Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Page 10
This was not, though, Spartak’s first experiment with a third back. A couple of years earlier, injuries on a tour of Norway had forced them to tinker with their usual 2-3-5. ‘Spartak used a defensive version of the W-M by enhancing the two backs with a half-back,’ Alexander Starostin, another of the brothers, said. ‘When necessary, both the insides drew back.’ Impressed by the possibilities of the system, Spartak briefly continued the third-back experiment as they prepared for the 1936 spring season. ‘That thought, brave but unpopular in the country, was ditched after a 5-2 defeat to Dinamo [Moscow] in a friendly,’ Nikolai Starostin said. ‘Now came the second attempt, again in a friendly, but this time in a very important international encounter. It was a huge risk.’
And not just from a sporting point of view. The authorities took the game so seriously that in the build-up, Ivan Kharchenko, the chairman of the Committee of Physical Culture, Alexander Kosarev, the head of Comsomol (the organisation of young Communists) and various other party officials slept at Spartak’s training base at Tarasovka. ‘Spartak was the last hope,’ Nikolai Starostin wrote in his autobiography, Football Through the Years. ‘All hell broke loose! There were letters, telegrams, calls giving us advice and wishing us good luck. I was summoned to several bosses of different ranks and they explained that the whole of the country was waiting on our victory.’
The day did not begin auspiciously, as Spartak were caught in a traffic-jam, causing the kick-off to be delayed. Twice in the first half they took the lead, only for the Basques to level but, after Shylovskyi had converted a controversial fifty-seventh-minute penalty, they ran away with it, Vladimir Stepanov completing a hat-trick in a 6-2 win. Nikolai Starostin later insisted his brother’s performance in an unfamiliar role had been ‘brilliant’, although the newspapers and the goalkeeper, Anatoly Akimov, disagreed, pointing out that Langara had dominated him in the air and scored one of the Basque goals.
That defeat proved an aberration. The Basques went on to beat Dynamo Kyiv, Dinamo Tbilisi and a team representing Georgia, prompting a furious piece in Pravda. Under the demanding headline ‘Soviet Players should become Invincible’, it laid down what had become obvious: ‘The performances of Basque Country in the USSR showed that our best teams are far from high quality… The deficiencies of Soviet football are particularly intolerable as there are no young people like ours in other countries, young people embraced by the care, attention and love of the party and government.’
Amid the bombast, there was some sense. ‘It is clear,’ the piece went on, ‘that improving the quality of the Soviet teams depends directly on matches against serious opponents. The matches against the Basques have been highly beneficial to our players (long passes, playing on the flanks, heading the ball).’
Four days later, the Basques rather proved Pravda’s point by completing the Soviet leg of their tour with a 6-1 victory over a Minsk XI. The lessons of the Basques, though, were not forgotten. It took time for the calls for increased involvement in international sport to be heeded, but it had been recognised that the W-M offered a number of intriguing possibilities.
The man who seized upon them most eagerly was Boris Arkadiev. Already highly regarded, he gradually established himself as the first great Soviet theorist of football. His 1946 book, Tactics of Football, was for years regarded as a bible for coaches across Eastern Europe.
Born in St Petersburg in 1899, Arkadiev moved to Moscow after the Revolution, where, alongside a respectable playing career, he taught fencing at the Mikhail Frunze Military Academy. It was fencing, he later explained, with its emphasis on parry-riposte, that convinced him of the value of counter-attacking. Having led Metallurg Moscow, one of the capital’s smaller clubs, to third in the inaugural Supreme League in 1936, Arkadiev took charge of Dinamo Moscow, who had won that first title. There, his restless mind and fertile imagination - not to mention his habit of taking his players on tours of art galleries before big games - soon gained him a reputation for eccentric brilliance. His first season brought the league and cup double, but he had to rethink his tactics as the lessons of the Basques revolutionised Soviet football.
‘After the Basque tour, all the leading Soviet teams started to reorganise in the spirit of the new system,’ Arkadiev wrote. ‘Torpedo moved ahead of their opponents in that respect and, having the advantage in tactics, had a great first half of the season in 1938 and by 1939 all of our teams were playing with the new system.’ The effect on Dinamo was baleful, as they slipped to fifth in 1938, and a lowly ninth the year after. With Lavrenty Beria, the notorious head of the KGB and the patron of the club, desperate for success, drastic action was required.
Others might have gone back to basics, but not Arkadiev: he took things further. He was convinced that the key was less the players he had than the way they were arranged, and so, in February 1940, at a pre-season training camp in the Black Sea resort of Gagry, he took the unprecedented step of spending a two-hour session teaching nothing but tactics. His aim, he said, was a refined variant of the W-M. ‘With the third-back, lots of our and foreign clubs employed so-called roaming players in attack,’ Arkadiev explained. ‘This creative searching didn’t go a long way, but it turned out to be a beginning of a radical perestroika in our football tactics. To be absolutely honest, some players started to roam for reasons that had nothing to do with tactics. Sometimes it was simply because he had great strength, speed or stamina that drew him out of his territorial area, and once he had left his home, he began to roam around the field. So you had four players [of the five forwards] who would hold an orthodox position and move to and fro in their channels, and then suddenly you would have one player who would start to disrupt their standard movements by running diagonally or left to right. That made it difficult for the defending team to follow him, and the other forwards benefited because they had a free team-mate to whom they could pass.’
The season began badly, with draws against Krylya Sovetov Moscow and Traktor Stalingrad and defeat at Dinamo Tbilisi, but Arkadiev didn’t waver. The day after the defeat in Tbilisi, he gathered his players together, sat them down and made them write a report on their own performance and that of their team-mates. The air cleared, the players seemed suddenly to grasp Arkadiev’s intentions. On 4 June, playing a rapid, close-passing style, Dinamo beat Dynamo Kyiv 8-5. They went on to win the return in Ukraine 7-0, and then, in the August, they hammered the defending champions Spartak 5-1. Their final seven games of the season brought seven wins, with twenty-six goals scored and just three conceded. ‘Our players worked to move from a schematic W-M, to breathe the Russian soul into the English invention, to add our neglect of dogma,’ Arkadiev said. ‘We confused the opposition, leaving them without weaponry with our sudden movements. Our left-winger, Sergei Ilyin, scored most of his goals from the centre-forward position, our right-winger, Mikhail Semichastny, from inside-left and our centre-forward, Sergei Soloviov, from the f lanks.’
The newspapers hailed the ‘organised disorder’, while opponents sought ways of combating it. The most common solution was to impose strict man-to-man marking, to which Arkadiev responded by having his players interchange positions even more frequently. ‘With the transition of the defensive line from a zonal game to marking specific opponents,’ he wrote, ‘it became tactically logical to have all the attackers and even the midfielders roaming, while having all the defenders switch to a mobile system, following their opponents according to where they went.’
It is important here to clarify exactly what Arkadiev meant by a ‘zonal game’. What he did not mean was the integrated system of ‘zonal marking’ that Zezé Moreira introduced in Brazil in the early fifties and that Viktor Maslov would later apply with such success at Dynamo Kyiv. He was speaking rather of the transition from the simple zonal game of the 2-3-5, in which one full-back would take the left-side and one the right, to the strict system of the W-M, in which each player knew clearly which player he was supposed to be marking (the right-back on the left-wing, the left-half on
the inside-right, centre-back on centre-forward etc). In England this had happened almost organically as the W-M developed; with the W-M arriving fully formed in the USSR, there was, inevitably, a period of confusion as the defensive ramifications were taken on board.
Very gradually, one of the halves took on a more defensive role, providing extra cover in front of the back three, which in turn meant an inside-forward dropping to cover him. It was a slow process, and it would be taken further more quickly on the other side of the globe, but 3-2-2-3 was on the way to becoming 4-2-4. Axel Vartanyan, the esteemed historian of Soviet football, even believes it probable that Arkadiev was the first man to deploy a flat back four.
As war caused the dissolution of the league, Arkadiev left Dinamo for CDKA (the forerunner of CSKA) in 1943, and went on to win the championship five times before the club was disbanded as Stalin held them responsible for the USSR’s defeat to Yugoslavia at the 1952 Olympics. Dinamo, meanwhile, continuing to apply Arkadiev’s principles, beguiled Britain with their short-passing style - passovotchka, as it became known - as they came on a goodwill tour following the end of hostilities in 1945.
The build-up to their first game, against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, was marked by political concerns and, more practically, fears that ‘charging’ might become as great a source of dispute as it had been for British sides on those early tours of South America. Chelsea were only eleventh in the Southern Division - a full resumption of the league programme still being several months away - and struggled to a fortuitous 3-3 draw, but their comparative lack of sophistication was clear. Just as Sindelar had tormented England by dropping deep, just as Nándor Hidegkuti would, so Konstantin Beskov bewildered Chelsea by refusing to operate in the area usually occupied by a forward.
The most striking aspect of Dinamo’s play, though, was their energy, and the intelligence with which they used it. ‘The Russians were on the move all the time,’ the Chelsea left-back Albert Tennant complained. ‘We could hardly keep up with them.’ Davie Meiklejohn, the former Rangers captain, wrote in the Daily Record: ‘They interchanged positions to the extent of the outside-left running over to the right-wing and vice versa. I have never seen football played like it. It was a Chinese puzzle to try to follow the players in their positions as it was given [sic] in the programme. They simply wandered here and there at will, but the most remarkable feature of it all, they never got in each other’s way.’
As Dinamo went on to thrash Cardiff 10-1, beat Arsenal 4-3 and draw 2-2 at Rangers, appreciation of their methods became ever more effusive. In the Daily Mail, Geoffrey Simpson spoke of them playing ‘a brand of football which, in class, style and effectiveness is way ahead of our own. As for its entertainment value - well, some of those who have been cheering their heads off at our league matches must wonder what they are shouting about.’ The question then was, was their style related to ideology?
There was talk - again - of their football being like chess, and suggestions that much of Dinamo’s football was based around
Chelsea 4 Dinamo Moscow 4, friendly, Stamford Bridge, London, 13 November 1945
pre-planned moves. It may be an easy metaphor to speak of Communist football being built around the team as a unit with the players mere cogs within it, as opposed to the British game that allowed for greater self-expression, but that does not mean there is no truth to it. Alex James, the former Arsenal inside-forward, wrote in the News of the World that Dinamo’s success ‘lies in teamwork to which there is a pattern. There is no individualist in their side such as a [Stanley] Matthews or a [Raich] Carter. They play to a plan, repeating it over and over again, and they show little variation. It would be quite easy to find a counter-method to beat them. This lack of an individualist is a great weakness.’ Or maybe their great individuals - and nobody would have denied that the likes of Beskov, Vsevolod Bobrov and Vasili Kartsev were fine, technically gifted players - simply utilised their gifts in a different way.
Mikhail Yakushin, who had replaced Arkadiev as coach of Dinamo, seemed just as keen to peddle the ideological line as the British press. ‘The principle of collective play is the guiding one in Soviet football,’ he said. ‘A player must not only be good in general; he must be good for the particular team.’ What about Matthews? ‘His individual qualities are high, but we put collective football first and individual football second, so we do not favour his style as we think teamwork would suffer,’ Yakushin replied.
In Britain, this was a revolutionary thought, and it raises an intriguing theory. Broadly speaking, although Bob McGory attempted to replicate the passovotchka style at Stoke City to little success - perhaps not surprisingly, given the presence of Matthews in his side - the lessons of the Dinamo tour were ignored. Now, given British football had ignored or patronised developments in South America and central Europe, it is unlikely - even in the revolutionary years immediately following the war - it would ever have cast off its conservatism entirely, but it may have been more open to innovation if it hadn’t been blessed at the time with a glut of great wingers. Why change a formation that allowed the likes of Matthews, Tom Finney and Len Shackleton in England, or Willie Waddell, Jimmy Delaney and Gordon Smith in Scotland, to give full rein to their talents?
Matthews’ finest hour, perhaps the high point of English wing-play, came in the 1953 FA Cup final, when his jinks and feints inspired Blackpool to come from 3-1 down to beat Bolton 4-3. Six months later, on the same pitch, Hungary destroyed England 6-3, and the Daily Mirror’s headline proclaimed the ‘Twilight of the (Soccer) Gods’. In terms of the reliance on wingers to provide the artistry, it was right.
The irony, of course, is that Herbert Chapman, the progenitor of the W-M, had been deeply suspicious of wing-play. His system, the first significant tactical development in the English game in almost half a century, had initially circumvented wingers, and yet it ended up being set in stone by them: the very aspect with which his innovation had done away returned to preclude further innovation. For managers with such players, sticking with the tried and tested was the logical thing to do. England’s record in the years immediately following the war was good; they went almost two years without defeat from May 1947, a run that included a 10-0 demolition of Portugal in Estoril and a 4-0 victory over Italy, still the world champions, in Turin. Scotland’s form was patchier, but even they could take comfort from six straight victories from October 1948. The problem was that the glister of those wingers ended up blinding Britain to the tactical advances being made elsewhere, and it would be eight years after the Dinamo tour before England’s eyes were - abruptly - opened.
Chapter Six
The Hungarian Connection
∆∇ The experience of the Wunderteam and Dinamo Moscow’s passovotchka tour had intimated at the future, but it was only in 1953 that England finally accepted the reality that the continental game had reached a level of excellence for which no amount of sweat and graft could compensate.
The visit of the Aranycsapat, Hungary’s ‘Golden Squad’, to Wembley on 25 November that year - the Olympic champions, unbeaten in three years, against the mother of football, who still considered herself supreme - was billed as ‘the Match of the Century’. That might have been marketing hyperbole, but no other game has so resonated through the history of English football. England had lost to foreign opposition before - most humiliatingly to the USA in the World Cup three years earlier - but, other than a defeat to the Republic of Ireland at Goodison Park in 1949, never at home, where climate, conditions and refereeing offered no excuse. They had certainly never been so outclassed. Hungary’s 6-3 victory was not the moment at which English decline began, but it was the moment at which it was recognised. Tom Finney, injured and watching from the press-box, was left reaching for the equine metaphor Gabriel Hanot had used thirty years earlier. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘like cart-horses playing race-horses.’
For the first half of the twentieth century, both from a footballing and a political point of view, Hungary had existed in
the shadow of Austria. Their thinking had, inevitably, been influenced by Hugo Meisl and the Danubian Whirl, but the crucial point was that it was thinking. In Budapest, as in Vienna, football was a matter for intellectual debate. Arthur Rowe, a former Tottenham player who took up a coaching position in Hungary before being forced home by the war, had lectured there on the W-M in 1940, but, given his later commitment to ‘push-and-run’, it is safe to imagine he focused on rather more subtle aspects of the system than simply the stopper centre-half that so dominated the thoughts of English coaches of the time.
Aside from the negativity to which it leant itself, the major effect of the prevailing conception of the W-M was to shape the preferred mode of centre-forward. Managers quickly tired of seeing dribblers and darters physically dominated by the close attentions of stopper centre-halves, and so turned instead to big battering-ram-style centre-forwards of the kind still referred to today in Britain as ‘the classic No. 9’; ‘the brainless bull at the gate’ as Glanville characterised them. If Matthias Sindelar represented the cerebral central European ideal; it was Arsenal’s Ted Drake - strong, powerful, brave and almost entirely unthinking - who typified the English view.
But just as there would have been no place for Der Papierene in England in the thirties, so beefy target-men were thin on the ground in 1940s Hungary. That was troublesome, for 2-3-5 had yielded to W-M in the minds of all but a few idealists: there was a need either for Hungary to start developing an English style of centre-forward, or to create a new system that retained the defensive solidity of the W-M without demanding a brawny focal point to the attack.