When Charlton Athletic's Keith Peacock walked onto the pitch wearing the Number 12 shirt on 21st August 1965, the first ever substitute in English football can’t have known he would play a part in changing the beautiful game forever. If Jean-Marc Bosman’s contract dispute created an inadvertent watershed that would see player power rise exponentially over the subsequent decades, then Peacock, even more inadvertently, provided the spark for a team game becoming a squad game, for managers earning their reputations from not only how they constructed their sides and upon which principles but also how they could tactically manipulate matches with the astute use of substitutions. Initially,...
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