Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Read online

  Over the course of a league season, luck, momentum, injuries, errors by players and errors by referees even themselves out - if not absolutely, then certainly far, far more than they do over seven games in a summer. That England have gone over forty years without winning a trophy is annoying, and for that various managers, players, officials and opponents bear a degree of responsibility, but it does not equate to a fundamental decline. It is possible that there is a fundamental flaw in the way England play the game, and an almost self-conscious Luddism hasn’t helped, but it would be hard to make a serious case for a root-and-branch overhaul of the English game on the basis of results in major tournaments alone.

  Globalisation is blurring national styles, but tradition, perpetuated by coaches, players, pundits and fans, is strong enough that they remain distinguishable. What became apparent in the writing of this book is that every nation came fairly quickly to recognise its strengths, and that no nation seems quite to trust them. Brazilian football is all about flair and improvisation, but it looks yearningly at the defensive organisation of the Italians. Italian football is about cynicism and tactical intelligence, but it admires and fears the physical courage of the English. English football is about tenacity and energy, but it feels it ought to ape the technique of the Brazilians.

  The history of tactics, it seems, is the history of two interlinked tensions: aesthetics versus results on the one side and technique versus physique on the other. What confuses the issue is that those who grow up in a technical culture tend to see a more robust approach as a way of getting results, while those from a physical culture see pragmatism in technique; and beauty - or at least what fans prefer to watch - remains very much in the eye of the beholder. British fans may admire (although most seemed not to) the cerebral jousting of, say, the 2003 Champions League final between AC Milan and Juventus, but what they actually want to see is the crash-bang-wallop of the Premiership. That is not entirely fair, for Premiership football is far more skilful now than it was even ten years ago, but it remains quicker and less possession-driven than any other major league. Judging by the figure paid for overseas television rights - a three-year deal worth £650million was agreed in 2007 - the rest of the world thinks it has found a happy balance.

  The mid-fifties saw the publication of a rash of books that tried to come to terms with England’s declining status. Glanville’s was probably the angriest, but just as revealing is Soccer Revolution by Willy Meisl, the younger brother of the great Austrian coach Hugo Meisl. As staunchly Anglophile as only an immigrant can be, his work is more of a lament. For them, blaming the unapologetic conservatism of the English game made sense and, with the benefit of hindsight, it can be seen as part of a more general cultural attack on an establishment that had overseen the end of Empire but was yet to find an appropriate role. England’s blinkeredness was at fault for the loss of footballing superiority. Yes, the rest of the world would have caught up at some stage, for, as Glanville wearily notes, pupils have a habit of overcoming their masters, but these masters, through their arrogance and insularity, were complicit in their own downfall.

  That, though, was then. England’s fall from her pedestal is no longer news. In that, by tracing the tactical evolution of the game, it attempts to explain how we got to where we are now, this book belongs to the same family as Soccer Nemesis and Soccer Revolution, but it sets out from a very different present, with England failing to rise rather than falling. It is, anyway, a history, not a polemic.

  A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

  In Britain, the term ‘centre-half’ is regularly used to describe a central defender. There are historical reasons for this, which are explained at the beginning of Chapter Four, but, for the sake of clarity, I have used ‘centre-half’ specifically to describe the central midfielder in the 2-3-5 formation. Hopefully all other terms to designate positions are self-explanatory.

  Chapter One

  From Genesis to the Pyramid

  ∆∇ In the beginning there was chaos, and football was without form. Then came the Victorians, who codified it, and after them the theorists, who analysed it. It wasn’t until the late 1920s that tactics in anything resembling a modern sense came to be recognised or discussed, but as early as the 1870s there was an acknowledgement that the arrangement of players on the pitch made a significant difference to the way the game was played. In its earliest form, though, football knew nothing of such sophistication.

  Various cultures can point to games that involved kicking a ball, but, for all the claims of Rome, Greece, Egypt, the Caribbean, Mexico, China or Japan to be the home of football, the modern sport has its roots in the mob game of medieval Britain. Rules - in as much as they existed at all - varied from place to place, but the game essentially involved two teams each trying to force a roughly spherical object to a target at opposite ends of a notional pitch. It was violent, unruly and anarchic, and it was repeatedly outlawed. Only in the early nineteenth century, when the public schools, their thinking shaped by advocates of muscular Christianity, decided that sport could be harnessed for the moral edification of their pupils, did anything approaching what we would today recognise as football emerge. Before there could be tactics, though, there had, first of all, to be a coherent set of rules.

  Even by the end of the nineteenth century, when the earliest formations began to emerge, it was rare to subject them to too much thought. In football’s earliest days, the notion of abstract consideration of tactics, of charts with crosses and arrows, would have been all but inconceivable, and yet the development of the game is instructive in what it reveals of the mindset of football, the unseen, often unacknowledged hard-wiring from which stemmed British conceptions of how it should be played (and, for forty years after the rules were first drawn up, there was nothing but a British conception).

  The boom came in the early Victorian era and, as David Winner demonstrates in Those Feet, was rooted in the idea - bizarre as it may seem in hindsight - that the Empire was in decline and that moral turpitude was somehow to blame. Team sports, it was thought, were to be promoted, because they discouraged solipsism, and solipsism allowed masturbation to flourish, and there could be nothing more debilitating than that. The Reverend Edward Thring, headmaster of Uppingham School, for instance, insisted in a sermon that it would lead to ‘early and dishonoured graves’. Football was seen as the perfect antidote, because, as E.A.C. Thompson would write in The Boys’ Champion Story Paper in 1901, ‘There is no more manly sport than football. It is so peculiarly and typically British, demanding pluck, coolness and endurance.’ There are very good politico-economic reasons for the coincidence, but there is also a neat symbolism in the fact that, after football had been used to shore up the Empire, Britain’s ultimate decline as an imperial power coincided with the erosion of the footballing superiority of the home nations.

  Football soared in popularity throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, but in those early days rules varied from school to school, largely according to conditions. At Cheltenham and Rugby, for instance, with their wide, open fields, the game differed little from the mob game. A player could fall on the ground, be fallen upon by a great many of his fellows and emerge from the mud relatively unscathed. On the cloisters of Charterhouse and Westminster, though, such rough-and-tumble would have led to broken bones, and so it was there that the dribbling game developed. That outlawed - or at least restricted - handling of the ball, but the game still differed radically from modern football. Formations were unheard of, while the length of the game and even the numbers of players on each side were still to be established. Essentially prefects or older pupils would run with the ball at their feet, their team-mates lined up behind them (‘backing up’) in case the ball bounced loose in a tackle, while the opposition players - or, at certain schools, fags (that is, younger pupils who were effectively their servants) - would try to stop them.

  Interplay among forwards, if it happened at all, was rudimentary; and from that sprouted certain fundamentals tha
t would shape the course of early English football: the game was all about dribbling; passing, cooperation and defending were perceived as somehow inferior. Head-down charging, certainly, was to be preferred to thinking, a manifestation, some would say, of the English attitude to life in general. In the public schools, thinking tended to be frowned upon as a matter of course (as late as 1946, the Hungarian comic writer George Mikes could write of how, when he had first arrived in Britain, he had been proud when a woman called him ‘clever’, only to realise later the loadedness of the term and the connotations of untrustworthiness it carried).

  The differing sets of rules frustrated efforts to establish football at universities until, in 1848, H.C. Malden of Godalming, Surrey, convened a meeting in his rooms at Cambridge with representatives of Harrow, Eton, Rugby, Winchester and Shrewsbury - and, remarkably, two non-public schoolboys - at which were collated what might be considered the first unified Laws of the Game. ‘The new rules were printed as the “Cambridge Rules”,’ Malden wrote. ‘Copies were distributed and pasted up on Parker’s Piece [an area of open grassland in the centre of the city], and very satisfactorily they worked, for it is right to add that they were loyally kept and I never heard of any public school man who gave up playing for not liking the rules.’

  Fourteen years later the southern version of the game took another step towards uniformity as J.C. Thring - the younger brother of Edward, the Uppingham headmaster - having been thwarted in an earlier attempt to draw up a set of unified rules at Cambridge, brought out a set of ten laws entitled ‘The Simplest Game’. The following October, another variant, the ‘Cambridge University Football Rules’, was published. Crucially, a month later, the Football Association was formed, and immediately set about trying to determine a definitive set of Laws of the Game, intending still to combine the best elements of both the dribbling and the handling game.

  It failed. The debate was long and furious but, after a fifth meeting at the Freemason’s Tavern in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, at 7pm on 8 December 1863, carrying the ball by hand was outlawed, and football and rugby went their separate ways. The dispute, strangely, was not over the use of the hand, but over hacking - that is, whether kicking opponents in the shins should be allowed. F.W. Campbell of Blackheath was very much in favour. ‘If you do away with [hacking],’ he said, ‘you will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice.’ Sport, he appears to have felt, was about pain, brutality and manliness; without that, if it actually came down to skill, any old foreigner might be able to win. A joke it may have been, but that his words were part of a serious debate is indicative of the general ethos, even if Blackheath did end up resigning from the association when hacking was eventually outlawed.

  The dribbling game prevailed, largely because of Law Six, the forerunner of the offside law: ‘When a player has kicked the ball, anyone of the same side who is nearer to the opponent’s goal-line is out of play, and may not touch the ball himself, nor in any way whatever prevent any other player from doing so, until he is in play…’ In other words, passes had to be either lateral or backwards; for Englishmen convinced that anything other than charging directly at a target was suspiciously subtle and unmanly, that would clearly never do.

  Dribbling itself, it should be said, was rather different to modern conceptions of the art. In his history of the FA Cup, Geoffrey Green, the late football correspondent of The Times, quotes an unnamed writer of the 1870s: ‘A really first-class player … will never lose sight of the ball, at the same time keeping his attention employed in the spying out of any gaps in the enemy’s ranks, or any weak points in the defence, which may give him a favourable chance of arriving at the coveted goal. To see some players guide and steer a ball through a circle of opposing legs, turning and twisting as the occasion requires, is a sight not to be forgotten… Skill in dribbling … necessitates something more than a go-ahead, fearless, headlong onslaught of the enemy’s citadel; it requires an eye quick at discovering a weak point, and nous to calculate and decide the chances of a successful passage.’ In terms of shape, it sounds rather like an elementary form of modern rugby union, only without any handling.

  Tactics - if that is not too grand a word in the circumstances - were similarly basic, even after the number of players had been fixed at eleven. Teams simply chased the ball. It wasn’t even until the 1870s that the goalkeeper became a recognised and universally accepted position; not until 1909 that he began to wear a different coloured shirt to the rest of his team; and not until 1912 that he was restricted to handling the ball only in his own box - a rule change implemented to thwart the Sunderland goalkeeper Leigh Richmond Roose’s habit of carrying the ball to the halfway line. If there were a formation at all in those earliest days, it would probably have been classified as two or three backs, with nine or eight forwards.

  Even when Law Six was changed in 1866, following Eton’s convention and permitting a forward pass provided there were at least three members of the defensive team between the player and the opponent’s goal when the ball was played (that is, one more than the modern offside law), it seems to have made little difference to those brought up on the dribbling game. As late as the 1870s, Charles W. Alcock, a leading early player and administrator, was writing evangelically of ‘the grand and essential principle of backing up. By “backing up”, of course, I shall be understood to mean the following closely on a fellow-player to assist him, if required, or to take on the ball in the case of his being attacked, or otherwise prevented from continuing his onward course.’ In other words, even a decade after the establishment of the FA, one of the founding fathers of the game felt it necessary to explain to others that if one of their team-mates were charging head-down at goal, it might be an idea to go and help him - although expecting to receive the ball from him volitionally seems to have been a step too far.

  That, at least, is how it was in the south. The north was making its own advances, particularly in south Yorkshire, where a combination of Old Harrovian teachers at Sheffield College and the traditional folk games of Holmfirth and Penistone led to the establishment of the Sheffield Club on 24 October 1857, initially as a way for cricketers to stay fit during the winter. On Boxing Day that year, the world’s first inter-club match was played as they beat Hallam FC 2-0. The sport grew rapidly: within five years crowds of several hundred were common, and fifteen clubs had been established in the area. The Sheffield Club drew up their own set of rules, published in 1862, which, significantly, while showing the influence of Harrow, Rugby and Winchester, made no mention of offside.

  There appears, though, to have been some regulation, for when Sheffield’s secretary William Chesterman wrote to the newly-founded Football Association on 30 November 1863, submitting the club’s subscription and his contribution to the debate over laws, he noted: ‘We have no printed rule at all like your No. 6, but I have written in the book a rule, which is always played by us.’ Exactly what that was remains unclear. Sheffield’s formal acceptance of offside came only in 1865, as part of horse-trading over rules ahead of a game against Notts County, and even then required only one defensive player to be goal-side of the forward when the ball was played for him to be onside. That, clearly, made passing far more viable, although it is debatable to what extent the opportunities it provided were taken up.

  The FA failed to respond to Sheffield’s overtures, and so for several years two codes - or rather, two basic codes, for there were also variations in Nottingham and other cities - existed. They met for the first time in 1866, with a match between London and Sheffield in Battersea Park on 31 March 1866. London won 2-0, with contemporary reports suggesting they had been the more skilful side, but had been unsettled by Sheffield’s physicality.

  After much to-ing and fro-ing over whose regulations to play by, Alcock brought a London team to Sheffield in December 1871. Playing under Sheffield rules, the home team won 3-1, their victory gen
erally being put down to the fact that they had an organised formation. That, taken in conjunction with their more liberal offside law, might suggest a passing game, but it seems Sheffield were rather more rooted in dribbling even than London. According to Percy M. Young in Football in Sheffield, the Sheffield players found ‘the dribbling skill of Alcock quite outside their range of experience. Moreover, Alcock was alive to the virtues of the well-placed pass (the local players adopted the simpler and more direct method of ignoring their own colleagues and making straight for goal on every possible occasion) and the delicate combination between himself and Chenery was a revelation to 2,000 delighted spectators’. There would be eighteen further meetings before Sheffield finally came into the FA fold in 1878.

  There may not have been a culture of passing in Sheffield, but it does seem they would punt the ball long to clear their lines. In The World Game, Geoffrey Green notes that when Sheffield players arrived in London for an exhibition match in 1875 and began ‘butting the ball with their heads’, the crowd regarded it as ‘something for amusement rather than admiration’. In a pure dribbling game, of course, there would have been no need for the ball ever to leave the ground, other - perhaps - than to lift it over a challenging foot. Only if the ball were played a significant distance in the air would heading have been necessary.

  The Scottish Football Association annual’s report of an 1877 match between Glasgow and Sheffield makes the point clearly: ‘That the game was a very well contested one, and victory has rested with the best side, no one will deny; but that it was a pretty game, abounding in fine displays of combined dribbling, which has frequently distinguished a Scottish team above all others, few will admit… The fact cannot be hidden … that the tactics pursued by the Sheffield team on Saturday were partially responsible for this inasmuch as they play a different set of rules from those of the English and Scottish Associations, and to them our “off-side” rule is next to a dead letter. In this manner, long kicking was largely indulged in on Saturday on their side; and in order to meet the same style of play, the Glasgow men actually lost that united action which had led them on to victory in many a harder fought field.’