Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Page 9
Back then, the great centre-forward Giuseppe Meazza, who had made his debut in 1930, was regularly compared to a bull-fighter, while a popular song of the time claimed ‘he scored to the rhythm of the foxtrot’. That sense of fun and élan, though, was soon to fade. Meazza remained a stylish forward, and there was no doubting the quality of the likes of Silvio Piola, Raimundo Orsi and Gino Colaussi, but physicality and combativeness became increasingly central. ‘In the tenth year of the fascist era,’ an editorial in Lo Stadia noted in 1932, ‘the youth are toughened for battle, and for the fight, and more for the game itself; courage, determination, gladiatorial pride, chosen sentiments of our race, cannot be excluded.’
Pozzo was also one of the earliest exponents of man-marking, a sign that football had become not merely about a side playing its own game, but about stopping the opposition playing theirs. In a friendly against Spain in Bilbao in 1931, for instance, he had Renato Cesarini mark Ignacío Aguirrezabala on the logic that ‘if I succeeded in cutting off the head with which the eleven adversaries thought, the whole system would collapse’.
That raised concerns among the purists, but it was at the 1934 World Cup that questions really began to be asked about the ethics of Pozzo’s Italy. Having drawn 1-1 with England - who were still persisting in their policy of isolation - a year earlier, Italy, playing at home, were always going to be among the favourites, particularly given the sense that the Wunderteam was past its peak. For once Meisl’s pessimism seemed justified as he complained of the absence of Hiden, his goalkeeper, and of players exhausted by foreign tours with their club sides, although he also claimed, apparently accepting the English criticism that his side lacked punch, that if he could have borrowed the Arsenal centre-forward Cliff Bastin, they could have walked to victory.
Italy and Austria, Pozzo and Meisl, met in the semi-final, but by then the tournament had already begun to slink into disrepute. Austria were far from innocent, having been involved in a brawl in their quarter-final victory over Hungary, but it was the 1-1 draw between Italy and Spain at the same stage that marked the descent of the tournament into violence. Monti, for all his ability, was quite prepared to indulge in the darker arts, while Ricardo Zamora, the Spain goalkeeper, was battered so frequently that he was unable to play in the replay the following day. Sources vary on whether three or four Spaniards were forced to leave the field through injury, but whichever, Spain were left feeling aggrieved as a diving header from Meazza gave Italy a 1-0 win.
The anticipated clash of styles in the semi-final was a damp squib. Sindelar was marked out of the game by Monti, Austria failed to have shot in the first forty minutes, and Italy won by a single goal, Meazza bundling into Hiden’s replacement, Peter Platzer, and Enrique Guaita, another of the oriundi, forcing the loose ball over the line. It was left to Czechoslovakia, who had beaten Germany in the other semi, to defend the honour of the Danubian School. At times they threatened to embarrass Italy, and took a seventy-sixth minute lead through Antonín Puc. Frantisek Svoboda hit a post and Jirí Sobotka missed another fine chance but, with eight minutes remaining, Orsi equalised with a drive that swerved freakishly past Frantisek Plánicka. Seven minutes into extra-time, a limping Meazza crossed from the right, Guaita helped it on and Angelo Schiavio, who later spoke of having been driven by ‘the strength of desperation’, beat Josef Ctyroky to fire in the winner. Mussolini’s Italy had the victory it so desired, but elsewhere the strength of that desire and the methods to which they were prepared to stoop to achieve it left a sour taste. ‘In the majority of countries the world championship was called a sporting fiasco,’ the Belgian referee John Langenus said, ‘because beside the will to win all sporting considerations were non-existent and because, moreover, a certain spirit brooded over the whole championship.’
A meeting with England that November - the so-called ‘Battle of Highbury’ - only confirmed the impression, as Italy reacted badly after Monti broke a bone in his foot in a second-minute challenge with Ted Drake. ‘For the first quarter of an hour there might just as well not have been a ball on the pitch as far as the Italians were concerned,’ said Stanley Matthews. ‘They were like men possessed, kicking anything and everything that moved.’ England capitalised on their indiscipline to take a 3-0 lead, but after Pozzo had calmed his side at half-time, they played stirringly to come back to 3-2 in the second half.
Italy 1 Austria 0, World Cup semi-final, San Siro, Milan, 3 June 1934
Beneath the aggression and the cynicism, Italy were unquestionably talented, and they retained the World Cup in 1938 with what Pozzo believed was his best side. Again, the focus was on defensive solidity. ‘The big secret of the Italian squad is its capacity to attack with the fewest amount of men possible, without ever distracting the half-backs from their defensive work,’ Zappa wrote. Austria had been subsumed by Germany by then, but a team formed by the two semi-finalists of the previous competition fared poorly, and lost after a replay to Karl Rappan’s Switzerland in the first round. Czechoslovakia went out to Brazil in the last eight, but Hungary progressed to the final for the last showdown between the Danubian School and Pozzo. Italy proved too quick and too athletic and, with Michele Andreolo, another oriundo who had replaced Monti as the centro mediano, keeping a check on György Sárosi, the Hungarian centre-forward, Meisl’s conception of the game was made to look sluggish and old-fashioned. It did not pass without lament - ‘How shall we play the game?’ the French journalist Jean Eskenazi asked. ‘As though we are making love or catching a bus?’ - but pass it did.
As Sindelar reached the end of his career and with Meisl ageing, the Danubian style of football may have faded away anyway, but political developments made sure of it. With the Anschluss came the end of the central European Jewish intelligentsia, the end of the spirit of the coffee house and the death of Sindelar. As the thirties went on, the great centre-forward had increasingly withdrawn from the national team, but he allowed himself to be picked for what was dubbed a ‘Reconciliation Game’ between an Ostmark XI and an all-German line-up on 3 April 1938.
Football in Germany was not so advanced as in Austria, but it was improving. Otto Nerz, first national coach, who was appointed on 1 July 1926, was an early advocate of the W-M, but something of Hogan’s teaching lived on through Schalke 04, who reached nine of the ten championship playoff finals between 1933 and 1942, winning six. Their coach, Gustav Wieser, was an Austrian, and under him they practised a version of the whirl that became known as ‘der Kreisel’ - the spinning-top. According to the defender Hans Bornemann, it was not the man with the ball, but those out of possession running into space who determined the direction of their attacks. ‘It was only when there was absolutely nobody left you could pass the ball to that we finally put it into the net,’ he said. Hogan may have admired their style, but he would have questioned their ethos.
Such excess troubled Nerz, and he refused to pick both Schalke’s feted inside-forwards, Ernst Kuzorra and Fritz Szepan, for the national team. (He did, in fact, call up Szepan for the 1934 World Cup, but bafflingly played him at centre-half.) ‘Nerz,’ Kuzorra explained, ‘said to me: “Let me tell you something: your odds and ends football at Schalke, all that passing around, doesn’t impress me one bit. If you and Szepan play together it’ll just be fiddling and dribbling around.”’
Germany were semi-finalists in Italy in 1934, which encouraged thoughts that they might win gold on home soil at the 1936 Olympics. Instead they lost, humiliatingly, 2-0 to Norway in what, unfortunately for Nerz, was the only football match Hitler ever attended.
Sepp Herberger, an assistant to Nerz and the man who would lead West Germany to victory at the 1954 World Cup, was not at the game, having gone to watch Italy play Japan in another quarter-final. He was eating a dinner of knuckle of pork and sauerkraut at the team camp when another coach brought him news of Germany’s defeat. Herberger pushed his plate away and never touched knuckle of pork again. He succeeded Nerz after the tournament, and immediately switched to a more Danubia
n model, bringing in Adolf Urban and Rudi Gellesch from Schalke and deploying the elegant, hard-drinking Mannheim inside-forward Otto Siffling as a central striker. The result was a team of greater flexibility that reached its peak on 16 May 1937 with an 8-0 friendly victory over Denmark in Breslau (what is ow Wroclaw). ‘The robot style people like to pin on Germany sank into the realm of legend,’ the journalist Gerd Krämer wrote. ‘Artistic football triumphed.’
Still, they were neither as talented nor as artistic as the Austrians, and the Ostmark dominated the reconciliation game. Fact has become rather obscured by subsequent myths, but what is clear is that Sindelar missed a series of chances in the first half. Given how frequently he rolled the ball a fraction wide of the posts, even contemporary reports wondered whether he had been mocking the Germans - and supposed orders not to score - by missing on purpose. Eventually, midway through the second half, he knocked in a rebound, and when his friend Schasti Sesta looped a second from a free-kick, he celebrated by dancing in front of a directors’ box packed with high-ranking Nazis.
In the months that followed, Sindelar, who never made any secret of his Social Democratic leanings, repeatedly refused to play for Sepp Herberger’s united German team. In the August he bought a café from Leopold Drill, a Jew forced to give it up under new legislation - paying DM20,000, which was either a very fair price or disgracefully opportunistic, depending which account you choose to believe - and was censured by the authorities for his reluctance to put up Nazi posters. To claim he was a dissident, though, as some have done, is to take things too far.
On the morning of 23 January 1939, his friend Gustav Hartmann, looking for Sindelar, broke down the door of a flat on Annagasse. He found him, naked and dead, lying alongside the unconscious form of his girlfriend of ten days, Camilla Castignola. She died later in hospital, the victim, like Sindelar, of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a faulty heater.
Or at least that was what the police said, as they ended their enquiries after two days. The public prosecutor, though, had still not reached a conclusion six months later when the Nazi authorities ordered the case be closed. In a 2003 BBC documentary, Egon Ulbrich, a friend of Sindelar, claimed a local official was bribed to record his death as an accident, which ensured that he would receive a state funeral. Others came up with their own explanations. On 25 January, a piece in the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung claimed that ‘everything points towards this great man having become the victim of murder through poisoning’. In his ‘Ballad on the Death of a Footballer’, Torberg suggested suicide by a man who felt ‘disowned’ by ‘the new order’. There were later suggestions that Sindelar or Castignola or both were Jewish. It is true that Sindelar played for Austria Vienna, the club of the Jewish bourgeoisie, and had been born in Moravia, from where many Jews had emigrated to the capital, but his family was Catholic. It is just about conceivable that Castignola, an Italian, may have had Jewish origins, but they were well-enough hidden that she had been allowed to become co-owner of a bar in the week before her death. Most tellingly, neighbours had complained a few days earlier that one of the chimneys in the block was defective.
The available evidence suggests Sindelar’s death was an accident, and yet the sense that heroes cannot mundanely die prevailed. What, after all, at least to a romantic liberal mind, could better symbolise Austria at the point of the Anschluss than this athlete-artist, the darling of Viennese society, being gassed alongside his Jewish girlfriend? ‘The good Sindelar followed the city, whose child and pride he was, to its death,’ Polgar wrote in his obituary. ‘He was so inextricably entwined with it that he had to die when it did. All the evidence points to suicide prompted by loyalty to his homeland. For to live and play football in the downtrodden, broken, tormented city meant deceiving Vienna with a repulsive spectre of itself… But how can one play football like that? And live, when a life without football is nothing?’
To its end, the football of the coffee house remained heroically romantic.
Chapter Five
Organised Disorder
∆∇ The football boom came late to the USSR and, perhaps because of that, it rapidly took on a radical aspect, uninhibited by historically rooted notions of the ‘right’ way of doing things. British sailors had played the game by the docks in Odessa as early as the 1860s, a description in The Hunter magazine giving some idea of the chaos and physicality of the game. ‘It is played by people with solid muscles and strong legs - a weak one would only be an onlooker in such a mess,’ their reporter wrote, apparently both bemused and disapproving.
It was only in the 1890s that the sport began to be properly organised. In Russia, as in so many other places, the British had a decisive role, first in St Petersburg, and later in Moscow, where Harry Charnock, general manager of the Morozov Mills, established the club that would become Dinamo Moscow in an attempt to persuade his workers to spend their Saturdays doing something other than drinking vodka. When Soviet myth-making was at its height, it was said that the Dinamo sports club, which was controlled by the Ministry of the Interior and ran teams across the USSR, chose blue and white as their colours to represent water and air, the two elements without which man could not live. The truth is rather that Charnock was from Blackburn, and dressed his team in the same colours as the team he supported: Blackburn Rovers.
Further west, the influence was naturally more central European. Lviv was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when, in 1894, it hosted the first football match played on what is now Ukrainian soil, a brief exhibition during a demonstration of sports by the Sokol Sports Club.
By the time a national league was established in 1936, the British were long gone (the expatriate dominance of Soviet football ended in 1908 when Sport, a Russian team, won the Aspeden Cup, the local St Petersburg competition), but the early 2-3-5 lingered as the default. The modification of the offside law in 1925 seems to have made little difference tactically and, with the USSR’s isolation from Fifa restricting meetings with foreign opposition largely to games against amateur sides, there was little to expose how far the Soviets were falling behind.
Jimmy Hogan, the father of central European football, demonstrating heading technique to the RAF in France, 1940
Vittorio Pozzo looks on nervously as Italy beat Czechoslovakia in the 1934 World Cup final
Herbert Chapman, the inventor of the W-M (all pics © Getty Images)
Boris Arkadiev outlines his theory of organised disorder to his CDKA players (Pavel Eriklinstev)
Matthias Sindelar, the withdrawn centre-forward, whose genius lay at the heart of the Austrian Wunderteam
Sándor Kocsis beats Gil Merrick to the ball in Hungary’s 6-3 victory over England at Wembley in 1953 (both pics © PA Photos)
Alicide Gigghia beats Moacyr Barbosa at his near post, to win the 1950 World Cup for Uruguay (PA Photos)
Jules Rimet hands over the trophy to Uruguay’s captain, Obdulio Varela (Getty Images)
Three men who brought tactics to Brazil: Martim Francisco (top), Gentil Cardoso (bottom left) and Fleitas Solich (bottom right) (all pics © Arquiro/Agência O Globo)
Béla Guttmann, the wandering Hungarian, during his time as coach of Benfica (PA Photos)
Vicente Feola, the Brazil coach who introduced 4-2-4 to the world (Getty Images)
Garrincha, the winger whose anarchic style flourished in the 4-2-4 (Getty Images)
Stan Cullis devises another tactical masterplan for Wolves (Getty Images)
Viktor Maslov talks his Torpedo players through his latest stratagem (Pavel Eriklinstev)
All that changed in 1937. The coming of the national league perhaps would have led to more sophisticated analysis of the game anyway, but the trigger for development was the arrival of a Basque side on the first leg of a world tour aimed at raising awareness of the Basque cause during the Spanish Civil War.
Because of their rarity, matches against foreign sides were always eagerly anticipated, all the more so in 1937 after the release the year before of
Vratar (The Keeper), Semyon Timoshenko’s hugely popular musical-comedy about a young working-class boy - played by the matinee idol Grigori Pluzhnik - selected for a local side to play against a touring team having been spotted catching a watermelon as it fell from a cart. Predictably, if ridiculously, after making a series of fine saves, the hero runs the length of the field in the final minute to score the winner. The film’s most famous song rams home the obvious political allegory: ‘Hey, keeper, prepare for the fight/ You are a sentry in the goal./ Imagine there is a border behind you.’
The real-life tourists, though, featuring six of the Spain squad from the 1934 World Cup, were no patsies for Soviet propaganda and, employing a W-M formation, hammered Lokomotiv 5-1 in their first game. Dinamo were then beaten 2-1 and, after a 2-2 draw against a Leningrad XI, the Basques returned to Moscow to beat the Dinamo Central Council’s Select XI 7-4. Their final game in Russia saw them face Spartak, the reigning champions. Determined to end the embarrassment, the head of Spartak’s coaching council, Nikolai Starostin, called up a number of players from other clubs, including the Dynamo Kyiv forwards Viktor Shylovskyi and Konstantyn Shchehotskyi, who had starred in a Kyiv Select XI’s 6-1 victory over Red Star Olympic - a rare game against professionals - on a tour of Paris in 1935.
Starostin decided to match the Basques shape-for-shape, converting his centre-half into a third back to try to restrict the influence of Isodro Langara, the Basque centre-forward. As Starostin records in his book Beginnings of Top-level Football, the move was far from popular, with the most vocal opponent being the centre-half, his brother Andrei. ‘“Do you want me to be famous across the whole Soviet Union?” he asked. “You are denying me room to breathe! Who will help the attack? You are destroying the tactic that has been played out for years…”’