Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Page 26
The notion of individuality within a system, Winner argues, is characteristic of the Netherlands at the time. The structuralist architect Aldo van Eyck, for instance, wrote that, ‘All systems should be familiarised, one with the other, in such a way that their combined impact and interaction can be appreciated as a single complex system.’ He was speaking specifically of architecture, but he could just have well have been describing the football of Michel’s Ajax.
The term ‘totaalvoetbal’ itself appeared only in response to performances of the national side in the 1974 World Cup, but the prefix ‘totaal’ was used across a range of disciplines. Another architect, JB Bakema, who wrote for the influential Forum magazine, spoke of ‘Total Urbanisation’, ‘Total Environment’ and ‘Total Energy’. ‘To understand things,’ he said in a lecture given in 1974, ‘you have to understand the relationship between things… Once the highest image of interrelationship in society was indicated by the word “God” and man was allowed to use earth and universal space under condition that he should care for what he used. But we have to actualise this kind of care and respect since man came by his awareness nearer the phenomenon of interrelationship called the relation of atoms. Man became aware of his being part of a total energy system.’ As in architecture, as across a range of disciplines at the time - the literary theory and semiology of Roland Barthes, the anthropological theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan - so in football. Within the Ajax model, players derived their meaning, their significance, from their interrelationship with other players. To suggest that could not have occurred without a decline in faith is probably a theoretical leap too far, but again, it is hard not to see a link between Dutch football and the intellectual spirit of the time - and it is a beguiling coincidence that the two greatest exponents of system as an attacking force, Ajax and Dynamo Kyiv, sprang up in the Netherlands and the USSR, arguably the two most secular societies in the world at the time.
The first signs that something special was coming together at Ajax came in 1966, when Liverpool were hammered 5-1 at De Meer in the second round of the European Cup. The result came as such a surprise that Bill Shankly’s boast that Liverpool would win 7-0 at Anfield was taken seriously, but two Cruyff goals helped Ajax to a comfortable 2-2 draw in the second leg. In the quarter-final against Dukla Prague, though, their weaknesses were exposed as a 1-1 draw at De Meer was followed by a 2-1 defeat in Czechoslovakia. It was then that Michels showed his ruthlessness for the first time. Tonny Pronk, who had conceded a penalty in the away leg, was moved from defence into midfield, while Ajax’s captain and centre-back, Frits Soetekouw, having scored an own-goal, was sold to PSV Eindhoven.
Although Ajax eventually became renowned for their attacking flair, Michels began his construction of it from the back, bringing in the experienced sweeper Velibor Vasović from Partizan Belgrade to replace Soetekouw alongside Hulshoff. Ajax won the league four times between 1966 and 1970, and also lost in the final of the European Cup to AC Milan in 1969. It was that achievement that captured the imagination of the Dutch public, with over 40,000 travelling to Paris to watch a playoff against Benfica after Ajax had overcome a 3-1 deficit from the home leg to draw 4-4 on aggregate in the quarter-final.
The system at that stage was still a modified 4-2-4, but with Vasović both dropping behind the other defenders and then stepping out to provide a third man in midfield. They still, though, could be overmanned in midfield. Bertie Mee, after seeing his Arsenal side beat Ajax 3-0 at Highbury in the semi-final of the Fairs Cup in 1970, described Ajax as ‘amateurish’; there was an idealism about them that bordered on naivety. Later that month Ajax drew 3-3 against Feyenoord, at which Michels came to the conclusion Brazil had reached eight years earlier and Viktor Maslov and Alf Ramsey a little later: playing four forwards could make it very hard for a team to regain possession.
Feyenoord themselves were on their way to a European Cup, under Ernst Happel, who had been part of the Austria side that had finished third in the 1954 World Cup. That side had been the last to use an attacking centre-half to any level of success, but Happel was no nostaligist and had already made the move to 4-3-3. Rinus Israel was a ferocious sweeper, while the creative duties in midfield fell to Wim van Hanegem. He was flanked by the Austrian Frank Hasil and Wim Jansen, with the rapid Coen Moulijn providing attacking thrust from the left wing. ‘Michels was an expert in planning the tactics before the match and preparing players physically and mentally, but Happel was a fine dissector of the game,’ explained Theo van Duivenbode, who had played at left-back for Ajax when they lost the 1969 European Cup final to AC Milan, before being sold to Feyenoord because Michels judged him too flimsy. ‘He saw things so quickly that he would make changes from the bench after only a few minutes’ play. Happel did not have at Feyenoord the outstanding individual players that Michels had at Ajax, so he went into greater tactical detail and produced more of a cooperative team. Not so much flair, perhaps, but very thorough teamwork.’
That makes them sound stodgy, which they were not - merely less fluent than Ajax. Nonetheless, that draw convinced Michels, and Ajax’s 4-2-4 became 4-3-3, with Vasović pushing up whenever possible to make a 3-4-3, which still left two markers to deal with the two opposing centre-forwards, plus a spare man as cover. ‘I played the last man in defence, the libero,’ said Vasović. ‘Michels made this plan to play very offensive football. We discussed it. I was the architect, together with Michels, of the aggressive way of defending.’
Vasović was never a man to hide his light under a bushel, and his claims should be treated with a degree of scepticism, but he was certainly pioneering as a defender who advanced up from the back line to become an additional midfielder, an idea that has remained constant in Dutch football through such sweepers as Horst Blankenburg, Arie Haan (in his later days) and Danny Blind. It was the combination of that with pressing that made it such an effective weapon.
Pressing for Ajax stemmed largely from Johan Neeskens’s aggression. He was usually deputed to pick up the opposing playmaker and Haarms described him as being ‘like a kamikaze pilot’ as he pursued him, often deep into opposition territory. At first other Ajax players hung back, but by the early seventies they had become used to following him. That meant they were playing a very high defensive line, squeezing the space in which the opposition had to play. That was risky, but Vasović was adept at stepping out to catch opposing forwards offside.
It required a particular skill to be able to do that. Captaining Brazil in their 2-0 defeat to Holland in the 1974 World Cup, the centre-back Marinho Peres had seen at first hand just how devastating the Dutch way could be, but he nonetheless found it hard to adjust after his 1974 move to Barcelona, who were by then under Michels’s management and had bought Cruyff and Neeskens. ‘Defenders in Brazil would never be able to push up like that,’ he said. ‘When I went to Barcelona, Michels wanted the centre-backs to push out to make the offside line. In Brazil this was known as the donkey line: people thought it was stupid. The theory was that if you passed one defender, you passed all the others.’ This had been a constant in Brazilian football since the full-backs were first split for the 1919 Copa América, and remained in the concept of the quarto zagueiro as developed by Lito at Vila Nova: as one defender went to the ball, another dropped off to provide cover.
‘What Cruyff said to me was that Holland could not play Brazilians or Argentinians, who were very skilful, on a huge pitch,’ Marinho went on. ‘The Dutch players wanted to reduce the space and put everybody in a thin band. The whole logic of the offside trap comes from squeezing the game. This was a brand new thing for me. In Brazil, people thought you could chip the ball over and somebody could run through and beat the offside trap, but it’s not like that because you don’t have time.’
The pressing had a dual function, though: it wasn’t just about frustrating the opposition. ‘In one training session,’ Marinho recalled, ‘I pushed up and we caught four or five players offside. I was pleas
ed, because it was still new to me and I was finding it difficult, but Michels came and shouted at me. What he wanted was for us then to charge the guy with the ball with the players we had spare because they had men out of the game in offside positions. That’s how offside becomes an offensive game. If when we got the ball like this, we couldn’t create a chance, the defenders dropped back and made the pitch bigger. It was all about space.’
The theory Winner sets out in Brilliant Orange that the Dutch are particularly adept at the manipulation of space because of the way their flat, frequently flooded landscape forces them to manipulate space in everyday life is persuasive (and just as the Viennese coffee-house writers saw a connection between Sindelar’s genius and their own literary output, it doesn’t seem a huge leap to see a relationship between the precise, glacial brilliance of Dennis Bergkamp and that of, say, Piet Mondriaan), but that is not to say Total Football was thought out in advance.
Buckingham spoke of how even in his day Ajax players were capable of what he called ‘habit football’: ‘They could find each other by instinct. They’d have a rhythm; go from the left side of the field to the right but make progress of 30 or 40 or 50 yards as well.’ The eventual flowering of Dutch football, first with Ajax and then with the national side, seems to have been less the result of any plan than the harnessing of a process that occurred naturally among a group of intelligent players who played with each other often enough for long enough that they were capable of ‘habit football’. ‘When I saw Suurbier going forward, I knew I had to go back,’ Swart said. ‘I didn’t have to be told. And after two years everybody knew what to do.’
To call it serendipitous would be unfairly to downplay the roles of Cruyff and Michels, but they were reacting to circumstance rather than, as Lobanovskyi did, imposing a vision. Even the rapid interchanging of positions, which became the defining feature of Ajax’s play, had developed initially as a measure to overcome the packed defences with which opponents attempted to combat their attacking style. This, in a sense, was the lesson learned from Celtic’s victory in the 1967 European Cup final: massed defences were best overcome by massed attacks, which meant defenders advancing to provide attacking options from deep.
‘In the fourth or fifth year,’ Michels said, ‘I tried to find guidelines that meant we could surprise a little those walls. I had to let midfield players and defensive players participate in the building up and in the attacking. It’s easy to say, but it’s a long way to go because the most difficult thing is not to teach a full-back to participate in attacking - because he likes that - but to find somebody else who is covering up. In the end, when you see they have the mobility, the positional game of such a team makes everyone think “I can participate too. It’s very easy.” And then you have reached the top, the paramount of the development.’
The move to 4-3-3 made that switching of positions rather easier to structure, because it tended to happen either down one flank or down the middle. So Suurbier, Haan and Swart interchanged on the right; Vasović (or Blankenburg or Hulshoff), Neeskens and Cruyff down the middle; and Ruud Krol, Gerrie Mühren and Keizer on the left. ‘People couldn’t see that sometimes we just did things automatically,’ said Hulshoff. ‘It comes from playing a long time together. Football is best when it’s instinctive. This way of playing, we grew into it. Total Football means that a player in attack can play in defence - only that he can do this, that is all. You make space, you come into space. And if the ball doesn’t come, you leave this space and another player will come into it.’
What was revolutionary was that the interchanging of positions was longitudinal rather than lateral. In Boris Arkadiev’s Dinamo Moscow side, wingers had moved into the centre, and inside-forwards had played on the wing, but the three lines of defence, midfield and attack had, broadly speaking, remained constant. The great Hungarians, by withdrawing their centre-forward and sitting the left-half so deep, had blurred the lines, and with 4-2-4 came attacking full-backs, but Michels’s Ajax were the first to encourage such whole-scale interchanges, and what allowed them to do so was pressing. Suddenly it didn’t matter if there were 40 yards of space behind the deepest outfield player because if an opponent received the ball he would be hounded so quickly it would be almost impossible for him to craft an accurate pass.
‘We could play sixty minutes of pressing,’ Swart said. ‘I’ve never seen any other club anywhere who could do that.’ Within a few years, Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo certainly could, but there was no one else, which raises the question of how they were able to maintain that intensity for so long. Both Ajax and Dynamo invested significantly in the science of preparation, working on nutrition and training schema, but both also looked to pharmaceutical means.
In an interview he game to the magazine Vrij Nederland in 1973, Hulshoff spoke of having been given drugs ahead of a match against Real Madrid six years earlier: ‘We took the pills in combination with what we always called chocolate sprinkles,’ he said. ‘What it was I don’t know, but you felt as strong as iron and suffered no breathlessness. One disadvantage was you lost all saliva, so after thirty-five minutes of the game I was retching.’
Salo Müller, who was Ajax’s masseur between 1959 and 1972, admitted as much in his autobiography, published in 2006, and revealed that Hulshoff and Johnny Rep had both come to him with concerns over pills given them by John Rollink, the club doctor. Over time, Müller collected pills Rollink had distributed from other sportsmen and had them analysed. ‘The results were not a surprise to me,’ he wrote. ‘They ranged from painkillers, muscle relaxants and tranquilising pills to amphetamine capsules.’
Even before joining Ajax, Rollink had form. The first drugs scandal to hit Dutch sport came at the 1960 Rome Olympics, when a female swimmer took two prescriptions from a team-mate’s bag and gave them to the press. A doctor said one was indicative of doping, pure and simple, and that the other was likely to be part of a programme of drug use: Rollink’s signature was on one of the prescriptions. He later left the Dutch Cycling Union when doping controls were instituted, and said that Ajax would have refused to comply had doping controls been brought in to Dutch football. He even admitted to taking amphetamines himself if he was working late. It may have been the systematic drugs programmes of the Soviet bloc that attracted the greatest attention, but they were certainly not the only ones at it.
Michels was the father of Total Football, and he carried it on at Barcelona, but it was only after he had left Amsterdam that Ajax reached their peak. Ajax, it is said, responded to his departure by drawing up a shortlist of fifteen names to replace him. They ended up with the cheapest, Ştefan Kovacs, a Romanian of Hungarian ethnicity who had led Steaua Bucharest to a league title and three Romanian Cups in the previous four years. He had had a brief spell with the Belgian side Charleroi during his playing career, but he was far from well-known in the Netherlands, and most greeted the arrival of the squat, grey-haired raconteur with a mixture of bewilderment and scepticism. He even, it is said, bought a return ticket to Amsterdam from Romania because he couldn’t quite believe himself that his stay would be a long one.
‘How do you like the length of our hair?’ one player is supposed to have asked at Kovacs’s first training session, seeing a soft target after the stringent days of Michels. ‘I’ve been employed as a coach, not a hair-dresser,’ Kovacs replied. A few minutes later, as he stood on the touchline, a ball fizzed towards him at knee-height. In one movement, he trapped and returned it. The test was passed, but the questions about his temperament would never go away.
‘Kovacs was a good coach,’ Gerrie Mühren said, ‘but he was too nice. Michels was more professional. He was very strict, with everyone on the same level. In the first year with Kovacs we played even better because we were good players who had been given freedom. But after that the discipline went and it was all over. We didn’t have the same spirit. We could have been champions of Europe for ever if we’d stayed together.’
Well, perhaps. Or perhaps the side’s
eventual disintegration was simply built into its emotional make-up. It is easy to see familiarity breeding discontent, particularly given the unusually confrontational atmosphere of the Ajax dressing room. Others, anyway, believed the slackening of the reins was necessary after the rigours of Michels. ‘The players were fed up with the hardness and discipline of Michels,’ Rep insisted. Liverpool, similarly, blossomed after the avuncular Bob Paisley had succeeded Bill Shankly and his more abrasive approach.
Certainly it was in 1971-72 that Ajax were at their most fluent, as Kovacs replaced Vasović with Blankenburg and encouraged him, Suurbier and Krol to advance, safe in the knowledge that Neeskens, Haan and Mühren could drop in to cover. Vasović himself always insisted Kovacs’s impact was minimal. ‘Those who say Total Football started with Kovacs are wrong,’ he said shortly before his death in 2002. ‘Kovacs had nothing to do with it. He simply took over a very good team, the champions of Europe, and let them continue the way they had already been playing.’ As Kovacs’s supporters point out, though, sometimes the hardest thing for a manager to do is to sit back and do nothing.
Doubts always pursued Kovacs. His record was extraordinary - two European Cups, an Intercontinental Cup, two European Super Cups, two Dutch championships and a Dutch Cup in two seasons - and yet there was always a sense that he was only a caretaker. In April 1972, shortly after a goalless draw away to Benfica had confirmed their progress to a second successive European Cup final, Ajax’s board members held an emergency meeting and decided to fire him. At the time, Ajax were five points clear in the league, had just hammered Feyenoord 5-1 in Rotterdam and had reached the Dutch Cup final. The sense, though, was that beating the Portuguese champions 1-0 over two legs was somehow not worthy of Ajax, and there were continual rumours of ill-discipline, with the assistant coach Han Grijzenhout and Rollink suggesting to the board that Kovacs had lost control of his squad.