Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Read online

  The sentiment is one with which Jorge Valdano, these days the eloquent philosopher prince of aesthetic football, is in full agreement. ‘Coaches,’ he said, ‘have come to view games as a succession of threats and thus fear has contaminated their ideas. Every imaginary threat they try to nullify leads them to a repressive decision which corrodes aspects of football such as happiness, freedom and creativity. At the heart of football’s great power of seduction is that there are certain sensations that are eternal. What a fan feels today thinking about the game is at the heart of what fans felt fifty or eighty years ago. Similarly, what Ronaldo thinks when he receives the ball is the same as what Pelé thought which in turn is the same as what Di Stefano thought. In that sense, not much has changed, the attraction is the same.’

  As Gabriele Marcotti pointed out in an article in The Times, for Valdano that attraction is rooted in emotion. ‘People often say results are paramount, that, ten years down the line, the only thing which will be remembered is the score, but that’s not true,’ Valdano said. ‘What remains in people’s memories is the search for greatness and the feelings that engenders. We remember Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan side more than we remember Fabio Capello’s AC Milan side, even though Capello’s Milan was more successful and more recent. Equally, the Dutch Total Football teams of the 1970s are legendary, far more than West Germany, who beat them in the World Cup final in 1974, or Argentina, who defeated them in the 1978 final. It’s about the search for perfection. We know it doesn’t exist, but it’s our obligation towards football and, maybe, towards humanity to strive towards it. That’s what we remember. That’s what’s special.’

  Even as Sacchi entered his thirties, though, his quest for perfection was in its infancy. From Baracco Luco, he moved on to Bellaria before, in 1979, joining Cesena, then in Serie B, where he worked with the youth team. That was a Rubicon. ‘I was still working for my father’s business, so that was a real lifestyle choice,’ Sacchi said. ‘I was paid £5,000 a year, which is roughly what I made in a month working as a director for my father’s company. But in a way that freed me. I never did the job for money because thankfully I never had to think about it.’ It was a gamble that was to bring an almost unthinkably rapid return.

  After Cesena, Sacchi took over at Rimini in Serie C1, almost leading them to the title. Then he got his great breakthrough as he was taken on by Fiorentina, a Serie A club at last, where Italo Allodi, once the shadowy club secretary of Inter and Juventus, gave him the role of youth coach. His achievements there got him the manager’s job at Parma, then in Serie C1. He won promotion in a first season in which they conceded just fourteen goals in thirty-four matches - his attacking principles were always predicated on a sound defence - and the following year took them to within three points of promotion to Serie A. More importantly for Sacchi, though, Parma beat Milan 1-0 in the group phase of the Coppa Italia, and then beat them again, 1-0 on aggregate, when they were paired in the first knockout round. They may have gone out to Atalanta in the quarter-final, and they may not have won a single game away from home in the league that season, but Silvio Berlusconi, who had bought Milan earlier in the year, was impressed by what he had seen. He, too, had dreams of greatness and seems to have bought into Sacchi’s idealism. ‘A manager,’ Sacchi said, ‘can only make a difference if he has a club that backs him, that is patient, that gives confidence to the players and that is willing to commit long-term. And, in my case, that doesn’t just want to win, but wants to win convincingly. And then you need the players with that mentality. Early on at Milan I was helped greatly by Ruud Gullit, because he had that mentality.’

  Still, the problem of credibility remained. Sacchi admitted he could barely believe he was there, but responded tartly to those who suggested somebody who had never been a professional footballer - Berlusconi, who had played amateur football to a reasonable level, was probably a better player - could never succeed as a coach. ‘A jockey,’ he said, ‘doesn’t have to have been born a horse.’

  Sacchi addressed the issue straightaway, reputedly saying to his squad at their first training session, ‘I may come from Fusignano, but what have you won?’ The side may have been expensively assembled, but the answer was not a lot. Milan had lifted the scudetto just once in the previous twenty years, and were still struggling to re-establish themselves after their relegation to Serie B in 1980 as part of the Totonero match-fixing scandal. The previous season they had finished fifth, pipping Sampdoria to the last qualification slot for the Uefa Cup only in a play-off.

  Sacchi’s resources were bolstered by the arrival of Gullit from PSV Eindhoven and Marco van Basten from Ajax for a combined fee of around £7million, but still there was no great expectation, particularly as Van Basten suffered a series of injuries, required surgery and ended up playing just eleven league games, most of them towards the end of the season. They lost their second game of the campaign, 2-0 at home to Fiorentina, but that was one of only two defeats they suffered that season as they won the scudetto by three points.

  That summer, Frank Rijkaard became the third Dutchman at the club. He had walked out on Ajax the previous season, having fallen out with their head coach Johan Cruyff, and had joined Sporting in Lisbon. Signed too late to be eligible for them, though, he ended up being loaned out to Real Zaragoza; when Sacchi insisted on signing him, there was a distinct element of risk, particularly as Berlusconi was convinced that the best option was to attempt to resurrect the career of the Argentina striker Claudio Borghi, who was already on the club’s books, but had been loaned out to Como. Sacchi was vindicated, emphatically so, as Rijkaard’s intelligence and physical robustness helped Milan to their first European Cup in twenty years.

  ‘The key to everything was the short team,’ Sacchi explained, by which he meant that he had his team squeeze the space between defensive line and forward line. Their use of an aggressive offside trap meant it was hard for teams to play the ball behind them, while teams looking to play through them had to break down three barriers in quick succession. ‘This allowed us to not expend too much energy, to get to the ball first, to not get tired. I used to tell my players that, if we played with twenty-five metres from the last defender to the centre-forward, given our ability, nobody could beat us. And thus, the team had to move as a unit up and down the pitch, and also from left to right.’

  They were not, though, defensive, although as with so many innovations, those who sought to copy the system frequently became so. ‘I always demanded, when we had possession, five players ahead of the ball,’ Sacchi said. ‘And that there would always be a man wide right and a man wide left. But it could be anybody. It wasn’t always the same people.’

  Sacchi’s first experience of European competition had ended with an embarrassing Uefa Cup second-round defeat to Espanyol, but it was Europe that would prove his greatest stage. By the time of the European Cup final in 1989, Milan seemed unstoppable but, as Sacchi’s detractors always point out, they had a huge stroke of luck in the second round. Vitosha of Bulgaria (the club that is now Levski) were beaten 7-2 on aggregate, but Red Star Belgrade were far tougher opponents and held Milan to a 1-1 draw at the San Siro. Red Star led the second leg at the Marakana 1-0 through a Dejan Savićević goal and, with Milan down to nine men after the dismissals of Pietro Paolo Virdis and Carlo Ancelotti, they seemed sure to go through. Fog, though, has a tendency to gather where the Danube meets the Sava, and as it thickened in the second half, the game was abandoned after fifty-seven minutes.

  The sides returned the following day. Van Basten and Dragan Stojković exchanged goals, but the game was overshadowed by the horrific injury suffered by Roberto Donadoni as he was fouled by Goran Vasilijević. As Donadoni lay unconscious on the pitch, his life was saved only by the quick-thinking of the Red Star physio, who broke his jaw to create a passage for oxygen to reach his lungs. Gullit, still far from fit following a knee operation but on the bench, insisted on being allowed to take his place. Milan should have won it when Vasilijević deflected t
he ball over his own line, but neither referee nor linesman gave the goal, and they ended up progressing only by means of a penalty shoot-out.

  There was controversy too in their quarter final against Werder Bremen. In the first leg in Germany, Werder had a goal ruled out for a far from obvious foul on the goalkeeper Giovanni Galli, while Milan were again left pointing to a shot that seemed to cross the line without being given as a goal, and felt they should have had two penalties. In the second, it was a debatable penalty converted by Marco van Basten after Donadoni - back in action after the winter break - had gone down under challenge from Gunnar Sauer that gave Milan a 1-0 aggregate victory. At that stage Milan seemed merely fortuitous, but what happened in the semi-final confirmed their brilliance.

  Poor Real Madrid: twenty-three years on from their last European triumph, it had come to feel that they existed merely for other teams to prove their excellence against. Benfica had seized the mantle from them in the 1962 final; Ajax had confirmed they were the best side in Europe by hammering them in the semi-final in 1973; and Sacchi’s Milan similarly gave notice of their ascension into the pantheon with a superlative performance and a 5-0 win. Perhaps it is simply their reputation that inspires pretenders against them; but perhaps it is also the case that their historical insistence upon the individual renders them prone to destruction by well-drilled teams. Potent as their strike force of Emilio Butragueño and Hugo Sánchez were, there was an imbalance in their midfield, with the arrival of Bernd Schüster from Barcelona forcing the incisive Michel into a deeper role.

  AC Milan 5 Real Madrid 0, European Cup Semi-Final, San Siro, Milan, 19 April 1989

  Milan had the better of the first leg in the Bernebéu but conceded a late equaliser and were held to a 1-1 draw. Madrid’s coach, the Dutchman Leo Beenhakker, opted to start the second leg with Paco Llorente, a rapid right-winger who was usually used as a substitute. The idea was presumably that his pace could undo Milan on the break, but the effect was rather to weaken the midfield. Schüster was not quick enough to make any impression on Milan’s central midfield pairing of Rijkaard and Ancelotti, and Butragueno ended up being dragged right to shore up the right flank, disabling his partnership with Sánchez.

  Perhaps Beenhakker got it wrong, but that is not to detract from the excellence of Saachi’s side. ‘Milan’s performance,’ Brian Glanville wrote, ‘was a compound of technical excellence, dynamic pace and inspired movement. Gullit, playing up front with Van Basten, can seldom have been better, seldom have shown such an irresistible combination of power, skill and opportunism.’

  Ancelotti got the first after eighteen minutes, working space for himself with a couple of neat sidesteps before smacking a thirty-yard drive into the top corner. Even his presence in the side, never mind the goal, was a vindication of Sacchi’s methods. When he had arrived in 1987 from Roma, he was twenty-eight, and he took time to adapt to the new coach’s approach. ‘He struggled at first,’ Sacchi said. ‘Berlusconi said we had an orchestra director who couldn’t read sheet music. I told him I would teach him to sing in tune in our orchestra. Every day, I would make him come an hour before training with some kids from the youth team and we would go through everything. Eventually he sang in perfect tune.’ And never better than in that semi-final.

  Rijkaard converted a right-wing cross from Mauro Tassotti to make it two, and Gullit added a third before half-time with a characteristic header from Donadoni’s clip from the left. The three Dutchmen combined for the fourth, four minutes after half-time, Gullit heading down Rijkaard’s pass for Van Basten to crash into the top corner. Donadoni rounded off Madrid’s humiliation with a fifth, scudded in at the near post from the edge of the box. ‘It is hard to play like that,’ said Franco Baresi, ‘but when we do we are unbeatable.’

  Steaua Bucharest offered little resistance in the final and were beaten 4-0, Gullit and Van Basten getting two goals each. ‘I was exhausted by the end,’ said the Steaua goalkeeper Silviu Lung. ‘In all my life I’d never had so many shots to deal with.’

  That, Sacchi said, was as near as he got to the perfection he sought, the nearest he came to fulfilment. ‘The morning after we beat Steaua Bucharest I woke up with a feeling I had never experienced before,’ he said. ‘It was one which I have never experienced since. I had this unusual, sweet taste in my mouth. I realised it was the apotheosis of my life’s work.’

  A decade after leaving the shoe factory, in two great performances, Sacchi saw his vision made flesh. ‘Many believe that football is about the players expressing themselves,’ he said. ‘But that’s not the case. Or, rather, it’s not the case in and of itself. The player needs to express himself within the parameters laid out by the manager. And that’s why the manager has to fill his head with as many scenarios, tools, movements, with as much information as possible. Then the player makes decisions based on that. And it’s about being a player. Not just being skilful or being athletic. I didn’t want robots or individualists. I wanted people with the intelligence to understand me, and the spirit to put that intelligence to the service of the team. In short, I wanted people who knew how to play football.’

  In that, he differs from Valdano, whose romanticism is of a less pragmatic bent. ‘There is room for all theories, but individual expression on the pitch is something I don’t think we can give up,’ Valdano said. ‘The brain of one manager can’t compete with the infinite possibilities of eleven thinking brains on the pitch. Ultimately, while the concept of team is very important, you need individuals to go to the next level.’

  For Sacchi, though, the system was the most important thing. ‘Football has a script,’ he said. ‘The actors, if they’re great actors, can interpret the script and their lines according to their creativity, but they still have to follow the script.’ There is no doubt that in his conception the scriptwriter was the manager, and the script itself was to be interpreted, not improvised upon. ‘I was the only one who could guide them and get them to develop a collective game which would maximize their potential as a unit,’ he said. ‘My philosophy was teaching players as much as I could, so they would know as much as possible. This would then enable them to make the right decision - and to do so quickly - based on every possible scenario on the pitch.’

  There is a sense in which his greatest triumph was persuading the great players and the great egos in his Milan squad of that. ‘I convinced Gullit and Van Basten by telling them that five organised players would beat ten disorganised ones,’ Saachi explained. ‘And I proved it to them. I took five players: Giovanni Galli in goal, Tassotti, Maldini, Costacurta and Baresi. They had ten players: Gullit, Van Basten, Rijkaard, Virdis, Evani, Ancelotti, Colombo, Donadoni, Lantignotti and Mannari. They had fifteen minutes to score against my five players, the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from ten metres inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once.’

  Pressing was the key, but there was no sense of hounding the man in possession as Dynamo Kyiv or Ajax had done. ‘Many things influenced me,’ Saachi said. ‘Dutch football for one. But I think they were different from us, they were based more on athleticism; we were more about tactics. Every player had to be in the right place. In the defensive phase, all of our players always had four reference points: the ball, the space, the opponent and his team-mates. Every movement had to be a function of those four reference points. Each player had to decide which of the four reference points should determine his movement.

  ‘Pressing is not about running and it’s not about working hard. It’s about controlling space. I wanted my players to feel strong and the opponents to feel weak. If we let our opponents play in a way they were accustomed to, they would grow in confidence. But if we stopped them, it would hurt their confidence. That was the key: our pressing was psychological as much as physical. Our pressing was always collective. I wanted all eleven players to be in an “active” position, effecting and influencing the opposition when we did not have the ba
ll. Every movement had to be synergistic and had to fit into the collective goal.

  ‘Everybody moved in unison. If a full-back went up, the entire eleven adjusted. People think we had these big, strong players, but we had guys like [Alberigo] Evani and Donadoni, who are slight. No, they became big, strong players because of their positioning and movement. That’s what made them seem big.

  ‘And we had several types of pressing, that we would vary throughout the game. There was partial pressing, where it was more about jockeying; there was total pressing which was more about winning the ball; there was fake pressing, when we pretended to press, but, in fact, used the time to recuperate.’

  It was based around a back four who played, radically for Italy, not with a libero, but in a line - a sliding arc that was only flat when the ball was in the centre of the field - and it was practised relentlessly, as it needed to be. ‘Before he came to Milan, the clash between two opposing players was always the key, but with him it was all about movement off the ball, and that’s where we won our matches,’ said Paolo Maldini. ‘Each player was as important defensively as he was in attack. It was a side in which players and not positions were the key.’