Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Read online

  When Zubeldía arrived at the club in 1965, having been dismissed from the national side, his initial target had simply been avoiding relegation. As a player with Boca Juniors, Vélez Sársfield, Atalanta and Banfield, he had been noted for his intelligence and his positional sense, and that awareness of shape and space was the cornerstone of his management. ‘He was a right-half, so he played just alongside me at Boca,’ said Rattín. ‘Even as a player he was a real studier of the game. He would look at the law, and he would stand right there on the border of it.’

  Zubeldía led Atalanta to two respectable finishes, but found things rather more difficult with Argentina, perhaps because, as Valeriy Lobanovskyi later discovered with the USSR, it is a much harder thing to impose a vision on a team at national level, where the time available to work with players is so brief, than it is at club level where the involvement is day-to-day.

  ‘He came to the club a month before starting,’ said Juan Ramón Verón, who is generally acknowledged to have been the most naturally gifted player in that Estudiantes side. ‘He looked at the first team and he looked at the third team and he saw the third team was playing better, and asked himself what was the point of keeping the old players.’

  He retained only four of them, preferring to try to mould young minds. ‘Zubeldía was a very simple man, and work was his goal,’ Verón went on. ‘He was very fond of teaching, of spending time with and working with the players. He came here with another trainer, Argentino Genorazzo, who was a very crazy guy, who was never at any club for long because he was always falling out with people. But when they got here they had a plan, and they already knew what they wanted to do.

  ‘We had a pre-season, which had not happened before. Coaches started to get heavily involved in daily training, which before then had not been usual. When Zubeldía came here, we started going into concentration the day before the game. We lived at the training ground. We learnt tactics on a blackboard and then practised them on the pitch.’

  No club from outside the capital had ever won the title before, so there were no expectations, no demands for instant success. ‘The fans here were more patient, so Zubeldía could work here for three years without having to win championships, which he would not have been able to do at, for instance, Boca,’ Verón said. ‘We were really young and didn’t really notice what was happening. Things just started growing, and we realised one day that we had a great team.’

  In El Gráfico, the journalist Jorge Ventura wrote of their style as ‘a football that is elaborated over a hard week of laboratory work, and explodes on the seventh day with an effectiveness that consecrates the tale of positions. Because Estudiantes continue to manufacture points just as they manufacture football: with more work than talent… Estudiantes keep winning.’

  They trained harder and more meticulously than any Argentinian side ever had before. ‘All the possibilities afforded by the game were foreseen and practised,’ Bilardo said. ‘The corners, the free-kicks, throw-ins were used to our best advantage and we also had secret signs and language which we used to make our opponents fall into the trap.’

  Estudiantes finished second in Group A of the Metropolitano championship in 1967, qualifying them for the last four. That in itself was some achievement, but they went on to come from 3-0 down to beat Platense 4-3 in the semi-final before a comfortable 3-0 win over Racing in the final. ‘Their victory has been a triumph for the new mentality, so many times proclaimed from Sweden until here, but rarely established in facts,’ the columnist Juvenal wrote in El Gráfico. ‘A new mentality served by young, strong, disciplined, dynamic, vigorous, spiritual and physically upright people. It is clear that Estudiantes didn’t invent anything. They followed the path already traced by Racing the previous year… Estudiantes won after the thirty-six-year “ban” of championships on ambitious “small” teams. Estudiantes defeated their convictions and their limitations as an ultra-defensive-destructive-biting team. Estudiantes defeated the intoxication of a unique week in their club history, claiming the most exemplary of their attributes in the hour of victory: humility.’

  Just as Pozzo’s Italy side had been hailed as representing the militaristic side of fascism, so too Estudiantes became poster-boys for Onganía’s new Argentina. Juvenal made the point even more clearly in January 1969, by which time Estudiantes were on their way to a third successive Copa Libertadores success. He praised their ‘defensive structures, dynamics, temperament, sacrifice, aggression in defence, fighting spirit, team thinking, organisation. We eliminate improvisation. We improve and evolve into what had caused our inferiority according to some critics.’ They were, in other words, being praised very specifically for what they did differently to la nuestra; moreover they were hailed for defying the European stereotype of South Americans as stylish but indolent.

  Estudiantes may have been following Racing in their style and their absolutist rejection of the tenets of la nuestra, but in certain key regards what they were doing was new. The shape was the 4-3-3 that was gaining in popularity across the continent, but what they did within that was unique not only in Argentina, but in South America as a whole: they pressed, and played an aggressive offside trap. ‘It was something unknown in Argentina,’ said Verón, ‘and it was that that allowed a humble team like Estudiantes to have such success.’

  The question then is where the idea came from. Zubeldía was noted for his curiosity and his study of coaching practices from around the world, and most of his squad seem to agree that pressing was something he picked up from, as Verón put it, ‘some European team’. Others go further and insist it was an eastern European side, but none can remember which one. As far as they were concerned, at least when the idea was introduced, it was just another one of Zubeldía’s schemes, just another video he was showing them. It is tempting to believe that Zubeldía was influenced by Viktor Maslov - and given that at that stage his Dynamo Kyiv were the only side really proficient at pressing it is even probable - but there is no direct evidence. Even, though, if it were some other eastern European side from which Zubeldía picked up pressing, they logically must themselves have picked it up from Maslov. Maslov’s influence was global.

  Pressing and the high offside line were their legitimate innovations, but there was also a more sinister side. It was the violence of Estudiantes that shocked Europeans, but, according to Presta, in that they were no different to any other Argentinian side of the time. Where they stood out was in their use of dirty tricks. ‘You don’t,’ Zubeldía said, ‘arrive at glory through a path of roses.’ It is difficult now to separate fact from fiction, but the stories are too widespread for them not to have at least some basis in actuality. The story has grown up that Bilardo would carry pins with him on the field to jab into opponents. ‘A myth,’ Verón said, but Rattín insisted it was true, although he admitted he had not seen it himself. ‘Bilardo was sneaky,’ Rattín said. ‘He was always up to something. Tricky: he’d pull your shirt, pretend to be hit, anything.’

  Although he was reluctant to go into specifics, Verón acknowledges that Estudiantes ‘tried to find out everything possible about our rivals individually, their habits, their characters, their weaknesses, and even about their private lives so we could goad them on the field, get them to react and risk being sent off.’

  ‘They used psychology in the worst possible way,’ said Presta. ‘There was a player from Independiente who had accidentally killed a friend on a hunting trip - when he played Estudiantes, all game long they chanted “murderer” at him. Or there was a goalkeeper for Racing who had a really close relationship with his mother. She didn’t want him to marry, but eventually he did, and six months later his mother died. Bilardo walked up to him and said, “Congratulations, finally you’ve killed your mother.”’

  It has even been alleged that Bilardo, who was a qualified doctor, drew on his contacts in the medical profession. The Racing defender Roberto Perfumo, for instance, was sent off for kicking Bilardo in the stomach, supposedly because Bilar
do had taunted him about a cyst his wife had recently had removed.

  Unpalatable their methods may have been, but Estudiantes were undeniably effective and, at least at first, that was enough for commentators to overlook their excesses. There was, after all, more to them than thuggishness. ‘They were really well constructed,’ said Delgado, who played against them after his move to Santos. ‘Aside from marking, they knew how to play. Verón was the key player. He gave them a flow. The two central midfielders - Pachamé and Bilardo - were not really talented. Pachamé was really defensive, and Bilardo was not talented but really really smart. Bilardo was the least talented of them all.’

  Estudiantes won the Libertadores in 1968, beating Racing in a brutal three-game semi-final, and then opening up to beat Palmeiras of Brazil in a final that also went to a third-game playoff. It was during that run that the term ‘anti-fútbol’ was coined to describe their methods, but El Gráfico remained supportive, although acknowledging that their style was ‘more solid than beautiful’.

  Later in the year they faced Manchester United in the final of the Intercontinental Cup over two games of predicable violence. In the first leg in Buenos Aires, Denis Law complained of having his hair pulled, George Best was punched in the stomach and Bobby Charlton was left requiring stitches following a foul by Bilardo. Nobby Stiles received a cut eye from a head-butt and then, having been goaded all game, was sent off late on for flicking a V-sign at a linesman. Amid it all, Marcos Conigliaro headed in a Verón corner to give Estudiantes the win. In was a similar story back in Manchester, where Law needed four stitches in a leg wound and Best and José Hugo Medina were sent off after throwing punches at each other. Willie Morgan cancelled out a Verón header late on, but a 1-1 draw gave the title to Estudiantes.

  ‘That was the high point,’ said Verón, but others were less convinced. The United midfielder Paddy Crerand called Estudiantes ‘the dirtiest team I’ve played against’, and the press reaction was just as bitter. ‘The night they spat on sportsmanship,’ read the Daily Mirror’s headline after the first leg, while Brian Glanville in the Sunday Times was despairing. ‘Some of their tactics…’ he wrote, ‘draw us again to question how football, at the highest level, can survive as a sport. Tactical fouls as practised tonight by Estudiantes, by Racing last year and by Argentina in 1966 at Wembley, simply make it impossible to practise the game.’

  The El Gráfico columnist Osvaldo Ardizzone defended Estudiantes after that victory - explaining it away as a natural product of England’s World Cup quarter-final win over Argentina, but by the time Estudiantes had won a second Libertadores, beating Nacional of Uruguay in both legs of the final, he was beginning to sound doubtful. ‘Estudiantes go out to destroy, to dirty, to irritate, to deny the show, to use all the illegal subterfuges in football…’ he wrote. ‘If it is good to win, it must be good.’

  The tide was turning and, David Goldblatt points out in The Ball is Round, not merely against Estudiantes. There were insurrections against the military regime in Cordoba and Rosario in 1969, suggesting that tolerance for an ends-justifies-the-means philosophy was diminishing. There were also, though, simple football reasons for the backlash against Estudiantes. Verón speaks of how delight in the triumph of a ‘humble’ team soon developed into resentment among clubs and press from the capital, while defeats away to Bolivia and Peru in the middle of 1969 effectively eliminated Argentina from the 1970 World Cup.

  Besides, that July there was a new underdog to cheer as Chacarita Juniors, a team from San Martín, a poor suburb of Buenos Aires, beat River Plate 4-1 in the Metropolitano final. In El Gráfico, Juvenal’s position had clearly changed. ‘Chacarita’s victory validates the values that made Argentinian football great…,’ he wrote. ‘Those values seemed to have been forgotten by many teams, players and coaches… Because Chacarita is not an “enlarged small” team that enjoys its greatest historical victories by running and playing roughly, by biting and fighting, by sweating and continuous rough play. Chacarita run, bite, sweat, give, sacrifice, but they also play football. Rather: they want to play, taking care of the ball throughout the park, and they also fight.’

  It was the failure to qualify for the Mexico World Cup, though, that really focused minds. An editorial in El Gráfico proclaimed ‘the school of Argentinian football’ as a ‘great victim’ of the revolution that followed the embarrassment of 1958. ‘The desire to erase the memory of those six Czechoslovakian goals propelled us towards a more defensive game, towards the eternal fear of losing, making us forget the necessity and pleasure of scoring more goals than our opponents to win,’ it said. ‘The desire to overcome our lack of speed and physical power before the Europeans induced in us an indiscriminate imitation, a contempt for ability and intelligence.’

  Estudiantes soon gave their critics further ammunition. Later in September they lost the first leg of the Intercontinental final 3-0 away to AC Milan, which raised doubts about the efficacy of their style, but it was the return in la Bombonera that really hardened opinion against them. Estudiantes won 2-1, but far more significant was the violence of the game. Aguirre Suárez elbowed Néstor Combin, breaking his cheekbone, the goalkeeper Alberto Poletti punched Gianni Rivera, an assault Eduardo Manera followed up by kicking him to the ground.

  A wave of revulsion was unleashed. ‘Television took the deformed image of a match and transformed it into urban guerrilla warfare all over the world,’ said the match report in El Gráfico, and the watching president was just as unimpressed. ‘Such shameful behaviour has compromised and sullied Argentina’s international reputation and provoked the revulsion of a nation,’ Onganía said. All three were sentenced to thirty days in jail for disgracing a public spectacle.

  Zubeldía was vilified, which immediately led his defenders to claim that he sanctioned only the system, not the gamesmanship. A more credible argument in mitigation might be that his side weren’t that much worse than anyone else in Argentina at the time, merely more effective. ‘Those who attribute a dimension of Mephistophelean leadership in regards to the roguery,’ Walter Vargas wrote in Football Delivery, ‘should know that on the sadly famous night in 1969, at the Bombonera against Milan, he went on to the pitch himself to try to stop the violent incidents and, once they had been committed, he condemned them and cautioned his players. Does that mean that 100 percent of the sins attributed to that Estudiantes are purely myths? Of course not. But the one suffered by Rivera, Combin and co was the most unjustifiable stain, the one that is impossible to expunge. Then, as is well known, [Juan] José [Pizzuti]’s Racing, the Independiente of 68, Rattín’s Boca and the rest were not exactly a monastery of Trappist monks.’

  Although Estudiantes went on to win the Libertadores the following year, losing to Feyenoord in the Intercontinental final, the mood was set against them. ‘The Estudiantes that we admired, applauded and defended, were a very different thing,’ another editorial in El Gráfico proclaimed. ‘When they won their first finals, their play was not anti-fútbol, but authentic football suffused with effort, vitality and sacrifice.’ Perhaps, like Herrera’s Inter, they pursued their idiosyncrasies so far that they ended up becoming a parody of themselves.

  As physicality and gamesmanship became unfashionable, so there awoke a nostalgia for the lost age of la nuestra. Three weeks after the Milan game, El Gráfico ran a piece claiming la Máquina would have beaten Estudiantes. A need developed for a side to take on their mantle, to reintroduce the old style. It emerged in Rosario with Newell’s Old Boys under the management of Miguel Antonio Juarez. It was his assistant, though, who would become far more acclaimed: César Luis Menotti.

  Menotti was an ineffably romantic figure. A pencil-thin chain-smoker with collar-length hair, greying sideburns and the stare of an eagle, he seemed the embodiment of Argentinian bohemianism. He was left-wing, intellectual, a philosopher and an artist. ‘I maintain that a team is above all an idea,’ he said, ‘and more than an idea it is a commitment, and more than a commitment it is the clear conviction
s that a coach must transmit to his players to defend that idea.

  ‘So my concern is that we coaches don’t arrogate to ourselves the right to remove from the spectacle the synonym of festival, in favour of a philosophical reading that cannot be sustained, which is to avoid taking risks. And in football there are risks because the only way you can avoid taking risks in any game is by not playing…

  ‘And to those who say that all that matters is winning, I want to warn them that someone always wins. Therefore, in a thirty-team championship, there are twenty-nine who must ask themselves: what did I leave at this club, what did I bring to my players, what possibility of growth did I give to my footballers?

  ‘I start from the premise that football is efficacy. I play to win, as much or more than any egoist who thinks he’s going to win by other means. I want to win the match. But I don’t give in to tactical reasoning as the only way to win, rather I believe that efficacy is not divorced from beauty…’

  Under Menotti, beauty and efficacy went hand in hand. In 1973, he won the Metropolitano title with Huracán, playing glorious attacking football. ‘To watch them play was a delight,’ an editorial in Clarín asserted. ‘It filled Argentinian fields with football and after forty-five years gave the smile back to a neighbourhood with the cadence of the tango.’ So beguiling were they, that when they beat Rosario Central 5-0, the opposing fans applauded them. ‘The team was in tune with the popular taste of Argentinians,’ said their forward Carlos Babington. ‘There were gambetas, one-touch moves, nutmegs, sombreros [a trick involving lifting the ball over the opponent’s head], one-twos, overlaps.’