Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Page 8

  For the Wunderteam, that was just the beginning. Playing a traditional 2-3-5 with an elegant attacking centre-half in Josef Smistik - but with an unorthodox centre-forward who encouraged such fluidity that their system became known as ‘the Danubian Whirl’ - Austria won nine and drew two of their next eleven games, scoring forty-four goals and winning the second edition of the Dr Gerö Cup in the process. The coffee houses were jubilant: their way of doing things had prevailed, largely because of Sindelar, a player who was, to their self-romanticising eye, the coffee house made flesh. ‘He would play football as a grandmaster plays chess: with a broad mental conception, calculating moves and countermoves in advance, always choosing the most promising of all possibilities,’ the theatre critic Alfred Polgar wrote in his obituary in the Pariser Tageszeitung, an article remarkable for how many fundamental themes it drew together.

  There was the analogy to chess Galeano had used to describe the Uruguayans of the twenties and, later still, Anatoliy Zelentsov would apply to Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv. The influence of Hogan and his obsession with the instant control of the ball was apparent, as Polgar went on: ‘He was an unequalled trapper of a ball, and a stager of surprise counter-attacks, inexhaustibly devising tactical feints which were followed by the true attacking move that his deception had made irresistible, the opponents having been cunningly fooled by a flash of skill.’

  And, then, perhaps most strikingly, he pre-empts the thinking of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould on ‘the universality of excellence’. ‘I don’t deny the differences in style and substance between athletic and conventional scholarly performance,’ Gould wrote, ‘but we surely err in regarding sports as a domain of brutish intuition… The greatest athletes cannot succeed by bodily gifts alone… One of the most intriguing, and undeniable, properties of great athletic performance lies in the impossibility of regulating certain central skills by overt mental deliberation: the required action simply doesn’t grant sufficient time for the sequential processing of conscious decisions.’ ‘In a way he had brains in his legs,’ Polgar said of Sindelar, ‘and many remarkable and unexpected things occurred to them while they were running. Sindelar’s shot hit the back of the net like the perfect punch-line, the ending that made it possible to understand and appreciate the perfect composition of the story, the crowning of which it represented.’

  And then, in December 1932, came the Wunderteam’s greatest test: England. They were not the best side in the world, far from it, but the world respected them for their influence over the development of the game and, at home, they remained unbeaten against foreign opposition. Spain had exposed England’s vulnerability by beating them in Madrid in 1929, but two years later they felt the full force of the backlash, being hammered 7-1 at Highbury. Buoyed by the victory over Scotland, many in Austria were exuberantly hopeful, but Meisl, who always tended to pessimism, was concerned, and turned to his old friend and mentor, Jimmy Hogan.

  Disenchanted with England, Hogan had moved to Switzerland in 1921, spending three years with Young Boys of Berne and then Lausanne, before returning to Budapest with MTK, in their new guise as FC Hungária. He then moved to Germany, working as an advisor to the football federation, coaching SC Dresden - where one of his pupils was Helmut Schön, who was assistant to Sepp Herberger when West Germany won the World Cup in 1954, and led them to victory himself in 1974 - and generally evangelising for a technically adept style of football that would ensure English football was soon overhauled by Europe.

  He was initially greeted with suspicion and, when various local coaches complained about his lack of fluency in German, the German FA asked Hogan to prove himself by delivering a lecture without a translator. It began badly, as Hogan inadvertently presented himself as ‘a professor of languages, not a master of football’, and got steadily worse. Attempting to stress the importance of the mind in football, he told his bemused audience that it was a game not merely of the body, but also of the committee. Faced with laughter and derision, Hogan called for a ten-minute intermission and left the stage. When he returned, he was wearing his Bolton Wanderers kit. He removed his boots and his socks and, telling his audience that three-quarters of German players could not kick the ball properly, smashed a right-footed shot barefoot into a wooden panel 15 yards away. As the ball bounced back to him he noted the value of being two-footed and let fly with another shot, this time with his left foot. This time the panel split in two. His point proved, Hogan undertook a lecture tour, in one month alone speaking to 5,000 footballers in the Dresden area. When he died in 1974, the then secretary of the German Football Federation (DFB), Hans Passlack, wrote to Hogan’s son, Frank, saying that Hogan was the founder of ‘modern football’ in Germany.

  Uneasy about the political situation, Hogan left Germany for Paris, sewing his savings into the seams of his plus-fours to avoid restrictions on the export of currency, but he struggled to maintain discipline there among a team of stars and returned to Lausanne, where he never came to terms with a chairman who believed that players should be fined for missing chances. When Meisl came calling, he was desperate for a challenge.

  Austria, it must be said, seem to have been in need of him, or at least in need of some outside confirmation of their talents. A fortnight before the game in London, with Sindelar unwell and playing far below his best, Austria had struggled to beat a scratch Vienna side 2-1. Nerves, evidently, were an issue, while there were fitness concerns over Adolf Vogl and Friedrich Gschweidl. Nonetheless, Austria was agog. Crowds gathered in the Heldenplatz to listen to commentary relayed over three loudspeakers, while the Parliamentary Finance Committee adjourned a sitting to listen to the game.

  The Wunderteam did not begin well, and within twenty-six minutes England were two up, both goals coming from the Blackpool forward Jimmy Hampson. Austria pulled one back six minutes into the second half, Sindelar and Anton Schall combining to set up Karl Zischek. Walter Nausch hit a post amid a welter of pressure, but then, as England rallied, an Eric Houghton free-kick deflected off the ducking Schall and past Rudi Hiden in the Austria goal. Sindelar, with consummate control and a cool finish made it 3-2, but almost as soon as he had done so a long-range effort from Sam Crooks put England back in charge. With England baffled by their opponents’ habit of dropping behind the ball when out of possession, Austria continued to dominate, spinning their webs of passes, but their lack of thrust was to cost them. Zischek bundled in a corner with five minutes remaining, but it was too late. They lost 4-3, but their performance captured the imagination. ‘A revelation,’ said the Daily Mail, while The Times awarded Austria the ‘moral victory’ and rhapsodised about their ‘passing skills’.

  Two years later, what was essentially the Austria national team played Arsenal at Highbury, although they were presented as a Vienna XI, matches between club and national sides being frowned upon by Fifa at the time. They lost 4-2, prompting Roland Allen to write in the Evening Standard that, ‘It looks fine, it is fine: when the Austrians have learned how to turn all their cleverness into something that counts: when … they have organised the winning of football matches as highly as they have organised the taming of a football, they will make [everyone] sit up and take notice.’ The writing was on the wall, but nobody in England was minded to read it.

  Instead the two games were taken as confirmation of the cliché that continental European teams lack punch in the final third. Applied to the Austrians, there was a certain truth to it, but the wider point about ball retention was obscured, a situation that wasn’t helped by Meisl’s habit of talking in idealistic terms. ‘To us Middle Europeans,’ he said, ‘the attacking play of the British professional, seen from an aesthetic point of view, seems rather poor. Such play consists of assigning the job of scoring goals to the centre-forward and the wings, while to the inside-forwards is allotted the task of linking attackers and defenders, and more as half-backs than as attacking players… The centre-forward, who, among us in Europe, is the leading figure, because of his technic
al excellence and tactical intelligence, in England limits his activity to exploiting the errors of the opposing defence.’

  He did, though, laud the pace at which the British played the game, saying it had left his own players ‘confused and disoriented’: ‘Although their passing, swift and high, is rather lacking in precision, the English players compensate for this by the rare potency and great rapidity of their attacks.’ The familiar battle-lines were drawn: England, physical, quick and tough; the continent, technical, patient and probably lacking in moral fibre.

  Austria finally enjoyed the victory over England Meisl so craved in Vienna in May 1936. When he presented his team to Hogan, the Englishman questioned the stamina of the inside-forwards, to which Meisl replied that he expected to take a decisive lead in the first twenty minutes, and spend the rest of the game defending it. He was right. Sindelar repeatedly dragged the centre-half John Barker out of position - foreshadowing Harry Johnston’s travails against Hungary’s Nándor Hidegkuti seventeen years later - and England soon found themselves two down. George Camsell pulled one back early in the second half but, for all Meisl’s bowler-hatted nervousness on the touchline, Austria’s superiority was obvious. ‘We didn’t know whether we were coming or going,’ Jack Crayston admitted. ‘And it was disgustingly hot.’ When the heat makes manic charging unsustainable and prioritises possession, British teams have never prospered.

  By then, though, the Wunderteam was in decline, and the Austrians had ceded their European supremacy to Italy. In terms of formation, the Italians - almost inadvertently - took up a middle ground between the English W-M and the 2-3-5 of the Danubians, but what set them apart was their ethos. ‘Technically less brilliant than its European rival,’ Glanville wrote, Italian football ‘compensated … by its greater forcefulness and the excellent physical condition of its players’. A belief in the primacy of athleticism was perhaps natural under fascism, but it corresponded too to the inclinations of Vittorio Pozzo, the bushy-haired visionary who became the presiding genius of inter-war Italian football.

  Born near Turin in 1886, Pozzo had shown great promise as a runner, winning the 400m at the Piedmont Student Games, but was converted to football after a friend of his, Giovanni Goccione, who would go on to play at centre-half for Juventus, mocked him for ‘running like a motor car’ and suggested he should try running with ‘a ball in front of him’. No great player, Pozzo remained in academia, studying at the International School of Commerce in Zurich, where he learnt English, French and German, and then in London. Tiring of the ex-pat community in the capital, he moved north to Bradford, where his father’s influence found him a post studying the manufacture of wool. England, and football, suddenly gripped him. So determined did he become to understand his new home that, although a Catholic, he began to attend Anglican services. His weeks soon fell into the English routine: church on Sunday, work for five days, football on Saturday. His parents recalled him to help with his brother’s engineering firm, but he refused. His father cut off his allowance, but still he stayed, making ends meet by teaching languages.

  Manchester United became Pozzo’s favourite team, largely because of the style of their fabled half-back line of Dick Duckworth, Charlie Roberts and Alec Bell. He took to hanging around by the players’ exit at Old Trafford after matches and, one week, having finally plucked up the courage, he approached Roberts, told him what an admirer he was and said how much he would appreciate the opportunity to talk with him about the game. It was the start of a lengthy friendship, from which grew the style Pozzo would have his Italy side play twenty years later. He abhorred the third-back game, and demanded his centre-half, like Roberts, be capable of sweeping long passes out to the wings. It was a belief he held fundamental and led, for instance, to his decision, having been reappointed comisario tecnico in 1924, immediately to drop Fulvio Bernadini, an idol of the Roman crowds, because he was a ‘carrier’ rather than a ‘dispatcher’.

  Pozzo finally went back to Italy to attend the marriage of his sister, after which his family prevented him from returning to England. He soon found a position as secretary of the Italian Football Federation, and was asked to take the national team to Sweden for the 1912 Olympics, becoming comisario tecnico for the first time. Having lost narrowly to Finland and then beaten Sweden, Italy were hammered 5-1 by Austria. The defeat was disappointing, if not unexpected, but was significant in precipitating a first meeting between Pozzo and Meisl. They became friends, and would be rivals for the rest of their lives.

  Pozzo stood down after a 3-1 defeat to Austria the following December and resumed his travels. He served as a major in the Alpine Regiment during the First World War, and was made comisario tecnico for the second time following a 4-0 defeat to Austria shortly before the 1924 Olympics. They showed promise in Paris, beating Spain and Luxembourg before a narrow defeat to Switzerland, but Pozzo’s wife died soon after, and he resigned again. For five years he served as a director of Pirelli, spending his spare time walking with his Alsatian in the mountains. Then, in 1929, the Italian Federation came calling again. He served for twenty years, turning Italy into the best side in Europe and probably the world.

  When Pozzo had taken the job the first time, he had found a bloated league of sixty-four clubs, several of whom disestablished from the federation when he tried to form a more streamlined first division. By the time of his third coming, there was a professional league and the fascist government, having recognised the utility of sport as a propaganda tool, was eagerly investing in stadiums and infrastructure. ‘Whether beyond or within the borders, sporting or not, we Italians … shook and still shake with joy when seeing in these thoroughbred athletes, that overwhelm so many noble opponents, such a symbol of the overwhelming march of Mussolini’s Italians,’ as Londo Ferretti, Mussolini’s press officer, put it in Lo Sport Fascista after Italy’s 1938 World Cup triumph.

  The level to which Pozzo bought into fascist ideology remains unclear. His associations with Mussolini led to him being shunned in the fifties and sixties and meant that the Stadio delle Alpi, the stadium built just outside Turin for the 1990 World Cup, was not named after him, but later in the nineties evidence emerged to suggest he had worked with the anti-fascist resistance, taking food to partisans around Biella and helping the escape of Allied prisoners of war.

  What is certainly true is that he made full use of the prevailing militarism to dominate and motivate his side. ‘More than one selector leads to compromise,’ he said, ‘and no great football team was ever built on that.’ He was an astute man-manager, developing a stern, paternalistic style to deal with players often idolised by fans of their clubs. He would, for instance, referee all practice games played in training, and if he felt a player had refused to pass to a team-mate because of some private grudge, he would send him off. If he picked two players who were known not to get on, he would force them to room together. It was his nationalism, though, that was most controversial. On the way to Budapest for a friendly against Hungary that Italy won 5-0, to take just one example, he made his players visit the First World War battlefields of Oslavia and Gorizia, stopping at the monumental cemetery at Redupiglia. ‘I told them it was good that the sad and terrible spectacle might have struck them: that whatever would be asked of us on that occasion was nothing compared with those that had lost their lives on those surrounding hills,’ he wrote in his autobiography. At other times, he would march at the head of his players singing ‘Il Piave’.

  For all that, Pozzo was Anglophile enough to hark back to a golden age of fair play, fretting about the deleterious effects of the win-bonuses that soon became a feature of the national league. ‘It is win at all costs,’ he said. ‘It is the bitter grudge against the adversary, it is the preoccupation of the result to the ends of the league table.’ He inclined, similarly, to a classical 2-3-5, but he lacked a centre-half of sufficient mobility and creativity to play the formation well. Pozzo turned instead to Luisito Monti, who had played for Argentina in the 1930 World Cup. He joined
Juventus in 1931, and became one of the oriundi, the South American players who, thanks to Italian heritage, qualified to play for their adopted country. Already thirty when he signed, Monti was overweight and, even after a month of solitary training, was not quick. He was, though, fit, and became known as ‘Doble ancho’ (‘Double-wide’) for his capacity to cover the ground. Pozzo, perhaps influenced by a formation that had already come into being at Juventus, used him as a centro mediano, a halfway house - not quite Charlie Roberts, but certainly not Herbie Roberts either. He would drop when the other team had possession and mark the opposing centre-forward, but would advance and become an attacking fulcrum when his side had the ball. Although he was not a third back - Glanville, in fact, says it was only in 1939 with an article Bernardini wrote after Pozzo’s side had drawn 2-2 against England in Milan that the full implications of the W-M (the sistema, as Pozzo called it, as opposed to the traditional metodo) were fully appreciated in Italy - he played deeper than a traditional centre-half, and so the two inside-forwards retreated to support the wing-halves. The shape was thus a 2-3-2-3, a W-W. At the time it seemed, as the journalist Mario Zappa put it in La Gazzetta della Sport, ‘a model of play that is the synthesis of the best elements of all the most admired systems.’

  Shape is one thing, style is another, and Pozzo, despite his qualms, was fundamentally pragmatic. That he had a technically accomplished side is not in doubt, as they proved, before Monti had been called into the side, in a 3-0 victory over Scotland in 1931. ‘The men are fast,’ the Corriere della Sera reported of the hapless tourists, ‘athletically well prepared, and seem sure enough in kicking and heading, but in classic play along the ground, they look like novices.’ That would be stern enough criticism for any side, but for players brought up in the finest pattern-weaving traditions, it is damning.