Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Page 4

  It was in central Europe and South America, where attitudes to the British were more sceptical, that football began to evolve. The 2-3-5 formation was retained, but shape is only part of the matter; there is also style. Where Britain, despite the acceptance of passing and the spread of 2-3-5, persisted in ruggedness and physicality, others developed subtler forms of the game.

  What set football in central Europe apart was the speed at which it was taken up by the urban working class. Although tours by the likes of Oxford University, Southampton, Corinthians, Everton and Tottenham and the arrival of various coaches ensured a British influence remained, those playing the game had not been inculcated in the beliefs of the English public schools, and so had no preconceived notions of the ‘right’ way of doing things.

  They were fortunate, also, that it was Scots who made the biggest impression, so ensuring that the focus of the game was on quick, short passing. In Prague, for instance, the former Celtic inside-left John Madden - ‘the ball artist of his day with all the tricks’ according to Jim Craig in A Lion Looks Back - coached Slavia between 1905 and 1938, while his compatriot John Dick, once of Airdrieonians and Arsenal, had two spells in charge of Sparta between 1919 and 1933. In Austria, meanwhile, a conscious effort was made to ape the style of the Rangers side that had toured in 1905.

  The greatest teacher of the Scottish game, though, was an Englishman of Irish descent: Jimmy Hogan. Born and raised in Burnley in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, in his teens he toyed with the idea of entering the priesthood, but he turned to football and went on to become the most influential coach there has ever been. ‘We played football as Jimmy Hogan taught us,’ said Gusztav Sebes, the coach of the great Hungary side of the early fifties. ‘When our football history is told, his name should be written in gold letters.’

  Defying his father’s desire for him to become an accountant, Hogan joined the Lancashire side Nelson as a sixteen year old and, developing into what he described as ‘a useful and studious insideright’ went on to Rochdale and then Burnley. He was, by all accounts, a difficult character, haggling repeatedly for better wages and showing a wholly alien devotion to self-improvement. His team-mates nicknamed him ‘the Parson’ in recognition of his meticulous, almost Puritanical disposition. At one point Hogan and his father devised a primitive exercise bike - essentially a bicycle mounted on a rickety wooden stand - on which he would cycle 30 miles a day until he realised that far from making him quicker, he was merely tightening his calf muscles.

  The ideal of effortless superiority may have belonged to the early amateurs, but it carried over into the professional game. Training, as such, was frowned upon. Players were expected to run, perhaps even practise their sprints, but ball-work was seen as unnecessary, possibly even deleterious. Tottenham’s training schedule for 1904, for instance, shows just two sessions a week with the ball, and they were probably more enlightened than most. Give a player a ball during the week, ran the reasoning, and he would not be so hungry for it on a Saturday: a weak metaphor turned into a point of principle.

  After one match, in which he had dribbled through a number of challenges to create an opportunity only to shoot disappointingly over the bar, Hogan asked his manager, Spen Whittaker, what had gone wrong. Had the position of his foot been wrong? Had he been off balance? Whittaker was dismissive, telling him just to keep trying, that to score one out of ten was a decent return. Others would have shrugged off the incident but, perfectionist that he was, Hogan dwelt on it. Surely, he thought, such things were not a matter of luck, but depended on technique. ‘From that day I began to fathom things out for myself,’ he said. ‘I coupled this with seeking advice from the truly great players. It was through my constant delving into matters that I became a coach later in life. It seemed the obvious thing, for I had coached myself as quite a young professional.’

  Hogan felt frustrated by Burnley’s primitive approach, but it was a financial dispute that finally persuaded him, at the age of twenty-three, to leave Lancashire for the first time, enticed to Fulham by their manager Harry Bradshaw, whom he had known briefly at Burnley. Bradshaw had no playing pedigree and was a businessman and administrator rather than a coach, but he had clear ideas on how football should be played. No fan of kick-and-rush, he employed a series of Scottish coaches schooled in the close-passing game, ensured a hefty Scottish representation among the playing staff and left them to get on with it.

  The policy was undeniably successful. Hogan helped Fulham to the Southern League championship in both 1906 and 1907 and, having joined the Second Division of the Football League in 1907-08, they reached the semi-final of the FA Cup, losing to Newcastle United. It was Hogan’s last match for the club. He had been struggling for some time with a knee injury and Bradshaw, business head firmly in place, decided that to retain him was an unjustifiable risk. Hogan briefly joined Swindon Town, before representatives of Bolton Wanderers, having waited for him outside church after evensong one Sunday, persuaded him back to the north-west.

  His career there was disappointing, ending in relegation, but a pre-season trip to the Netherlands made Hogan aware of the potential of Europe, and the desire of its players to learn. English football may have dismissed coaching as unnecessary, but the Dutch were begging for it. Following a 10-0 win over Dordrecht, Hogan vowed that one day he would ‘go back and teach those fellows how to play properly’. He also, crucially, became good friends with James Howcroft, an engineer from Redcar who was a leading referee. Howcroft regularly took charge of games overseas and, as a result, knew several foreign administrators. One evening, Howcroft mentioned to Hogan that he had heard that Dordrecht were looking for a new coach, and hoped to employ somebody with an expertise in the British game. The coincidence was remarkable, and the opportunity not to be missed; Hogan applied, and, at the age of twenty-eight, a year after making his vow, he was back in Holland to fulfil it, accepting a two-year contract.

  Hogan’s players were amateurs, many of them students, but he began to train them as he felt British professionals should have been trained. He improved their fitness, certainly, but he believed the key was to develop their ball control. He wanted his team, he said, to replicate ‘the old Scottish game’, to play in ‘an intelligent, constructive and progressive, on-the-carpet manner’. Crucially, because many of them came from the universities, his players were keen to study, and Hogan introduced lessons, explaining in chalk on a blackboard how he thought football should be played. Tactics and positioning began to be understood and explained not in an ad hoc manner on the pitch, but via diagrams in a classroom.

  Hogan was successful and popular enough that he was asked to take charge of the Dutch national side for a game against Germany, which they won 2-1. Still only thirty, though, he felt he had more to give as a player, so, when his contract at Dordrecht was up, he returned to Bolton, who had retained his registration. He played a season there, helping them to promotion, but his future, he knew, lay in coaching. He began looking for work again in the summer of 1912, and again Howcroft proved instrumental, putting him in touch with the great pioneer of Austrian football, Hugo Meisl.

  Meisl had been born in the Bohemian city of Maleschau in 1881 to a middle-class Jewish family, who moved to Vienna while he was still very young. He became obsessed by football, and turned out to limited success for the Cricket Club. His father, though, wanted him to go into business, and found him work in Trieste, where he became fluent in Italian and began to pick up other languages. Returning to Austria to perform his military service, he accepted his father’s request that he should secure employment at a bank, but also started working for the Austrian football federation. Initially his job was concerned largely with fund-raising, but Meisl, like Hogan an intelligent inside-forward, had firm ideas on how the game should be played and was determined to shape the future of Austrian football. Slowly, his role expanded until, as the de facto head of the Austrian federation, he gave up banking altogether.

  In 1912, Austria drew 1-1 again
st Hungary in a game refereed by Howcroft. Meisl was frustrated by the outcome, and asked Howcroft where his side was going wrong. Howcroft replied that he thought they needed a proper coach, somebody who could develop their individual technique, somebody, in other words, like his old mate Jimmy Hogan. Meisl promptly appointed him on a six-week contract, partly to work with leading Austrian clubs, but mainly to prepare the Austria national squad ahead of the Stockholm Olympics.

  Hogan’s first training session did not go well. The Austrian players found him difficult to understand, and felt he was focusing rather too much on basics. Meisl, though, was impressed, and he and Hogan talked long into the night about their vision of football. Tactically, neither saw anything wrong with the 2-3-5 - which had, after all, formed the basis of all football for over thirty years - but they believed that movement was necessary, that too many teams were too rigid and so predictable. Both believed that it was necessary to make the ball do the work, that swift combinations of passes were preferable to dribbling, and that individual technique was crucial, not for the slaloming individual runs that would become such a feature of the game in South America, but for the instant control of an incoming pass to allow a swift release. Hogan was also keen to stress the value of the long pass to unsettle opposing defences, provided it were well-directed and not an aimless upfield punt. Meisl was a romantic, but what is fascinating about Hogan is that his beliefs were, essentially, pragmatic. He was not an evangelist for the passing game through any quixotic notion of what was right; he simply believed that the best way to win matches was to retain possession.

  Austria hammered Germany 5-1 in Stockholm, but went down 4- 3 to Holland in the quarter-finals. Still, Meisl was convinced, and when the German football federation asked him to give Hogan a reference, he instead offered Hogan a job, putting him in charge of Austria’s preparations for the 1916 Olympics. ‘To leave my dark, gloomy, industrial Lancashire for gay Vienna was just like stepping into paradise,’ Hogan said. He worked with the Olympic side twice a week, and spent the rest of the time coaching the city’s top club sides, finding himself so much in demand that he was forced to begin his sessions with Wiener FC at 5.30 in the morning.

  Austria warmed to Hogan, and Hogan warmed to Austria. Their football, he said, was like a waltz, ‘light and easy’, and Meisl was optimistic of success in 1916. War, though, destroyed that dream. Realising the probability of conflict, Hogan approached the British consul and asked whether it would be advisable to return swiftly with his family to Britain. He was told there was no imminent danger, but within forty-eight hours, war had been declared. A day later, Hogan was arrested as a foreign national.

  The American consul managed to get Hogan’s wife and children back to Britain in March 1915, while Hogan was released the day before he was due to be sent to an internment camp in Germany after the Blythe brothers, who owned a department store in Vienna, agreed to act as guarantors for him. For almost eighteen months he worked for them, teaching their children how to play tennis, but, 130 miles to the east, moves were afoot to bring him back into football. Baron Dirstay, the Cambridge-educated vice-president of the Budapest club MTK, had heard of Hogan’s plight and, after pulling various diplomatic strings, secured him a position coaching his side, provided he agreed to report regularly to the local police.

  Hogan readily accepted. With most of the first team away at the front, his first task was to assemble a squad. He turned, naturally, to youth, picking up two of the club’s most popular players, György Orth and Jozsef ‘Csibi’ Braun, after spotting them in a kickabout as he strolled through Angol Park. ‘I pounced on them and said “they are mine, my very own”,’ he explained. ‘They were both intelligent lads attending high school in Budapest. Every day after school I had them on the field, instructing them in the art of the game.’ Clever and keen to learn, Orth and Braun were typical both of the sort of player central Europe produced and of the sort of player with whom Hogan loved to work; which is, of course, why he felt so at home in both Vienna and Budapest. ‘The great advantage which continental football has over British soccer,’ Hogan said, ‘is that boys are coached in the art of the game at a very tender age.’

  His methods brought spectacular success. MTK won the title in 1916-17, the first official championship after a brief hiatus for the war, and held on to it for nine years. As the war came to an end, a combined Budapest side gave notice of the growing strength of the continental game by hammering Bolton 4-1. Hogan, though, presided over just two of MTK’s triumphs. As soon as he could when the war was over, he left for Britain. ‘The time I spent in Hungary was almost as happy as my stay in Austria. Budapest is a lovely city - in my opinion, the most beautiful in Europe,’ he said, but he had seen neither his wife nor his son in almost four years. Hogan was succeeded by one of his senior players, Dori Kürschner, who, twenty years later, would be crucial to the development of the game in Brazil.

  Hogan returned to Lancashire and found a job in Liverpool, working as a dispatch foreman for Walker’s Tobacco. Money, though, remained tight, and he was advised to ask for a hand-out from the Football Association, which had established a fund to support professionals financially disadvantaged by the war years. It proved a watershed in his career. Hogan believed he was due £200, and borrowed £5 to cover his travelling expenses to London. The FA secretary Frederick Wall, though, treated him with disdain. The fund, Wall said, was for those who had fought. Hogan pointed out that he had been interned for four years and so had had no chance to sign up. Wall’s response was to give him three pairs of khaki socks, sneering that ‘the boys at the front were very glad of those’. Hogan was furious, never forgave the FA and his talent - not that his ideas would have been well-received in conservative England anyway - was lost to English football.

  In Vienna, Meisl retained Hogan’s template, although his faith was tested by a 5-0 defeat Austria suffered to Southern Germany shortly after the end of the war. On a frozen, rutted pitch in Nuremberg, their close-passing game proved impractical, and a despondent Meisl spent the return journey discussing with his players whether they should abandon their approach for something more direct and physical. Absolutely not, came their response, and so were set in stone the principles from which grew the Wunderteam of the early thirties, the first of the great unfulfilled national sides. Under Meisl, Brian Glanville wrote, ‘soccer became almost an exhibition, a sort of competitive ballet, in which scoring goals was no more than the excuse for the weaving of a hundred intricate patterns.’

  The pyramid remained as the basic shape, but the style of the game as a radicalised extension of the Scottish passing game was so different from that found in England that it became recognised as a separate model: ‘the Danubian School’. Technique was prized over physicality, but was harnessed into a team structure. In South America, the game came to diverge even more sharply from the original model. Again technique was prized, but in Uruguay and, particularly, Argentina, it was individuality and self-expression that were celebrated.

  The Football Association’s Laws of the Game arrived in Argentina in 1867, where they were published by an English-language newspaper, The Standard. Later that year the Buenos Aires Football Club was founded as an offshoot of the Cricket Club, but the seeds fell on stony ground, and six years later it switched to rugby. Only in the 1880s did football really take off, thanks largely to Alexander Watson Hutton, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, who came to Argentina to teach at St Andrew’s Scotch School. He resigned when the school refused to extend its playing fields, and established the English High School in 1884, where he employed a specialist games master to teach football. When the Argentinian Association Football League was reformed in 1893, Hutton was a central figure. Alumni, a team made up of old boys from the English High School, took their place in the first division and came to dominate it in the early part of the twentieth century, while the school team itself played lower down the league pyramid. They were far from the only school to take football seriously, and s
ix of the first seven titles were won by teams based on the prestigious Lomas de Zamora boarding school.

  It was a similar story across the River Plate in Uruguay, where young British professionals founded cricket and rowing clubs that developed football sections, and British schools pushed the game. William Leslie Poole, a teacher at the English High School in Montevideo, was the equivalent of Hutton, forming the Albion Cricket Club in May 1891, the football section of which was soon playing football against teams from Buenos Aires.

  In those early days, as a quick glance at the team-sheets demonstrates, the players were largely British or Anglo-Argentinian, and so was the ethos. In his history of amateur football in Argentina, Jorge Iwanczuk speaks of the goal being ‘to play well without passion’ and of the importance of ‘fair play’. In a game against Estudiantes, Alumni even refused to take a penalty because they believed it had been incorrectly awarded. It was all about doing things the ‘right way’, a belief that extended into tactics: 2-3-5 was universal. The Buenos Aires Herald’s extensive coverage of Southampton’s 3-0 victory over Alumni in 1904 - the first game played on Argentinian soil by a British touring side - makes clear how public school values prevailed. Britain’s pre-eminence, an editorial claimed, was the result of ‘an inherent love of all things manly’.

  Gradually, though, the British dominance waned. The Argentinian Football Association (AFA) adopted Spanish as its language of business in 1903 and the Uruguayan FA did likewise two years later. Alumni were wound up in 1911, and the following year AFA became the Asociación del Football Argentina, although it would take until 1934 before ‘football’ became ‘fútbol’. Uruguayans and Argentinians, uninfected by British ideals of muscular Christianity, had no similar sense of physicality as a virtue in its own right, no similar distrust of cunning. The shape may have been the same, but the style was as different as it was possible to be. The anthropologist Eduardo Archetti has insisted that, as the influence of Spanish and Italian immigrants began to be felt, power and discipline were rejected in favour of skill and sensuousness - a trend that was felt across a range of disciplines. ‘Like the tango,’ wrote the Uruguayan poet and journalist Eduardo Galeano, ‘football blossomed in the slums.’