Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Read online

  Different conditions necessitate a different style. Just as the game of the cloisters differed from the game of the playing fields in English public schools, so, in the tight, uneven, restricted spaces of the poorer areas of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, other skills developed and a new style was born: ‘a home-grown way of playing football,’ as Galeano put it, ‘like the home-grown way of dancing which was being invented in the milonga clubs. Dancers drew filigrees on a single floor tile, and football players created their own language in that tiny space where they chose to retain and possess the ball rather than kick it, as if their feet were hands braiding the leather. On the feet of the first Creole virtuosos, el toque, the touch, was born: the ball was strummed as if it were a guitar, a source of music.’

  Prioritising different virtues, the two styles could not comfortably coexist, and so, inevitably, when old and new met, there was conflict. That was apparent as early as 1905, when the physicality of Nottingham Forest against a representative XI - made up largely of Anglo-Argentinians - in the sixth game of their tour led to considerable ill-feeling. The Herald, pro-British as ever, even felt moved to issue a magnificently grand rebuke to those who had dared to criticise Forest’s approach: ‘a game especially intended to improve the stamina and try the strength of young men in the prime of life is not necessarily a parlour game.’ Acrimony became a feature of subsequent tours, caused largely by a fundamental disagreement on the part the shoulder-charge had to play in the game.

  Swindon Town’s tour of 1912 was one of the few that could be judged a success, and from that came a realisation that the British might perhaps have something to learn. Samuel Allen, the Swindon manager, was generally approving, saying he had seen no better football between amateur sides, but even he expressed a concern that local players ‘look on individual exploits as the main thing, and every time there was a chance to show clever work single-handed, it was taken’. Even traditionalists within Argentina were sceptical about the creolisation of the game. Jorge Brown, a former Alumni player of British origin, protested in the early 1920s that the new style of football ‘was weakened by an excess of passing close to the goal. It is a game that is more fine, perhaps more artistic, even apparently more intelligent, but it has lost its primitive enthusiasm.’ It was a criticism that would become increasingly familiar; until Hungary in 1953 settled the debate decisively at Wembley, Britain laboured under the delusion that the rest of the world suffered from a lack of directness in front of goal.

  Nobody who watched Uruguay in the 1924 Olympics could have been so misguided. Argentina chose to stay at home, but Uruguay went to Paris and wrote one of the great stories of early football. Galeano has a tendency to over-romanticise, but his evident glee in his country’s gold medal is hard to begrudge. This was, first and foremost, a team of workers, including, among other professions, a meat-packer, a marble-cutter, a grocer and an ice-salesman. They travelled to Europe in steerage, and played to pay for their board, winning nine friendlies in Spain before they even reached France. Uruguay were the first Latin American side to tour Europe, but they attracted little attention - at least initially - only around 2,000 turning up to watch them eviscerate Yugoslavia 7-0 in their opening game in the Olympics.

  ‘We founded the school of Uruguayan football,’ said Ondino Viera, who would go on to manage the national side and who had a turn of phrase only marginally less colourful than Galeano’s, ‘without coaches, without physical preparation, without sports medicine, without specialists. Just us alone in the fields of Uruguay, chasing the leather from the morning to the afternoon and then into the moonlit night. We played for twenty years to become players, to become what players had to be: absolute masters of the ball … seizing the ball and not letting it go for any reason … It was a wild football, our game. It was an empirical, self-taught, native style of football. It was a football that was not yet within the canons of the management of football in the Old World, not remotely … That was our football, and that’s how we formed our school of play, and that’s how the school of play for the entire continent of the New World was formed.’

  In Paris, word soon got around. ‘Game after game,’ Galeano wrote, ‘the crowd jostled to see those men, slippery as squirrels, who played chess with a ball. The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball, but these disinherited children from far-off America didn’t walk in their father’s footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling.’

  Chess with a ball? Charles Alcock would scarcely have recognised it, although he would presumably have appreciated the goal-scoring ability of the centre-forward Pedro Petrone, even if he did refuse to head the ball for fear of disturbing his heavily brilliantined hair. Those who were there, though, were enraptured as Uruguay maintained their form through the competition, scoring a total of seventeen goals and conceding two in their four games before beating Switzerland 3-0 in the final. The reaction of the French essayist and novelist Henry de Montherlant was typical. ‘A revelation!’ he wrote. ‘Here we have real football. Compared with this, what we knew before, what we played, was no more than a schoolboy’s hobby.’

  Gabriel Hanot, who would go on to edit L’Équipe, but was then coming to the end of a distinguished playing career, offered a less emotional response. Uruguay, he wrote, showed ‘marvellous virtuosity in receiving the ball, controlling it and using it. They created a beautiful football, elegant but at the same time varied, rapid, powerful and effective.’ As to the thought that British football might still be superior, Hanot was dismissive: ‘It is like comparing Arab thoroughbreds to farm horses.’

  Uruguay returned home and were promptly challenged to a game by Argentina, who insisted that their subsequent 3-2 aggregate win - achieved thanks to a 2-1 second-leg victory in Buenos Aires in a game halted early by crowd trouble - demonstrated that they would have been Olympic champions, if only they had turned up. Perhaps, perhaps not; it is impossible to say, but the Buenos Aires side Boca Juniors certainly impressed on a tour of Europe in 1925, losing just three of nineteen games.

  Argentina did travel to Amsterdam for the Olympics four years later and, fittingly, met Uruguay in the final, losing 2-1 after a replay. Two years later, the two sides met again in the first World Cup final, and again Uruguay were triumphant, winning 4-2. As far as it is possible to judge from contemporary reports, Uruguay’s advantage seems to have been that, for all their artistry and for all Viera’s claims of a raw spontaneity, they were able to retain a defensive shape, whereas Argentina’s individualism led at times to confusion. According to the Italian journalist Gianni Brera in Storia critica del calcio Italiano, the 1930 World Cup final was evidence that, ‘Argentina play football with a lot of imagination and elegance, but technical superiority cannot compensate for the abandonment of tactics. Between the two rioplatense national teams, the ants are the Uruguayans, the cicadas are the Argentinians.’ This is a fundamental: it could be said that the whole history of tactics describes the struggle to achieve the best possible balance of defensive solidity with attacking fluidity.

  So grew up the theory of la garra charrúa - ‘charrúa’ relating to the indigenous Charrúa Indians of Uruguay and ‘garra’ meaning literally ‘claw’ or, more idiomatically, ‘guts’ or ‘fighting spirit’. It was that, supposedly, that gave a nation with a population of only three million the determination to win two World Cups, and it was also that which gave a tenuous legitimacy to the brutality of later Uruguayan teams.

  Romanticised as that theory may have been - there was, after all, next to no Charrúa involvement in football - what was obvious to everybody outside of Britain was that the best football in the world was being played on the River Plate estuary, and that it was a game far advanced from the predictable 2-3-5 as practised in Britain. ‘The Anglo-Saxon influence has been disappearing, giving way to the less phlegmatic and more restless spirit of the Latin...’ a piece in the Argentinian newspaper El Grafi in 1
928 asserted. ‘They soon began modifying the science of the game and fashioning one of their own… It is different from the British in that it is less monochrome, less disciplined and methodical, because it does not sacrifice individualism for the honour of collective values… River Plate football makes more use of dribbling and generous personal effort, and is more agile and attractive.’

  Uruguay 4 Argentina 2, World Cup final, El Centenario, Montevideo, 30 July 1930

  Imagination was prized to the extent that certain players were lionised as the inventors of certain skills or tricks: Juan Evaristo was hailed as the inventor of the ‘marianella’ - the volleyed backheel; Pablo Bartolucci of the diving header; and Pedro Calomino of the bicycle-kick, although this last example is disputed. Some say the bicycle-kick was invented in Peru in the late nineteenth century; most seem to credit Ramón Unzaga Asla, a native of Bilbao who emigrated to Chile and first used it in 1914 (hence the use of term chilena throughout Spanish-speaking South America, unless that refers to David Arellano, a Chilean who popularised the technique on a tour of Spain in 1920); while others follow Leônidas, the Brazilian forward of the thirties, in attributing it to Petronilho de Brito. Weirdly, the former Aston Villa chairman Doug Ellis also claimed to have invented the bicycle-kick, even though he never played football to any level and was not born until ten years after the first record of Unzaga performing the trick. Who actually invented it is less important in this context than what the arguments show of the value set on imagination around the River Plate estuary in the twenties. The shaming thing for British football is that the game’s homeland was so ill-disposed to innovation that it is just about conceivable that Ellis was the first man to perform a bicycle-kick on British soil.

  Argentinian football developed its own foundation myth, based largely around the visit of the Hungarian side Ferencváros in 1922, which, exposing locals to the style of the Danubian School, supposedly revolutionised their thinking on the game. Given the process of creolisation had been going on for at least a decade, though, it seems probable that the tour simply confirmed changes that were already afoot, that in their early stages the Danubian and rioplatense games were similar and almost simultaneous shifts away from the physicality of the British style towards something based more on individual technique.

  With the technical experimentation came a willingness to tinker - albeit gently - with tactics. ‘South American teams treated the ball better and were more tactical in outlook,’ said Francisco Varallo, Argentina’s inside-right in the first World Cup final. ‘It was the era when we had five forwards with the No.8 and the No.10 dropping back and wingers sending in passes.’ Those inside-forwards came to be seen as the key to creativity, and the game developed a cult of the gambeta, the slaloming style of dribbling. In both Argentina and Uruguay the story is told of a player skipping through the opposition to score a goal of outrageous quality, and then erasing his footsteps in the dust as he returned to his own half so that no one should ever copy his trick.

  Mythic, evidently, but indicative of the prevailing system of values, which became even more pronounced as Argentinian football drifted into reclusiveness. Undermined by the emigration of players ahead of the 1934 World Cup - there were four Argentinians in the Italy side that won it - they were beaten in the first round by Sweden, and then refused to send a team to France in 1938 after their own bid to host the tournament was turned down. As the Second World War took hold, and then Juan Perón led the country into isolation, Argentina did not appear again on the world stage until 1950, and in the interim enjoyed a golden age. A professional league began in 1931, big stadiums brought big crowds and newspaper and radio coverage both drew off, and fuelled, the nationwide interest in the game. So central did football become to Argentinian life that when Jorge Luis Borges, who hated the sport, and Adolfo Bioy Casares, who loved it, collaborated on the short story ‘Esse est percipi’, it was football they chose to demonstrate how perceptions of reality could be manipulated, as they imagine a fan’s disillusionment as he learns from a conversation with a club chairman that all football is staged, with results pre-ordained and players played by actors.

  The style that had begun to emerge in the twenties developed into something even more spectacular, la nuestra - ‘ours’ or ‘our style of play’ - which was rooted in the criolla viveza - ‘native cunning’. The term itself seems to have been popularised in the aftermath of Argentina’s 3-1 victory over an England XI in 1953: ‘la nuestra’, ‘our style’, it had been seen, could beat that of the gringos (although technically that was only a representative game, not a full international). What it describes, though, is the whole early philosophy of Argentinian football, which was founded on the joy of attacking. Between September 1936 and April 1938, there was not a single goalless draw in the Argentinian championship. Yet goals were only part of the story. In a much-cited anecdote from his novel On Heroes and Tombs (annoyingly missing from the English translation), Ernesto Sábato discusses the spirit of la nuestra as the character Julien d’Arcangelo tells the hero, Martín, of an incident involving two Independiente inside-forwards of the twenties, Alberto Lalín and Manuel Seoane (nicknamed both la Chancha and el Negro), who were seen as embodying the two different schools of thought on how football should be played. ‘“To show you what those two modalities were,”’ D’Arcangelo says to Martín, “I am going to share with you an illustrative anecdote. One afternoon, at half-time, la Chancha was saying to Lalín: “Cross it to me, man, and I can go in and score.” The second half starts, Lalín crosses and sure enough el Negro gets to it, goes in and scores. Seoane returns with his arms outstretched, running towards Lalín, shouting: “See, Lalín, see?!” and Lalín answered, “Yes, but I’m not having fun.” There you have, if you like, the whole problem of Argentinian football.’

  The tricks, entertainment, came to rival winning in importance. Half a century earlier, Britain had herself had the argument: to keep playing the ‘right way’, to keep dribbling (albeit in a far less flamboyant manner), or to adopt the style that won matches. In its twenty-year cocoon, in a culture obsessed by viveza and with few games against outsiders that might have brought defeat and a tactical rethink, the exuberant style flourished. It might not have been for the long-term good of Argentinian football, but it was fun while it lasted.

  Chapter Three

  The Third Back

  ∆∇ Part of football’s enduring fascination is that it is a holistic game, that the slightest change in one part of the pitch can have unexpected and radical effects elsewhere. When the home associations persuaded the international board in 1925 to liberalise the offside law, it was to answer the specific issue of a lack of goals. Notts County had begun the trend, but by then several clubs, most notably Newcastle United with their full-back pairing of Frank Hudspeth and Bill McCracken, had become so adept at setting an offside trap that games would be compressed into a narrow sliver either side of the halfway line. When Newcastle drew 0-0 at Bury in February 1925, it came as the final straw. It was Newcastle’s sixth goalless draw of a season that produced what at the time was an unthinkably low average of 2.58 goals per game. The football was boring, attendances were falling and the FA, for once, not merely recognised that something needed to be done, but set about doing it.

  The offside law had remained unchanged since 1866, and demanded that, for a forward to be onside, three opposing players (usually a goalkeeper and two defenders) had to be between him and his opponent’s goal. The FA came up with two possible solutions - either to require only two players to be in advance of the forward, or to add a line in each half 40 yards from goal behind which a forward could not be offside - and set about testing them in a series of exhibition games, with one half being played under one alternative, and the other under the other.

  At a meeting in London in June, the FA decided they preferred the version requiring only two defending players to play a forward onside. The Scottish FA soon adopted the amendment as well, and it was they who presented the propose
d rule change to the International Board, the new variant being implemented ahead of the 1925-26 season. Previously a side looking to play the offside trap had been able to retain one full-back as cover as his partner stepped up to try to catch the forward; the new legislation meant that a misjudgement risked leaving the forward through one-on-one with the goalkeeper.

  On the face of it, the amendment was an immediate success, with the average number of goals per game shooting up to 3.69 the following season, but it brought about significant changes in the way the game was played, and led directly to Herbert Chapman’s development of the ‘third back’ or W-M formation. And that, it is widely held, was what precipitated the decline and increasing negativity of English football.

  The argument is put most strongly by Willy Meisl, the younger brother of Hugo, in Soccer Revolution, which was written in horrified response to England’s 6-3 defeat at home to Hungary in 1953. Meisl, it should be said, had been a devout Anglophile even before he fled rising anti-Semitism in Austria to settle in London, and his book reads as a lament for a past he experienced only second-hand and probably idealised. He became a respected figure in sports journalism, writing mainly on English football for foreign publications, but Soccer Revolution, for all its fine phrase-making, is, to modern eyes at least, a strikingly eccentric work. For him, the change in the offside rule was football’s version of the Fall; the moment at which innocence was lost and commercialism won out. Perhaps it was, but it was the very thin end of what is now a gargantuan wedge.