Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Page 11
It was Márton Bukovi, the coach of MTK (or Vörös Lobogó as they became after nationalisation in 1949), who hit upon the solution after his ‘tank’, the Romania-born Norbert Höfling, was sold to Lazio in 1948. If you didn’t have the right style of centre-forward, rather than trying to force unsuitable players into the position, he decided, it was better simply to do away with him altogether. He inverted the W of the W-M, creating what was effectively an M-M. Gradually, as the centre-forward dropped deeper and deeper to become an auxiliary midfielder, the two wingers pushed on, to create a fluid front four. ‘The centre-forward was having increasing difficulties with a marker around his neck,’ explained Nándor Hidegkuti, the man who tormented England from his deep-lying role at Wembley. ‘So the idea emerged to play the No. 9 deeper where there was some space.
‘At wing-half in the MTK side was a fine attacking player with very accurate distribution: Péter Palotás. Péter had never had a hard shot, but he was never expected to score goals, and though he wore the No. 9 shirt, he continued to play his natural game. Positioning himself in midfield, Péter collected passes from his defence, and simply kept his wingers and inside-forwards well supplied with passes… With Palotás withdrawing from centre-forward his play clashed with that of the wing-halves, so inevitably one was withdrawn to play a tight defensive game, while the other linked with Palotás as midfield foragers.’
Hidegkuti played as a winger for MTK so, logically enough, when Gusztáv Sebes decided to employ the system at national level, it was Palotás he picked as his withdrawn striker. He retained him through Hungary’s Olympic triumph of 1952, when Hidegkuti played largely on the right, but that September, Palotás was substituted for Hidegkuti with Hungary 2-0 down in a friendly against Switzerland. Sebes had made the switch before, in friendlies against Italy and Poland, leading the radio commentator György Szepesi to conclude that he was experimenting to see whether Hidegkuti, by then thirty, was fit enough to fulfil the withdrawn role. Hungary came back to win 4-2, and so influential was Hidegkuti that his position became unassailable. ‘He was a great player and a wonderful reader of the game,’ said Ferenc Puskás. ‘He was perfect for the role, sitting at the front of midfield, making telling passes, dragging the opposition defence out of shape and making fantastic runs to score himself.’
Hidegkuti was almost universally referred to as a withdrawn centre-forward, but the term is misleading, derived largely from his shirt number. He was, in modern terminology, simply an attacking midfielder. ‘I usually took up my position around the middle of the field on [József] Zakariás’ side,’ he explained, ‘while [József] Bozsik on the other flank often moved up as far as the opposition’s penalty area, and scored quite a number of goals, too. In the front line the most frequent goalscorers were Puskás and [Sándor] Kocsis, the two inside-forwards, and they positioned themselves closer to the enemy goal than was usual with … the W-M system… After a brief experience with this new framework Gusztav Sebes decided to ask the two wingers to drop back a little towards midfield, to pick up the passes to be had from Bozsik and myself, and this added the final touch to the tactical development.’
It was Hidegkuti, though, who destroyed England. Their players had, after all, grown up in a culture where the number denoted the position. The right-winger, the No. 7, lined up against the left-back, the No. 3; the centre-half, the No. 5, took care of the centre-forward, the No. 9. So fundamental was this that the television commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme felt compelled in the opening minutes of the game to explain the foreign custom to his viewers. ‘You might be mystified by some of the Hungarian numbers,’ he said in a tone of indulgent exasperation. ‘The reason is they number the players rather logically, with the centre-half as 3 and the backs as 2 and 4.’ They numbered them, in other words, as you would read them across the pitch, rather than by archaic custom: how was an Englishman to cope? And, more pertinently, what was a centre-half to do if the centre-forward kept disappearing off towards the halfway line? ‘To me,’ Harry Johnston, England’s centre-half that day, wrote in his autobiography, ‘the tragedy was the utter helplessness … being unable to do anything to alter the grim outlook.’ If he followed him, it left a hole between the two full-backs; if he sat off him, Hidegkuti was able to drift around unchallenged, dictating the play. In the end Johnston was caught between the two stools, and Hidegkuti scored a hat-trick. Syd Owen, Johnston’s replacement for the rematch in Budapest six months later, fared no better, and England were beaten 7-1.
It wasn’t just Hidegkuti who flummoxed England, though. Their whole system and style of play was alien. It was, Owen said, ‘like playing people from outer space’. Billy Wright, England’s captain, admitted, ‘We completely underestimated the advances that the Hungarians had made.’ It says much about the general technical standard of English football at the time that Wolstenholme was enraptured by Puskás nonchalantly performing half-a-dozen keepie-ups while he waited to kick off. If that sends a shudder of embarrassment down the modern English spine, it is nothing to what Frank Coles wrote in the Daily Telegraph on the morning of the game. ‘Hungary’s superb ball-jugglers,’ he asserted with a touching faith in the enduring powers of English pluck, ‘can be checked by firm tackling.’ Little wonder Glanville spoke of it as a defeat that ‘gave eyes to the blind’.
And yet it wasn’t just about technique, perhaps it wasn’t even primarily about technique. Yes, Hungary had, in Puskás, Hidegkuti, Kocsis, Bozsik and Zoltán Czibor, five of the greatest players of the age and, in Sebes, an inspirational and meticulous coach but, as Hungary’s right-back Jenő Buzánszky acknowledged, ‘It was because of tactics that Hungary won. The match showed the clash of two formations and, as often happens, the newer, more developed formation prevailed.’ Perhaps it is wrong to divide the two, for while the tactics permitted the technique to flourish, without the technique the tactics would have been redundant. England were slow to react to the problems (and certainly negligent in failing to address them ahead of the rematch in Budapest six months later), but it is hard to ar˝e that their manager Walter Winterbottom picked the wrong tactics on the day. The problem, rather, was endemic.
England, Geoffrey Green wrote in The Times the following morning, ‘found themselves strangers in a strange world, a world of flitting red spirits, for such did the Hungarians seem as they moved at devastating pace with superb skill and powerful finish in their cherry bright shirts. One has talked about the new conception of football as developed by the continentals and South Americans. Always the main criticism against the style has been its lack of a final punch near goal. One has thought at times, too, that perhaps the perfection of football was to be found somewhere between the hard-hitting, open British method and this other more probing infiltration. Yesterday, the Hungarians, with perfect teamwork, demonstrated this mid-point to perfection.’
Not that Sebes saw his Hungary as the mid-point of anything. Having organised a labour dispute at the Renault factory in Paris before the war, his Communist credentials were impeccable and, while he was assuredly saying what his government wanted to hear, there is no reason to believe he was not also voicing his own opinion as he insisted Hungary’s success, so obviously rooted in the interplay of the team as opposed to the dissociated individuality of England, was a victory for socialism. Certainly that November evening, as the flags hung limp in the fog above the Twin Towers, themselves designed to reflect the work of Lutyens in New Delhi, it didn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to recognise Empire’s symbolic defeat.
Football, of course, is not played on the blackboard. However sound the system, success on the pitch requires compromise between - in the best case, stems from a symbiosis of - the theory and the players available. Bukovi’s idea was perfect for Hungary, because four front men and a withdrawn centre-forward permitted a fluidity of attack that suited the mindset of their forwards. It is revealing watching a video of the game today that, midway through the first half, Wolstenholme observes, in a tone midway between amuseme
nt and amazement, that ‘the outside-left Czibor came across to pick up the ball in the outside-right position’.
Fluidity is all very well, but, of course, the more fluid a team is, the harder it is to retain the structures necessary to defend. That is where Sebes excelled. He was so concerned with detail that he had his side practise with the heavier English balls and on a training pitch with the same dimensions as Wembley, and his notebook shows a similar care for the tactical side of the game. He encouraged the two full-backs, Buzánszky and Mihály Lantos, to advance, but that meant the centre-half, Gyula Lóránt, dropping even deeper, into a position not dissimilar to the sweeper in Karl Rappan’s verrou system. Puskás had licence to roam, while Bozsik, notionally the right-half, was encouraged to push forwards to support Hidegkuti. That required a corresponding defensive presence, which was provided by the left-half, Zakariás, who, in the tactical plan for the game Sebes sketched in his notebook, appears so deep he is almost playing between the two full-backs. Two full-backs, two central defensive presences, two players running the middle and four up front: the Hungarian system was a hair’s-breadth from 4-2-4.
And yet the Aranycsapat remained forever unfulfilled. After thirty-six games undefeated, Hungary threw away a two-goal lead to lose 3-2 to West Germany in the 1954 World Cup final, undone, in the end, by ill luck, a muddy pitch that hampered their passing game, a touch of complacency and the German manager Sepp Herberger’s simple ploy of sitting Horst Eckel man-to-man on Hidegkuti. A system thought up to free the centre-forward from the clutches of a marker fell down when the marker was moved closer to him.
Perhaps, though, they paid as well for a defensive frailty. Even allowing for the attacking standards of the time, the Hungarian defence was porous. The three they conceded to West Germany meant they had let in ten in the tournament, while in 1953 they leaked eleven goals in a six-game run that culminated in the 6-3 win at Wembley. Just about everybody agreed that the three flattered England, an observation taken at the time to emphasise Hungary’s superiority, but it could just as well be interpreted as a criticism of their laxity.
England 3 Hungary 6, friendly, Wembley, London, 25 November 1953
The problem with three at the back is that the defence operates on a pivot, with the left-back tucking in alongside the centre-back if attacks come down the right and vice versa, rendering it vulnerable to being ‘turned’ by a smart cross-field ball that, at the very least, gave the winger on the opposite flank acceleration room. Zakariás, still notionally a midfielder, did not play deep enough to provide the extra cover that would have allowed a full-back to remain tighter to the winger he was supposed to be marking.
Whatever the cause of the defeat in Berne, the response in Hungary was one of fury. When they had returned after beating England at Wembley, the Aranycsapat had been greeted by adoring crowds; after losing the World Cup final they had to be diverted to the northern town of Tata to avoid street demonstrations. Puskás was barracked at league games, Sebes’s son was beaten up at school, and the goalkeeper, Gyula Grosics, was arrested. Through 1955, the management team Sebes had constructed was dismantled and, following a 4-3 defeat to Belgium the following year, he was replaced by a five-man committee headed by Bukovi. Amid the chaos of the Uprising and the subsequent defections of several players, though, his task was an impossible one. Sebes, meanwhile, lingered a while in sports administration as the deputy head of the National Physical Education and Sports Committee, before taking on a string of coaching positions, eventually retiring in 1970. ‘When I was a kid, Sebes lived in the same area of Budapest as me,’ remembers the great Ferencváros forward of the seventies, Tibor Nyilasi. ‘He would come down to the square where I played football with my friends, and take us up to his flat, give us sandwiches, and show us Super-8 films of the 6- 3 and 7-1 games. It was he who recommended me to Ferencváros. He was like a grandfather. He only lived for football.’
While it was the national team’s performances that attracted the most attention at the time, it was probably Sebes’s compatriot Béla Guttmann who had a more lasting influence on the game. To claim that he invented Brazilian football is stretching things, but that didn’t stop him trying. What is beyond dispute is that he represented the final flowering of the great era of central European football; he was the last of the coffee-house coaches, perhaps even the last defender of football’s innocence.
The two great Hungarian managers of the era could hardly have been more different. Where Sebes was a committed socialist, happy to spout the Party line and play the diplomatic game, Guttmann was a quick-tempered individualist, a man chewed up by circumstance and distrustful and dismissive of authority as a consequence. The end of his international playing career after three full caps was typical. Selected for the 1924 Olympics in Paris, Guttmann was appalled by Hungary’s inadequate preparations. There were more officials than players in the squad, and the party accordingly was based in a hotel near Montmartre: ideal for the officials’ late-night socialising, less good for players who needed to sleep. In protest Guttmann led a number of his team-mates on a rat-catching expedition through the hotel, and then tied their prey by the tails to the handles of the officials’ room-doors. He never played for his country again. Guttmann lived life like the world’s rejected guest, always on the lookout for a slight, always ready to flounce, irritating and irritated in equal measure.
Born in Budapest in 1899 to a family of dance instructors, Guttmann qualified as a teacher of classical dance when he was sixteen. It was football that really fascinated him, though, and, playing as an old-school attacking centre-half - contemporary accounts almost invariably describe him as ‘graceful’ - he impressed enough with the first-division side Torekves to earn a move in 1920 to MTK, a club seen as representing Budapest’s Jewish middle-class and a club still playing in the style Jimmy Hogan had introduced.
At first, Guttmann was cover for Ferenc Nyúl, but he soon left for the Romanian side Hagibor Cluj, leaving the younger man to function as MTK’s fulcrum as they won the championship in 1921, the sixth in a run of ten straight titles interrupted only by a three-year hiatus for the war. The following season, though, Nyúl returned and, ousted from the team, Guttmann did what he would go on to do throughout his career: he walked, following the route of many Jews fearing persecution from the Miklós Horthy regime and heading for Vienna. It was the first of twenty-three moves Guttmann would make across national borders.
Anti-Semitism was not exactly unknown in Vienna, but it was there, amid the football intellectuals of the coffee houses, that Guttmann seems to have felt most at home. ‘Later,’ the journalist Hardy Grüne wrote in the catalogue of an auction of Guttmann memorabilia held in the German town of Kassel in 2001, ‘he would often sit in São Paulo, New York or Lisbon and dream of enjoying a Melange in a Viennese café and chatting to good friends about football.’ When, aged seventy-five, Guttmann finally gave up his wandering, it was to Vienna he returned, living in an apartment near the opera house on Walfischgasse.
He joined Hakoah, the great Jewish club of Vienna, late in 1921, and supplemented the small income they were able to provide by setting up a dancing academy. They too practised the Scottish passing game, as preached by their coach Billy Hunter, who had played for Bolton Wanderers - alongside Jimmy Hogan - and Millwall. Although central Europe had never embraced the brute physicality of the English approach, Hunter’s ideas were to have a lasting impact.
Hakoah turned professional in 1925 and, with Guttmann at centre-half, won the inaugural professional Austrian championship the following year. Just as important to the club were the money-making tours they undertook to promote muscular Judaism in general and Zionism in particular. In 1926, billed as ‘the Unbeatable Jews’ (although they lost two of their thirteen games), Hakoah toured the east coast of the USA. In terms of money and profile, the tour was a tremendous success, and in that lay Hakoah’s downfall. The US clubs were richer than Hakoah and, after agreeing a much-improved contract, Guttmann joined the New
York Giants. By the end of the year, half the squad was based in the city.
From a football point of view, Guttmann prospered, winning the US Cup in 1929, but, having bought into a speakeasy, he was ruined as the economy disintegrated after the Wall Street Crash. ‘I poked holes in the eyes of Abraham Lincoln on my last five-dollar bill,’ he said. ‘I thought then it wouldn’t be able to find its way to the door.’ Always a man with an eye for the finer things in life - at Hakoah he insisted his shirts be made of silk - he seems also to have vowed then that he would never be poor again. He stayed with the Giants until the US league collapsed in 1932, returning to Hakoah to begin a coaching career that would last for forty-one years.
He stayed in Vienna for two seasons and then, on the recommendation of Hugo Meisl, moved on to the Dutch club SC Enschede. He initially signed a three-month contract but, when they came to negotiate a new deal, he insisted upon a huge bonus should Enschede win the league. As the club was struggling to avoid relegation out of the Eastern Division, the directors readily agreed. Their form promptly revived and, after they had narrowly missed out on the national championship, their chairman admitted that towards the end of the season he had gone to games praying his side would lose: Guttmann’s bonus would have bankrupted them.
He would have had little compunction about accepting it. Some managers are empire-builders, committed to laying structures that will bring their clubs success long after they have gone; Guttmann was a gun for hire. He bargained hard and brooked no interference. ‘The third season,’ he would say later in his career, ‘is fatal.’ He rarely lasted that long. After two years in Holland he returned to Hakoah, fleeing to Hungary after the Anschluss.