Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Read online

  It worked. Arsenal won the league in 1931 and 1933, and were beaten in the 1932 Cup final only by a highly controversial goal. Glanville wrote of them ‘approaching the precision of a machine’, and in their rapid transition from defence to attack, the unfussy functionalism of their style, there was a sensibility in keeping with the art deco surrounds of Highbury. The ‘machine’ analogy is telling, recalling as it does Le Corbusier’s reference to a house as ‘a machine for living in’; this was modernist football. William Carlos Williams, similarly, in a phrase that would become almost a slogan for his version of modernism, described a poem as ‘a machine made of words … there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.’ Chapman’s Arsenal were very much of their age. ‘It was,’ Joy said of their style, ‘twentieth-century, terse, exciting, spectacular, economic, devastating.’

  Arsenal 2 Huddersfield Town 0, FA Cup final, Wembley, London, 26 April 1930

  Perhaps that is not surprising. Chapman was, after all, part of the first wave of beneficiaries of Forster’s Education Act of 1870, which made schooling compulsory to the age of twelve and allowed unprecedented numbers of working-class men to fill the managerial vacancies opened up by the First World War. They may not have had Ezra Pound’s command to ‘make it new’ ringing in their ears, but it is fair to suggest that the new managerial class was more open to innovation than its tradition-bound predecessors. Chapman, it is worth remembering, was a near contemporary of another modernist genius of Nottinghamshire mining stock, D.H. Lawrence.

  Within football there were doubters, perhaps the most astute of them Carruthers in the Daily Mail, who, after the 1933 championship, commented: ‘If it were thought that other clubs would try to copy them, their example might, I’m afraid, be unfortunate. There is only one Arsenal today, and I cannot conceive another simply because no other club has players fit to carry on the same ideas.’

  The ideas, anyway, were imperfectly understood, as was demonstrated when England’s selection committee picked Roberts for a friendly against Scotland in 1931. He was the first stopper to be called up for his country, but neither of the full-backs, Fred Goodall and Ernie Blenkinsop, were accustomed to the W-M. As a result, Scotland ‘picnicked happily in the open spaces’ as L.V. Manning put it in the Daily Sketch, winning 2-0.

  In Scotland, opinion was just as divided between those who recognised the efficacy of the more modern system, and those who remained romantically tied to the short passing game. The last hurrah of the pattern-weaving approach came on 31 March 1928 when the Scotland side who would become immortalised as the ‘Wembley Wizards’ hammered England, Alex Jackson scoring three and Alex James two in a 5-1 win. In his report in The Evening News, Sandy Adamson described Jackson’s first goal as ‘a zigzag advance which ought to go down in posterity as a classic of its kind’ and went on to describe how ‘exultant Scots engaged in cat-and-mouse cantrips… From toe to toe the ball sped. The distracted enemy was bewildered, baffled and beaten. One bit of weaving embraced eleven passes and not an Englishman touched the sphere until [Tim] Dunn closed the movement with a sky-high shot over the bar…’

  The Glasgow Herald was more restrained. ‘The success of the Scots,’ its report said, ‘was primarily another demonstration that Scottish skill, science and trickery will still prevail against the less attractive and simpler methods of the English style in which speed is relied upon as the main factor.’ Jimmy Gibson and Jimmy McMullan, the wing-halves, and Dunn and James, the inside-forwards, clearly did combine to devastating effect on a wet pitch, but it should be borne in mind that the game was effectively a playoff for the wooden spoon in the Home International championship. The supposedly self-evident superiority of the Scottish style hadn’t been apparent in the 1-0 defeat to Northern Ireland or the 2-2 draw against Wales.

  It is significant too that eight of the Scotland eleven were based at English clubs: for all their passing ability, it evidently helped to have players used to the pace of the English game. Stylistically, anyway, this was not quite the throw-back some would suggest. Tom Bradshaw, the centre-half, was given a defensive role, marking Dixie Dean, so while they may not have been playing a full-blown W-M, nor was their system a classic 2-3-5.

  The W-M’s arrival in the club game was patchy. The former Rangers player George Brown recalls a charity game between a Rangers-Celtic XI and a Hearts-Hibs XI from ‘about 1930’: ‘Davie Meiklejohn was at right-half, I was at left-half and Celtic’s Jimmy McStay was at centre-half,’ he said. ‘Things did not go very well for us in the first half and by the interval we were one goal down. So during half-time, Meiklejohn said to McStay, “All the trouble is coming through the middle because you are too far up the field. We play with Jimmy Simpson well back and this leaves the backs free.” McStay agreed to try this and we eventually ran out comfortable winners. So from then on he played the same type of game for Celtic.’ Like Jack Butler at Arsenal, though, McStay was no natural defender, and a run of nine seasons without a title was brought to an end only when the stopper centre-half Willie Lyon was signed from Queen’s Park.

  And that, in a sense, was the problem: it was simply easier to be a good defensive centre-half than a good attacking one. The creative part of Chapman’s equation was even harder to fulfil. Inside-forwards of the ability of Alex James were rare, but phlegmatic Herbie Roberts-style stoppers abounded. ‘Other clubs tried to copy Chapman,’ Jimmy Hogan said, ‘but they had not the men, and the result was, in my opinion, the ruination of British football, with the accent on defence and bringing about the big kicking game which put to an end the playing of constructive football. Through this type of game our players lost the touch and feeling for the ball.’

  The seeds of that decline may have pre-dated the change in the offside law, but they were nurtured by Chapman’s response to it. The effect of the third-back game, as Glanville said, was ‘to reinforce and aggravate weakness which already existed’ because it encouraged a mental laziness on the part of coaches and players. It is far less arduous, after all, to lump long balls in the general direction of a forward than to endure the agonies of creation. Chapman, though, remained unapologetic. ‘Our system, which is so often imitated by other clubs, has lately become the object of criticism and discussion…,’ he told Hugo Meisl. ‘There is only one ball in play and only one man at a time can play it, while the other twenty-one become spectators. One is therefore dealing only with the speed, the intuition, the ability and the approach of the player in possession of the ball. For the rest, let people think what they like about our system. It has certainly showed itself to be the one best adapted to our players’ individual qualities, has carried us from one victory to another… Why change a winning system?’

  Chapman himself never had to, nor did he have to deal with the transition from one generation of players to the next. On 1 January 1934, he caught a chill during a game at Bury, but decided to go anyway the next day to see Arsenal’s next opponents, Sheffield Wednesday. He went back to London with a high temperature, but ignored the advice of club doctors and went to watch the reserves play at Guildford. He retired to bed on his return, but by then pneumonia had set in, and he died early on 6 January, a fortnight short of his fifty-sixth birthday.

  Arsenal went on to win the title, and made it three in a row the following year. A few months after his death, a collection of Chapman’s writings was published. In it, intriguingly, he too seemed to express regret for the passing of a less-competitive age. ‘It is no longer necessary for a team to play well,’ he said. ‘They must get goals, no matter how, and the points. The measure of their skill is, in fact, judged by their position in the league table.’

  This, now, seems all but axiomatic; it is a measure of how pervasive the amateur inclinations of the game remained that even Chapman seems to have felt it necessary to apologise for winning. ‘Thirty years ago,’ he went on, ‘men went out with the fullest licence to display their arts and crafts. Today they have to make their contribution to a system.’ And so, f
inally, resolved to winning, football recognised the value of tactics, the need for individuality to be harnessed within the framework of a team.

  Chapter Four

  How Fascism Destroyed the Coffee House

  ∆∇ Herbert Chapman was one man, making one change to answer a specific problem. English football followed him because it saw his method worked, but the coming of the third-back game did not herald the coming of a generation of English tacticians. ‘Unfortunately,’ as Willy Meisl wrote, ‘the plaster cast remained, no soccer sorcerer or professor was here to smash it to pieces and cast it in another mould.’ If anything, the preference was to try to pretend the tactical change had not happened, that the sacred pyramid remained intact. When the FA made shirt numbering compulsory in 1939, they ignored later developments and stipulated that the right-back must wear 2, the left-back 3, right-half 4, the centre-half 5, the left-half 6, the right-winger 7, the inside-right 8, the centre-forward 9, the inside-left 10 and the left-winger 11, as though the 2-3-5 were still universal, or at least the basis from which all other formations were mere tinkerings. That meant that teams using the W-M lined up, in modern notation, 2, 5, 3; 4, 6; 8, 10; 7, 9, 11, which is why ‘centre-half’ is - confusingly - used as a synonym for ‘centre-back’ in Britain.

  Newspapers, similarly, ignored the reality, continuing to print team line-ups as though everybody played a 2-3-5 until the 1960s. Even when Chelsea played the Budapest side Vörös Lobogó in 1954, and - alerted to tactical nuances by the fall-out from England’s 6-3 defeat to Hungary at Wembley a year earlier - made the effort to print the Hungarian formation correctly in the match programme, they persisted with the delusion that their own W-M was actually a 2-3-5. So overwhelmingly conservative was the English outlook that the manager of Doncaster Rovers, Peter Doherty, enjoyed success in the fifties with his ploy of occasionally having his players switch shirts, bewildering opponents who were used to recognising their direct adversary by the number on their back.

  Numbering in a 2-3-5

  Numbering in a W-M (England)

  For the importance of tactics fully to be realised, the game had to be taken up by a social class that instinctively theorised and deconstructed, that was as comfortable with planning in the abstract as it was with reacting on the field and, crucially, that suffered none of the distrust of intellectualism that was to be found in Britain. That happened in central Europe between the wars. What was demonstrated by the Uruguayans and Argentinians was explained by a - largely Jewish - section of the Austrian and Hungarian bourgeoisie. The modern way of understanding and discussing the game was invented in the coffee houses of Vienna.

  Football boomed in Austria in the twenties, with the establishment of a two-tier professional league in 1924. That November the Neues Wiener Journal asked, ‘Where else can you see at least 40-50,000 spectators gathering Sunday after Sunday at all the sports stadiums, rain or shine? Where else is a majority of the population so interested in the results of games that in the evening you can hear almost every other person talking about the results of the league matches and the club’s prospects for the coming games?’ The answer was easy: Britain aside, nowhere else in Europe.

  But where in Britain the discussion of games took place in the pub, in Austria it took place in the coffee house. In Britain football had begun as a pastime of the public schools, but by the 1930s it had become a resolutely working-class sport; in central Europe, it had followed a more complex arc, introduced by the Anglophile upper middle classes, rapidly adopted by the working classes, and then, although the majority of the players remained working class, seized upon by intellectuals.

  Football in central Europe was an almost entirely urban phenomenon, centred around Vienna, Budapest and Prague, and it was in those cities that coffee-house culture was at its strongest. The coffee house flourished towards the end of the Habsburg Empire, becoming a public salon, a place where men and women of all classes mingled, but which became particularly noted for its artistic, bohemian aspect. People would read the newspapers there; pick up mail and laundry; play cards and chess. Political candidates used them as venues for meetings and debates, while intellectuals and their acolytes would discuss the great affairs of the day: art, literature, drama and, increasingly in the twenties, football.

  Each club had its own café, where players, supporters, directors and writers would mix. Fans of Austria Vienna, for instance, met in the Café Parsifal; Rapid fans in the Café Holub. The hub of the football scene in the inter-war years, though, was the Ring Café. It had been the hang-out of the anglophile cricket community, but by 1930 it was the centre of the broader football community. It was, according to a piece written in Welt am Montag after the war, ‘a kind of revolutionary parliament of the friends and fanatics of football; one-sided club interest could not prevail because just about every Viennese club was present.’

  The impact of football on the wider culture is made clear by the career of the Rapid centre-forward Josef Uridil. He came from the suburbs - in the Vienna of the time edgy, working-class districts - and his robust style of play was celebrated as exemplifying the proletarian roots of the club. He was the first football hero of the coffee house, and, in 1922, became the subject of a song by the noted cabaret artist Hermann Leopoldi, ‘Heute spielt der Uridil’, which was so successful that it spread his fame even to those with no interest in football. He began advertising a range of products from soap to fruit juice and, by February 1924, he was appearing as a compère at a music hall while at the same time Pflicht und Ehre, a film in which he appeared as himself, was showing in cinemas.

  It was into that environment that Hugo Meisl’s Wunderteam exploded. The trend through the late twenties was upward and, despite a poor start, Austria narrowly missed out on the inaugural Dr Gerö Cup, a thirty-month league tournament also featuring Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland. After losing three of their opening four games, they hammered Hungary 5-1 and the eventual winners Italy 3-0, finishing runners-up by a point. In the Ring, they weren’t satisfied, and agitated for the selection of Matthias Sindelar, a gifted, almost cerebral, forward from Austria Vienna, a club strongly associated with the Jewish bourgeoisie.

  He was a new style of centre-forward, a player of such slight stature that he was nicknamed ‘Der Papierene’ - ‘the Paper-man’. There was an air of flimsy genius about him that led writers to compare his creativity to theirs: a fine sense of timing and of drama, a flair for both the spontaneous and the well-crafted. In his 1978 collection Die Erben der Tante Jolesch, Friedrich Torberg, one of the foremost of the coffee-house writers, wrote that: ‘He was endowed with such an unbelievable wealth of variations and ideas that one could never really be sure which manner of play was to be expected. He had no system, to say nothing of a set pattern. He just had … genius.’

  Hugo Meisl, though, was doubtful. He had given Sindelar his international debut as a twenty-three year old in 1926 but, for all that he stood in the vanguard of the new conception of football, Meisl was, at heart, a conservative. Everything he did tactically could be traced back to a nostalgic attempt to recreate the style of the Rangers tourists of 1905: he insisted on the pattern-weaving mode of passing, ignored the coming of the third back, and retained a sense that a centre-forward should be a physical totem, somebody, in fact, like Uridil.

  Uridil and Sindelar were both from Moravian immigrant families, both grew up in the suburbs and both became celebrities (Sindelar too played himself in a film and supplemented his footballer’s income by advertising wrist-watches and dairy products), but they had little else in common. As Torberg put it, ‘They can only be compared as regards popularity; in terms of technique, invention, skill, in short, in terms of culture, they were as different from each other as a tank from a wafer.’

  Finally, in 1931, Meisl succumbed to the pressure and turned to Sindelar, installing him as a fixture in the team. The effects were extraordinary, and on 16 May 1931, Austria thrashed Scotland 5-0. Two-and-a-half years on from the Wembl
ey Wizards’ 5-1 demolition of England, Scotland found themselves just as outmanoeuvred by the same game, taken to yet greater heights. They were, admittedly, without any Rangers or Celtic players, fielded seven debutants and lost Daniel Liddle to an early injury, while Colin McNab played on as a virtual passenger after suffering a blow to the head towards the end of the first half, but the Daily Record was in no doubt what it had witnessed: ‘Outclassed!’ it roared. ‘There can be no excuses’. Only the heroics of John Jackson, the goalkeeper, prevented an even greater humiliation.

  Given England had been beaten 5-2 by France in Paris two days earlier, that week now seems to stand as a threshold, as the moment at which it became impossible to deny the rest of the world had caught up with Britain (not that that stopped the British newspapers and football authorities trying). The Arbeiter-Zeitung caught the mood perfectly. ‘If there was an elegiac note in watching the decline of the ideal the Scots represented for us, even yesterday, it was all the more refreshing to witness a triumph that sprang from true artistry,’ it wrote. ‘Eleven footballers, eleven professionals - certainly, there are more important sides to life, yet this was ultimately a tribute to Viennese aesthetic sense, imagination and passion.’