Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Read online

  Switzerland were beaten 2-0, as were Belgium, and then West Germany were beaten 3-1. ‘The system worked out, and afterwards we used it in the 1986 World Cup, where the entire world saw it,’ said Bilardo. ‘When we went out to play like that, it took the world by surprise because they didn’t know the details of the system.’

  Perhaps, like Alf Ramsey in 1966, Bilardo deliberately decided to shield his new formation from spying eyes; perhaps the truth is that his achievement was rooted less in any grand plan than in strategic tinkering as and when necessary (as, to an extent, was Ramsey’s). Either way, Argentina did not go to Mexico on any great cloud of optimism. They won their last warm-up game 7-2 against Israel, but that was their first victory in seven games. As Maradona put it in his autobiography, fans watched their opening game against South Korea ‘with their eyes half-closed’, fearing the sort of humiliation that was eventually inflicted upon them by Cameroon four years later. ‘They didn’t even know who was playing,’ he went on. ‘[Daniel] Passarella had left; [Jorge Luis] Brown, [José Luis] Cuciuffo and [Héctor] Enrique had come into the squad. We trusted, we trusted, but we had not yet a single positive result to build on… All Bilardo’s meticulous plans, all his tactics, his obsession with positions, suddenly it all fell into place.’

  Cuciuffo and Enrique, though, did not play in that opening game. Rather Argentina began with a 4-4-2, with Brown playing as a libero behind Néstor Clausen, Oscar Ruggeri and Oscar Garré, and Pedro Pasculli alongside Jorge Valdano up front. Argentina won that comfortably enough, but against Italy, Bilardo decided Cuciuffo would be better equipped to deal with the darting Italy forward Giuseppe Galderisi. Ruggeri took care of Alessandro Altobelli and so, as in il gioco all’ Italiana, the left-back, Garré, was left free to push on and join the midfield. The same system was retained for the third group game against Bulgaria and the second-round victory over Uruguay.

  It was only against England in the quarter-final that Bilardo settled upon the eleven that would go on to beat Belgium in the semi-final and West Germany in the final (Ramsey, of course, had only settled on his final eleven in a quarter-final against Argentina). In Brown he had a libero who seemed a throwback to the days of uncomplicated sweepers like Picchi. In front of him were the two markers, Ruggeri and Cuciuffo, who picked up the opposing centre-forwards. Sergio Batista operated in front of them as a ball-playing ball-winner, with Julio Olarticoechea - preferred to the more defensively minded Garré - and Ricardo Giusti wide. Jorge Burrachaga, as a link between midfield and attack, was a certainty, as, obviously, were Valdano and Maradona, which left just one position left to fill. Pasculli had scored the winner against Uruguay in the previous round, but Bilardo decided to drop him, deciding instead to pick Enrique ‘You can’t play against the English with a pure centre-forward,’ he explained. ‘They’d devour him, and the extra man in midfield will give Maradona more room.’

  So Maradona played as a nominal second striker, but given the freedom to roam wherever he saw fit by the defensive platform behind him. His first goal, after fifty-one minutes, was an example of viveza at its worst; his second, four minutes later, quite breath-taking. Called upon to attack by the two-goal deficit, the England manager Bobby Robson threw on two wingers in John Barnes and Chris Waddle, and the defensive weaknesses of Bilardo’s system were immediately exposed. Gary Lineker converted a Barnes cross to pull one back, and was a hair’s breadth away from a repeat in the final seconds.

  Would a side with wingers have overrun Argentina? Possibly. It could be argued that their central midfield three of Batista, Enrique and Burruchaga would have dominated possession, but they failed to cut out the supply to Barnes and Waddle even against a central midfield duo as lacking in ferocity as Glenn Hoddle and Steve Hodge. Carlos Tápia replaced the more attacking Burruchaga with fifteen minutes to go, but Barnes still ran riot.

  Still, it hardly mattered. Belgium had no wide players of any note - who is to say they would have had the courage to play them even if they had? - and restricted their semi-final to a midfield battle, only to be beaten by more Maradona brilliance. In the final, Argentina met a West Germany side going through their own uneasy transition to a wing-back system. The acknowledgement of the possibilities of 3-5-2 seems to have happened all but simultaneously in Europe and South America, and although the outcome was similar, as with the move to 4-2-4, the processes of evolution were different.

  After defeat in the 1966 World Cup final West German football had moved slowly towards the libero as practised by the Dutch, with Franz Beckenbauer, by 1974, established as an attacking sweeper in a 1-3-3-3. He had played in the role for Bayern Munich from the late sixties, encouraged by Zlatko Cajkovski, their Yugoslav coach, who had grown up in an environment that saw the value in having ball-playing central defenders. It is no coincidence that the first great Ajax libero, Velibor Vasović was produced by the same culture. Beckenbauer himself always insisted his attacking style resulted from him playing in midfield for West Germany, where Willi Schulz remained the libero, which meant he was less prone to the discomfort defenders commonly felt when advancing with the ball.

  Whatever the origins, a 1-3-3-3 with man-marking and the libero as a true free man became the default in German football, and, with the minor modification of one of the forwards being withdrawn into a playmaking role, it was still essentially that system that Beckenbauer, by then their coach, had West Germany use in Mexico in 1986. In the quarter-final, for instance, when they beat the hosts on penalties, Ditmar Jakobs played as the sweeper with, from right to left, Andreas Brehme, Karl-Heinz Förster and Hans-Peter Briegel in front of him. Thomas Berthold, Lothar Matthäus and Norbert Eder made up the midfield, with Felix Magath as the playmaker behind Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Klaus Allofs.

  For the semi-final against France, though, which was won 2-0, West Germany also went with three central defenders, as Eder dropped in alongside Förster and Wolfgang Rolff came into midfield to perform a man-to-man marking job on Michel Platini. Beckenbauer instructed Förster to remain deep, and so, as the defender said, ‘we ended up playing zonal marking almost by default’. It would be another decade before the debate was properly addressed in German football.

  With Rolff standing down for the return of Berthold from suspension, the job of man-marking Maradona was given to Matthäus in the final. West Germany stuck with the 3-5-2 and Maradona was kept relatively quiet, but he also neutralised Matthäus, dragging him so deep that it was though West Germany had four central defenders. With two holders in front of the back line, that left them shorn of creativity and left Magath isolated, with the result that he was barely involved.

  West Germany’s narrowness - and their system didn’t even allow the full-backs to push on - played into Argentina’s hands. Brown headed them in front after Schumacher had flapped at a corner, and when Valdano calmly added a second eleven minutes into the second half, the game seemed won. Only then was Matthäus released from his marking duties, and only then did West Germany begin to play, exposing a weakness that had tormented Bilardo. Set-plays were supposed to be his speciality, but he was so anxious about his side’s ability to defend them that, at 4 a.m. on the morning of the final, he burst into Ruggeri’s room, pounced on him, and, with the defender disoriented and half-asleep, asked who he was marking at corners. ‘Rummenigge,’ came the instant reply, which Bilardo took as evidence that Ruggeri was sufficiently focused.

  With sixteen minutes to go, though, and with Brown nursing a fractured shoulder, Rudi Völler glanced on a corner for Rummenigge to score. Eight minutes later, Berthold headed another corner back across goal and Völler levelled. Perhaps having done so, West Germany should have gone back into the negativity their system seemed to demand, but they did not. The momentum was with them and, at last, they left space in behind their defence. It took Maradona just three minutes to exploit it, laying a pass beyond Briegel for Burruchaga to run on and score the winner.

  Looking back, their success seems almost freakish and, while the
jibes they were a one-man team were unfair, the dangers of being quite so reliant on Maradona were seen as Argentina won only six of the thirty-one games they played between the end of that World Cup and the start of the next one. They went on, somehow, to reach the final. Bilardo did not win many games as national coach, but he did have a habit of winning the ones that mattered. Moreover, his thinking came to seem axiomatic. By Italia ’90, three at the back was a common sight.

  Argentina 3 West Germany 2, World Cup final, Azteca, Mexico City, 29 June 1986

  The champions, West Germany, employed the formation, with Klaus Augenthaler, Guido Buchwald and either Berthold or Jürgen Kohler providing the foundations for a midfield trio of Matthäus plus two of Buchwald, Thomas Hässler, Uwe Bein, Pierre Littbarski and Olaf Thon, depending on circumstance. That was the beauty of the system - it allowed changes of tone to be made simply, without great wrenches of shape. Against Holland in the second round, for instance, Buchwald, usually a central defender, was used a midfielder to help break up the Dutch passing game.

  For Brazil, it required only minor modification, one of the two holding players in their 4-2-2-2 becoming a third centre-back, although they never seemed to have much confidence in the formation and were generally uninspired, losing 1-0 to Argentina in the second round. More surprisingly, even England adopted the libero, almost as a last resort after they began the competition with a 1-1 draw against the Republic of Ireland so bad that the Gazzetta della Sport reported it under the headline ‘No football, please, we’re British.’

  With Mark Wright as a sweeper, flanked by Terry Butcher and Des Walker, England felt able to deploy the attacking talents of Chris Waddle, David Platt and Paul Gascoigne in the same midfield. They may have been fortuitous at times, but the outcome was that, in a paradox that seemed to blind England fans to the wider truths of that tournament, they played with greater adventure than for years and reached a semi-final for the first time since 1966. There, they were good enough to match West Germany before losing on penalties.

  Still, that was not a good World Cup. Goals were down to a record low of 2.21 per game; red cards up to a record high of sixteen. Even West Germany, clearly the best side there, managed just three goals in their final three games: two penalties and a deflected free-kick. Theirs was a team built predominantly on muscle, something the 3-5-2 seemed to encourage. Johan Cruyff despaired of it, later speaking of the replacement of the winger with the wing-back as the ‘death of football’.

  This was the result of the other facet of Bilardo’s thinking coming into play: that the best place for a playmaker was perhaps not in the midfield, but as a second forward. His insistence on three players and seven runners may have been extreme, but the balance certainly tipped in that direction. Even Holland in 1988 ended up deploying Ruud Gullit, who would surely once have been a deeper-lying player, as a second striker behind Marco van Basten in a 4-4-1-1.

  As players became fitter and systems more organised, defences became tighter. The idealism of the Brazilians faded, and the playmaking second striker morphed into a fifth midfielder. After the sterility of the 1990 World Cup, the low point came in the European Championship of 1992, a festival of dullness that yielded an average of just 2.13 goals per game. Even as Fifa desperately changed the rules to outlaw the backpass and the challenge from behind, football seemed to have embarked on an endless march away from the aesthetic. With the game so well analysed and understood, and defensive strategies so resolute, by the early nineties the great question facing football was whether beauty could be accommodated at all.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The English Pragmatism (2)

  ∆∇ As so often, progress began with defeat. Chris Lawler’s goal in a 2-1 loss in the first leg in the Marakana had given Liverpool hope of overcoming Red Star Belgrade in the second leg and reaching the quarter-final of the 1973-74 European Cup, but at Anfield, Red Star, under the guidance of Miljan Miljanić, played a brilliant counter-attacking game and struck twice on the break through Vojin Lazareviç and Slobodan Janković to complete a 4-2 aggregate win.

  The following day, 5 November 1973, in a cramped, windowless room just off the corridor leading to the Anfield dressing room, six men set in motion the stylistic shift that led English clubs to dominate Europe in the late seventies and early eighties. The boot-room, as history would know it, was not an obvious place to plot a revolution. It was small and shabbily carpeted, hung on one side with hooks for players’ boots and decorated with team photographs and topless calendars. Joe Fagan, the first-team coach under Bill Shankly, had begun the tradition of post-game discussions there, stocking the room with crates of beer supplied by the chairman of Guinness Exports, whose works team he had once run in nearby Runcorn. Initially he met only with Bob Paisley, in those days the team’s physiotherapist, but gradually other members of the club’s backroom staff began to drop in. ‘You got a more wide-ranging discussion in the boot-room than the boardroom,’ Paisley said. ‘What went on was kept within those four walls. There was a certain mystique about the place.’ Managers of opposing teams willing to offer information and opinions about players were invited, and even Elton John visited during his time as Watford chairman. When offered a drink, Anfield legend has it, he asked for a pink gin; he was given a beer.

  Gradually the boot-room grew in importance, becoming effectively a library where coaches could refer to books in which were logged details of training, tactics and matches. In Winners and Losers: The Business Strategy of Football, the economist Stefan Szymanski and the business consultant Tim Kuypers claimed Liverpool’s success in the seventies and eighties was a result of their organisational structure, of which the boot-room was a key part. ‘The boot-room,’ they wrote, ‘appears to have been some kind of database for the club, not merely of facts and figures, but a record of the club’s spirit, its attitudes and its philosophy.’

  On Bonfire Night 1973, though, the greater part of that success was still to come, and Liverpool seemed to have reached an impasse. Red Star, European Cup semi-finalists in 1970, were a useful side, of that there was no question, but the manner of their victory seemed to point to a more essential deficiency than the vagaries of form. So a meeting was convened, Shankly, Fagan and Paisley being joined in the boot-room by Ronnie Moran, the reserve team coach, by Tom Saunders, the head of youth development, and by the chief coach Reuben Bennett, a dour Scottish disciplinarian famed for his habit of telling injured players to rub away the pain with a wire-brush or a kipper.

  They weren’t crisis talks exactly, but the issues they discussed were fundamental: just why did Liverpool, imperious domestically, look so vulnerable in Europe? Despite the background of English underachievement, it is a mark of Shankly’s perfectionism that a flaw was perceived at all. After all, Liverpool had won the Uefa Cup the previous season, beating Borussia Mönchengladbach 3-2 on aggregate in the final. In the years before that success, though, Liverpool had gone out of European competition to the likes of Ferencváros, Athletic Bilbao and Vitória Setúbal, none of them complete minnows, but none of them the cream of Europe, either. If the Uefa Cup triumph suggested Liverpool had found a solution, the defeat to Red Star emphatically disabused them.

  ‘They are a good side,’ Shankly said, ‘even though our fans would not pay to watch the football the play.’ The way they were prepared to hold possession and frustrate their opponents, though, taught Liverpool an important lesson. ‘We realised it was no use winning the ball if you finished up on your backside,’ said Paisley. ‘The top Europeans showed us how to break out of defence effectively. The pace of their movement was dictated by their first pass. We had to learn how to be patient like that and think about the next two or three moves when we had the ball.’

  The days of the old-fashioned stopper centre-half, the boot-room decided, were over: it was necessary to have defenders who could play. Larry Lloyd, exactly the kind of central defender they had declared extinct (although he would later enjoy an unlikely renaissance at Nottingham
Forest), then ruptured a hamstring, and Phil Thompson, originally a midfielder, was pushed back to partner Emlyn Hughes at the heart of the defence. ‘The Europeans showed that building from the back is the only way to play,’ Shankly explained. ‘It started in Europe and we adapted it into our game at Liverpool where our system had always been a collective one. But when Phil Thompson came in to partner Hughes it became more fluid and perhaps not as easy to identify. This set the pattern which was followed by Thompson and [Alan] Hansen in later years.

  ‘We realised at Liverpool that you can’t score a goal every time you get the ball. And we learned this from Europe, from the Latin people. When they play the ball from the back they play in little groups. The pattern of the opposition changes as they change. This leaves room for players like Ray Kennedy and Terry McDermott, who both played for Liverpool after I left, to sneak in for the final pass. So it’s cat and mouse for a while waiting for the opening to appear before the final ball is let loose. It’s simple and it’s effective… It’s also taken the spectators time to adjust to it.’

  Shankly was no great tactician - he tended to leave that side of the game to Paisley, and was so bored when he did attend a week-long coaching course at Lilleshall that he left on the Tuesday - but from the moment of his arrival at Liverpool, he had a clear sense of the general style his wished to play. ‘Shankly,’ said a piece in the Liverpool Echo from December 1959, ‘is a disciple of the game as it is played by the continentals. The man out of possession, he believes, is just as important as the man with the ball at his feet. Continental football is not the lazy man’s way of playing soccer. Shankly will aim at incisive forward moves by which continentals streak through a defence when it is “closed up” by British standards. He will make his players learn to kill a ball and move it all in the same action… he will make them practise complete mastery of the ball.’