The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines

by Michael Cox

  Kinkladze’s other superb strike, later voted March’s goal of the month, came at Southampton. Having already scored the first with a close-range tap-in, and hit the crossbar from outside the box, Kinkladze collected the ball on the right, dribbled directly towards goal while evading four increasingly desperate challenges, dummied to put goalkeeper Dave Beasant on the ground, then lifted the ball over Beasant’s head and into the net. ‘It was the closest thing I have seen to Maradona’s goal against England!’ Ball raved, before somewhat unnecessarily clarifying: ‘Not the one with his hand, the one where he did everyone and put it away. People ask why we are bringing this type of player to this country. If that wasn’t the answer today, nothing is.’

  City supporters were already tired of United’s dominance and Cantona’s cult-like status, and they absolutely worshipped Kinkladze – the best Georgi in Manchester since Best. The love was reciprocated; after his initial alienation in Manchester, Kinkladze grew to love the city and married a Mancunian. ‘If he’d been playing with a successful team,’ said striker Niall Quinn at the time, ‘then he would have won Player’s Player of the Year because it’s quite breathtaking what he’s done in English football. He’s a lovely guy as well – I think, because he doesn’t speak a word of English – but he seems nice.’

  This was at the height of Britpop, and Kinkladze was rewarded for his fine form with a chant to the tune of Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’. ‘All the runs that Kinky makes are blinding,’ it ran, before ending with a brilliant: ‘And after all … we’ve got Alan Ball.’ The composer of the original song, City fan Noel Gallagher, also offered a wonderful Kinkladze summary. Describing him as ‘either the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen or the best thing I’ve ever seen’, Gallagher predicted Kinkladze would either lead City to the European Cup, or take them down to the Fourth Division. He was nearly right; when Kinkladze left City in 1998, they were in the third tier.

  City were relegated because Ball built the entire team around Kinkladze, as winger Nicky Summerbee outlined. ‘Bally loved him. Georgi could do no wrong – I got on very well with him and we weren’t jealous because we could all see how talented he was, but some hated Alan Ball for doing that – except Georgi, because he loved all the praise … the problem with Georgi was that you couldn’t play 4–4–2 because to get the best out of him you wouldn’t want him playing a conventional running midfield game, and if there are two men wide, that leaves only one in midfield. Ball changed formation all the time, a sure sign he didn’t know what he was doing.’

  Keith Curle, then City’s captain, later recalled the extent of the free role Ball afforded Kinkladze. ‘I remember losing away to Arsenal that season and one of the goals we conceded came because Georgi hadn’t tracked a runner. The lads were not happy and some said as much to the manager after the game. In reply, he told them that if they were as talented as Georgi, they wouldn’t have to track back either.’

  After City’s relegation, Ball lasted just three games before he was replaced by Frank Clark, who tried a similar approach. ‘I wanted to build the team around Kinkladze because that’s the ideal way to get the best out of him. He’s an incredible talent … [but] he certainly didn’t like running if he didn’t have the ball at his feet and I thought there was a certain amount of resentment towards him from some of the squad.’ Like Ball, Clark ended up changing formation to change Kinkladze’s role. He initially played a 4–4–2 with the Georgian as a deep-lying forward, then switched to 4–3–1–2, fielding him behind a strike duo. ‘We tied ourselves up in knots trying to accommodate Kinkladze,’ Clark continued. ‘The [4–3–1–2] system suited Kinkladze perfectly because it gave him great freedom, but it didn’t suit the other players and it didn’t work.’ Incidentally, Kinkladze switched to number 10 after City’s relegation, having previously worn number 7.

  Clarke was replaced by Joe Royle, less of a footballing romantic, whose first words to the board about footballing matters were simple: ‘We have to sell Kinkladze.’ He would no longer be indulged. ‘Kinkladze was not a team player, and had a disturbing habit of disappearing for long periods during games,’ Royle said. ‘To the supporters he was the only positive in all that time. To me he was a big negative.’ The Georgian was sold to European giants Ajax, a club who love technical players but play 4–3–3, so manager Jan Wouters had no space for a number 10. ‘I could have been Maradona and he wouldn’t have changed the system to accommodate me,’ he complained. By this point, managers had tired of basing the side around Kinkladze, who needed a manager like Ball.

  Chiefly remembered for his high-pitched voice, his red hair, his flat cap and for being the standout player in the 1966 World Cup Final, Ball was also the first footballer in England to wear white boots – the ultimate sign of a flair player – and clearly wanted like-minded footballers in his sides. Before Kinkladze, Ball had also adored England’s truest number 10 during this period, Southampton’s Matt Le Tissier.

  Avoiding the hatred that comes with playing for a title challenger, Le Tissier was the most popular player in the country and a regular winner of Goal of the Month competitions. He scored a wide variety of incredible strikes: there was a chip-up-and-volley from a free-kick against Wimbledon and a legendary strike against Newcastle that involved backheeling the ball over his own head, before flicking the ball over two defenders in a row and volleying in. He lobbed Blackburn’s Tim Flowers from 35 yards and chipped Manchester United’s Peter Schmeichel from 25. He had enough natural ability to be an England regular but, fittingly for a man born in Guernsey, was distinctly un-English. His name added to the foreign feel, and in his younger days his father was contacted by France assistant manager Gérard Houllier, a keen fan of players in Cantona’s mould, who unsuccessfully enquired whether Le Tissier had any French relatives.

  Ball declared his love for Le Tissier immediately upon arrival at Southampton, with the south-coast club languishing in the relegation zone. In their first training session Ball and assistant manager Lawrie McMenemy pulled ten players onto the training pitch and assembled them in a defensive shape, leaving Le Tissier wondering if he’d be omitted, as had often happened under previous coach Ian Branfoot. Instead, Ball then dragged Le Tissier into the centre of the group and announced to the other ten players, ‘This is the best player you’ve got on your team. Get the ball to him as often as you can, and he’ll win games for you.’ Le Tissier, a humble man, felt slightly uncomfortable being elevated to this status, but it provided an enormous confidence boost and he scored six goals in his first four appearances under Ball.

  Just as Ferguson made allowances off the pitch for Cantona, Le Tissier’s free role extended to socialising. On a rest day midway through a pre-season trip to Northern Ireland, Southampton’s squad had planned a round of golf, but Ball suggested they went to a local pub instead. This was a bad move. After Ball retired to the hotel it turned into an all-day drinking session, capped by the players venturing out to a nightclub. They arrived back at 2 am, blind drunk, with training the following morning. Ball was furious, screaming at Beasant, Iain Dowie and Jim Magilton before sending them to bed. He then took Le Tissier aside and told him, ‘Look, our senior players are setting a bad example … but the way you’re playing, you can do what you like!’ Le Tissier, incidentally, was routinely mocked by teammates for his drinking habits. He didn’t drink beer, preferring Malibu and Coke, although this wasn’t because of a revolutionary, forward-thinking diet – he admits consuming sausage and egg McMuffins ahead of training sessions, and fish and chips the evening before a game. Le Tissier wasn’t the fittest or the hardest-working, and recalls an incident later in his career when then-Southampton manager Gordon Strachan shouted from the technical area to a particularly languid Le Tissier, walking back from an attacking move, ‘Matt! Get yourself warmed up, I’m bringing you off!’

  ‘Those 18 months Ball was there were the best of my career,’ Le Tissier recalled. ‘Ball built the team around me, instead of trying to fit me into the team.’ Desp
ite playing as an attacking midfielder rather than a forward, Le Tissier hit 45 goals in 64 games in all competitions under Ball, many of them spectacular. Southampton avoided relegation at the end of Ball’s first season, and finished in the top half in his second.

  Unfortunately, England managers didn’t share Ball’s enthusiasm for Le Tissier. There was still a suspicion of number 10s in his mould, even among managers like Terry Venables and Glenn Hoddle, who appreciated flair players. English football now adored foreign number 10s but didn’t trust its own, and Le Tissier made the familiar complaint of the 1990s number 10: ‘I think maybe England managers weren’t brave enough to change their formation to accommodate me.’ That said, Hoddle – who was Le Tissier’s boyhood hero – used both him and Liverpool’s Steve McManaman behind Alan Shearer in a fluid 3–4–2–1 shape for a 1–0 defeat to Italy in 1997, England’s first-ever World Cup qualifying defeat at Wembley. It was a performance that encapsulated such an enigmatic footballer; Le Tissier was constantly second to loose balls, conceded possession regularly, and his lack of energy was juxtaposed by the constant running of the wonderful Zola, who played the same role for Italy and fired in the only goal when sprinting in advance of his strike partner. Nevertheless, Le Tissier came closest to scoring for England.

  ‘It is not a gamble [to play Le Tissier] when you feel the game is going to be tight and the door might need to be unlocked,’ said Hoddle afterwards. ‘Le Tissier, with his talent, could do that.’ Nevertheless, he lost faith in his most creative talent – presumably his faith-healer Eileen Drewery hadn’t been able to help – and failed to include Le Tissier in his 30-man provisional 1998 World Cup squad, a blow Le Tissier admits he never recovered from. The ultimate 1990s Premier League player discovered the devastating news in a brilliantly 1990s way: by reading Teletext.

  English football had learned to appreciate the quality provided by number 10s, but was still largely fixated on variations on 4–4–2. Therefore, while the entire definition of a number 10 is that he’s neither a forward nor a midfielder and instead is somewhere in between, realistically almost every number 10 is one or the other. And while withdrawn forwards like Cantona, Bergkamp and Zola thrived by dropping deep and turning their side into a 4–4–1–1, attacking midfielders like Juninho, Kinkladze and Le Tissier caused problems, because they generally needed more unusual formations that their English teammates simply weren’t accustomed to. The Premier League was evolving in terms of personnel, but not yet in terms of tactics.

  5

  Arsènal

  ‘Wenger doesn’t know anything about English football. He’s at a big club – well, Arsenal used to be a big club – he’s a novice and should keep his opinions to Japanese football.’

  Alex Ferguson

  The sheer scale of revolution during the Premier League’s formative years is best summarised by Arsenal. When the division was formed, Arsenal were the most traditional, conservative club in English football; the chairman was an Old Etonian from a family of cricketers, while the beautiful old marble halls at Highbury underlined the old-fashioned, if unquestionably grand, nature of the club. In footballing terms, Arsenal’s players were old-school and British, the team most famous for its offside trap and for winning 1–0. ‘Boring, boring Arsenal’ was the standard jeer from opposition fans.

  After just six years of the Premier League, however, Arsenal had become the model for futuristic football. They were the division’s most attractive side, the most forward-thinking club in terms of physiology, they recruited footballers from untapped markets across Europe and were the first team in English top-flight history to win the league with a foreign manager. The revolution, however, was not solely about Arsène Wenger.

  Arsenal had enjoyed tremendous success in their eight seasons under George Graham, who won six major honours, including two league titles and the European Cup Winners’ Cup. When Graham was suddenly sacked midway through 1994/95 after accepting an illegal payment from an agent, Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein wanted to appoint former Monaco manager Wenger, who he’d encountered by chance at Highbury six years earlier. Dein realised the need for revolution; whereas most directors of English clubs surrounded themselves with like-minded figures and lived in a rather small world, Dein also had a prominent role at the Football Association, which meant he was frequently travelling abroad, moving in international circles and discovering how antiquated English football had become. The move didn’t happen this time. Wenger went to Japan – at this stage a complete footballing backwater, having never qualified for the World Cup – to coach Nagoya Grampus Eight. Japan had recently launched an extraordinary 100-year football plan with the intention of winning the World Cup by 2092, the type of long-term thinking Wenger would become closely associated with.

  Instead, Arsenal appointed Bruce Rioch. He was a considerably safer choice, and somewhat reminiscent of Graham, both being ex-Scottish international midfielders and strict disciplinarians. Rioch’s reign was troubled, as he ostracised senior players, but during his sole season in charge, 1995/96, he recorded a respectable fifth-place finish – and more crucially set the wheels in motion for the Wenger revolution, introducing a passing game that was distinctly different from the direct style Graham had favoured towards the end of his reign. He had two major objectives: encouraging Arsenal to play out from the back and ensuring there was less dependence upon Ian Wright in terms of goalscoring. ‘Bruce encouraged us to pass the ball through midfield more,’ goalkeeper David Seaman said. ‘Had he stayed longer, I am sure he would have gradually changed the whole way we played – as was to happen later with Arsène Wenger.’

  England captain David Platt, who arrived at Arsenal shortly after Bergkamp, had been playing in Serie A under revered coaches like Giovanni Trapattoni and Sven-Göran Eriksson, yet said that Rioch ‘deeply impressed me with his vision of how the game should be played’. Martin Keown underlined the difference between Graham and Rioch: ‘Under George the emphasis was to win the ball back, press as a team, deny the opposition space and have lots of offsides … Bruce began by introducing the passing game. We would work on keeping the ball, whereas with George we worked on winning it back.’ Rioch was a huge admirer of flair players, and the board provided him with the transformative footballer Arsenal desperately needed: Dennis Bergkamp.

  In terms of stylistic impact upon the Premier League, Bergkamp is second only to Eric Cantona. They could, in slightly different circumstances, have ended up at one another’s clubs; Alex Ferguson had explored the possibility of recruiting Bergkamp before eventually signing Cantona, who, upon leaving Leeds, supposedly wanted to join one of Manchester United, Liverpool or Arsenal. When Cantona finished third in the 1993 Ballon d’Or, he made a particular point of paying tribute to Ajax’s Bergkamp, who had finished second behind Roberto Baggio. He recognised a kindred spirit.

  When Bergkamp left Ajax for Inter Milan that year, he was signed specifically because Inter were desperate to evolve from a defensive, unattractive side to a more aesthetically pleasing outfit. They were tired of the plaudits showered upon city rivals AC Milan, who had become Europe’s most celebrated side courtesy of Arrigo Sacchi’s revolutionary coaching and the efforts of three brilliant Dutchmen: Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard and Ruud Gullit. Inter had challenged them with a team featuring three Germans: Jürgen Klinsmann, Andreas Brehme and Lothar Matthäus. But at this stage there was a huge difference in the perceptions of Dutch footballers (intelligent, creative, dynamic) and German footballers (efficient, ruthless, boring) and Inter attempted to becoming more stylish by signing two Dutchmen of their own, Bergkamp and his Ajax teammate Wim Jonk.

  But Inter’s revolution never occurred. After poor initial results, they became more defensive and sacked their manager, leaving Bergkamp playing in a more direct side and unable to link attacking moves. He managed just 11 goals in two Serie A campaigns combined. It’s fascinating, therefore, that Bergkamp put that frustrating experience aside and made a second transfer to a club who requi
red a catalyst for technical football. After retirement, Bergkamp outlined his determination to be a revolutionary: ‘Like when I chose Inter instead of Milan or Barcelona, I thought: “I’m the sort of player you don’t see at Arsenal, so maybe I can show people this is my way of playing.”’

  Arsenal, who had generally been reluctant to pay large fees and therefore missed out on top talent during the Premier League’s first three seasons, broke their club record fee three times over to sign Bergkamp and immediately reallocated Paul Merson’s number 10 shirt to their new technical leader. The Independent’s headline read, ‘Rioch signs Bergkamp to signal new era’. That would prove particularly prescient, but there were sceptics – England left-back Stuart Pearce said it was a ‘massive gamble’, pundits questioned his value when he took seven games to score, while Tottenham chairman Alan Sugar said his arrival amounted to ‘cosmetic surgery’. Instead, it was more like a brain transplant. ‘He was the one that changed our whole attitude towards training,’ said Ray Parlour. ‘Just watching the way he handled himself from day one was an eye-opener. It made you think: hold on a second, I need to up my effort here.’

  Rioch, in particular, offered tremendous support, defending him staunchly from the early criticism and encouraging Bergkamp’s teammates to supply him frequently between the lines, although Arsenal were sometimes crowded in that zone, with Bergkamp, David Platt and Paul Merson broadly playing similar roles. It was a notable shift, however, from Arsenal’s previous approach of incessantly knocking long balls over the top for Wright. Bergkamp’s first campaign was patchy – and he endured more quiet seasons at Highbury than his reputation might suggest – but he was unquestionably Arsenal’s game-changer, someone who brought the best out of others. Bergkamp says his role changed upon arriving in the Premier League, becoming an assister more than a goalscorer, as shown by the fact that he collected 93 Premier League assists compared with 87 goals. Tellingly, the only other players to have scored 50+ Premier League goals but been more prolific assisters are all midfielders: Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Damien Duff, Gareth Barry and Danny Murphy.