Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  The first attempt to import the W-M to Brazil was made by Gentil Cardoso, but he was beset by two major difficulties: he had next to no background as a player, and he was black. He had been a bootblack, a waiter, a tram driver and a baker, and had then joined the merchant navy. That entailed frequent voyages to Europe, and while there he seems to have spent most of his free time watching football. He became a particular fan of the English game, and later claimed to have watched first-hand Herbert Chapman’s development of the W-M formation at Arsenal. ‘He was a larger than life character,’ said Soter, ‘somebody who loved telling tales of his travels.’ Often they were embellished, but what is undeniable is his capacity for tactical analysis. He saw the W-M, recognised its possibilities, and realised that this, vastly different as it was to Brazilian football, was the future.

  Cardoso was given his chance to coach in the thirties, when he divided his time between football and the sea. He implemented the W-M at the small Carioca side Sírio Libanês, where he oversaw the emergence of Leônidas. ‘He was a thoroughly Brazilian player,’ the playwright Nélson Rodrigues wrote of the forward. ‘Full of the fantasy, improvisation, childishness and sensuality that have marked out all the Brazilian greats.’ He was not, in other words, much like the centre-forwards the English preferred to employ in the W-M. Shape could be copied; style, it seems, was rather harder to implement.

  Sírio Libanês was too small a club for Cardoso’s innovation really to reverberate, and even after he’d moved to Bonsucesso, a slightly larger club, taking Leônidas with him, he found it hard to find an audience for his ideas. He became noted for quoting Socrates, Cicero and Gandhi in team-talks, and enhanced Brazil’s footballing vocabulary - ‘snake’ to mean good player, for instance; or ‘zebra’ for a shock result - but, as a tactician, as Soter said, ‘People just didn’t take him seriously.’

  It took a European, Dori Kürschner, to implant the W-M firmly in Brazil, although he died before his ideas really took hold. ‘When Kruschner [sic] arrived in Brazil, Gentil was talking a lot about the W-M,’ Flávio Costa, Kürschner’s predecessor and successor at Flamengo, said in an interview with Aidan Hamilton, ‘but he never had the prestige to apply it. Kruschner was the one who tried to apply futebol sistema.’

  Kürschner has become a mythic figure in Brazil, a wise man from a distant land who brought great knowledge and, like all true prophets, went unheralded in his own lifetime. He is portrayed as an evangelist without a history, a man from nowhere. ‘We don’t even know if he was Hungarian, Czech, Bohemian…’ said Roberto Assaf, the television pundit and great chronicler of Flamengo. The confusion is understandable. At some stage, the ‘R’ and the ‘U’ became transposed, and so in Brazil Kürschner’s name is spelt and pronounced ‘Kruschner’; anyone looking up ‘Kruschner’, of course, finds that the record is blank. As Alex Bellos notes in his introduction to Futebol, ‘Brazil is not big on facts… It is a country built of stories, myths and Chinese whispers.’

  That explains Kürschner’s aura of mystery, but it does not explain why the Flamengo president José Bastos Padilha settled upon him as the man to further his plans for Carioca domination, which had already included funding the construction of a new stadium. Whatever his intentions, what he got when he appointed him was somebody with a fine pedigree in Danubian football, and somebody, moreover, who provided a direct link to Jimmy Hogan. Hogan is regularly hailed as the father of Hungarian, Austrian and German football; what is trumpeted rather less is that he was also the grandfather of the Brazilian game.

  Kürschner was born in Budapest, and as a player enjoyed success with MTK, winning the Hungarian title in 1904 and 1908, and earning a handful of international call-ups. A left-half who occasionally operated in the centre, he was known for his unfussy acuity in possession, and was particularly noted for his heading ability. In his later days, he was coached by Hogan, and he succeeded him as MTK coach in 1918. Kürschner won a title there, but within a year he had left for Germany.

  There he had minor success with Stuttgarter Kickers, won a national German title with Nürnberg, and, after a brief stint with Bayern Munich, was their coach as they shared the title the following season after the so-called ‘eternal final’ against SV Hamburg. In his early career, Kürschner seems, like Guttmann, never to have been able to settle, and he moved on to Eintracht Frankfurt and then to Switzerland with Nordstern Basel, where he won promotion at the first attempt. He promptly left, and joined up with Hogan and the nominal head coach Teddy Duckworth, another Englishman, to prepare the Switzerland national side for the Paris Olympics. There, they achieved the greatest success in the history of Swiss football, reaching the final where they were beaten by defending champions Uruguay.

  Kürschner moved back to Germany with Schwarz-Weiss Essen then, in 1925, he joined Grasshoppers in Zurich. He spent the next nine years there, winning three league titles and four cups, before being replaced by Karl Rappan. Had he stayed in Germany or gone back to Hungary, where the classic Danubian 2-3-5 still held sway, things might have been different, but it seems that in Switzerland Kürschner became convinced of the merits of the W-M, or at least a variant of it. So when Padilha approached him in 1937, he took with him to Rio de Janeiro the formation that would kick-start the Brazilian revolution.

  Perhaps it is most charitably described as a slow-burner, for in its own way Brazilian football was just as conservative as the English game. Flamengo’s centre-half when Kürschner arrived was Fausto dos Santos, ‘the Black Wonder’, an elegant stylist who was used to dominating games. There was a clear hierarchy of positions in Brazilian football, with centre-half at the top and the full-backs at the bottom and there was no way, he told Kürschner, that he was going to drop back and become a defensive player. Fans and journalists were divided on the issue, which was only resolved when Padilha intervened, fined Fausto, and told him to get on with doing what he was paid to do. That, at least, is the legend, which paints Kürschner as an unyielding moderniser, deaf both to the appeals of tradition and to the individual characteristics and concerns of his players.

  It is not, though, quite as simple as that. Ideas rarely spring fully formed from the minds of their creators, and here too circumstance seems to have played its part. According to Assaf, Kürschner was appalled by the medical facilities he found at the club and his first significant decision, far from being an act of tactical fundamentalism, was to send his players to see a doctor. Fausto, it transpired, was suffering from the early stages of the tuberculosis that would kill him two years later, and the decision to push him into a deeper role seems to have been taken as much with his declining health in mind as for reasons of ideology. Whether, had Fausto been well, Kürschner would have retained the old 2-3-5, or whether he might have used him as a half-back and deployed another player as a defensive centre-half in a W-M, it is impossible to say.

  Kürschner’s notion of the W-M, anyway, seems to have been rather different to that common in Britain. As a Danubian, even one schooled in Swiss football, it is improbable he would have countenanced a Herbie Roberts-style stopper, either at centre-half or anywhere else on the pitch. And even if he had, Fausto dos Santos was absolutely not the right man to replicate that style. What Kürschner and the Brazilians call a W-M, it seems probable, is actually rather closer to Vittorio Pozzo’s metodo, more of a W-W shape, with the centre-half playing behind his half-backs, but in advance of the two full-backs. As Soter acknowledges, although the system seemed shockingly defensive in the context of Brazilian football of the time, it was nowhere near as negative or as rigid as the British model.

  While his background is not as obscure as is made out, what certainly is true is that Kürschner disappeared into nothing. Flávio Costa, the former Flamengo player he had replaced as coach, remained as his assistant and, taking advantage of the fact that Kürschner had no Portuguese, undermined him at every opportunity, pouring scorn on the W-M and backing Fausto during the dispute. Results were disappointing. Despite scoring eighty-three go
als in twenty-two games, Flamengo finished second in the Carioca championship behind their arch-rivals Fluminense and Kürschner found himself and his methods widely derided in the local press. The first game of the 1938 campaign was also the inaugural game at the Estádio da Gávea, and when Flamengo lost 2-0 to Vasco da Gama, Kürschner was sacked - and replaced by Flávio Costa.

  Widely misunderstood and far from popular, Kürschner might have been expected to return to Europe but, presumably fearing anti-Semitism back in Budapest where Miklos Hórthy’s regime had declared a formal alliance with Nazi Germany, he stayed in Rio. He was appointed coach of Botafogo in 1939, but left the following year and died of a mystery virus in 1941.

  For all the suspicion with which he was treated, Kürschner was asked to work as an advisor to the national coach, Adhemar Pimenta, at the 1938 World Cup in France. Before the tournament began, Tomás Mazzoni, then working as a newspaper reporter, went to watch a friendly between France and England at the Stade de Colombes in Paris. England were comfortably superior, winning 4-2, and yet, Mazzoni wrote in shocked tones, they retained three defenders throughout. This, he concluded, would never catch on in Brazil.

  Things were changing, though, and while Brazil at that tournament used Martim Silveira as an attacking centre-half, the two inside-forwards, Romeu and Peracio, were withdrawn into what became known as the ponta da lança position (literally, the point of the lance), formalising a process that had been going on for some time. By the late thirties, even those nations who ostensibly practised the 2-3-5 had found five forwards strung out in a row too much. Matthias Sindelar dropped off the front line to give the Austrians flexibility, while in Argentina and Uruguay it was common for the inside-forwards to probe from deep. Silveira was a far more attack-minded player than Luisito Monti but, that aside, Brazil’s formation in 1938 was little different from the metodo of Pozzo’s Italy.

  It evidently helped as Brazil reached the semi-finals. In a later study of the tournament, though, João Saldanha, the journalist who became national coach in 1969, was critical, concluding they would have gone further with a third back. They did, after all, let in ten goals in their five games, three of them from penalties, which he took as an indication of an over-manned defence panicking under pressure.

  Back at Flamengo, Flávio Costa did not, as it had been assumed he would after Kürschner’s dismissal, revert to a 2-3-5, but rather tweaked the W-M, creating what he termed ‘the diagonal’. Essentially all he did was to nudge the square that lay at the centre of the W-M so it became a parallelogram. Crucially, it retained three defenders - which had been the bone of contention with Fausto - and three forwards, but rather than simply two half-backs and two inside-forwards, as in the British model, the diagonal featured a deep-lying half-back - in Flávio Costa’s initial conception, which had crystalised by 1941, the right-half, Volante (the term ‘volante’ is now used in Brazil to mean ‘defensive midfielder’) - with a more advanced player to his left - Jayme. The right of the two inside-forwards - Zizinho - then played slightly deeper so as not to leave too large a space behind him, with the inside-left - Perácio - more advanced in the classic ponta da lança role.

  The formation could just as well be flipped, so that the right side was more attacking. Ondino Viera, part of Uruguay’s World Cup-winning squad of 1930, for instance, employed the diagonal at Fluminense, but with Spinelli, the left-half, operating defensively, and Romeu providing the ponta da lança.

  How new the diagonal was is debatable. According to the author and former Portugal coach Cândido de Oliveira in his book The W-M System, when Flávio Costa was later taken to Europe by a director of Vasco da Gama to explain his formation, it was laughed off as a cheap imitation of the W-M. Perhaps the truth is rather that Flávio Costa formalised an unspoken process that was inherent in the W-M. One inside-forward would always be more creative than the other; one half-back more defensive. At Arsenal in the thirties, as Bernard Joy explains in Soccer Tactics, the left-half Wilf Copping played deep, with the right-half Jack Crayston given more freedom. When the Wolves and England captain of the late forties and early fifties, Billy Wright, who could play as a centre-half, played as a half-back, did he not play deeper than Billy Crook or Jimmy Dickinson? As Richard Williams points out in The Perfect 10, it was usual - perhaps giving credence to theories linking left-sidedness with creativity - for the inside-left to be more attacking than the inside-right, which is why the No. 10 rather than the No. 8 became lionised as the playmaker.

  It is easy, as for instance the Paulista commentator Alberto Helena Junior is, to be cynical about Flávio Costa, suggesting he was doing nothing more than repackaging Kürschner because, having been so critical of him, he could not simply re-use his methods, but the effect was of huge significance. Flávio Costa’s tinkering made apparent that the W-M was no more inviolable than the pyramid had been. Once the square has become a parallelogram, it doesn’t take much more of a nudge for it to become a diamond, and when that has happened, what is left is 4-2-4. Before that could take place and be widely accepted, though, Brazil had first to go through the agonies of 1950.

  The Diagonal (Pela Direita) : Flamengo 1941

  The Diagonal (Pela Esqueroa) : Fluminense 1941

  Brazil are almost universally recognised as having been the best side at the World Cup finals they hosted, but they did not win it. Rather they suffered a defeat in their final game so stunning that Nélson Rodrigues wrote of it as ‘our catastrophe, our Hiroshima’.

  The diagonal imposed by Flávio Costa had undergone a minor modification, with Ademir, really an inside-forward, acting as the centre-forward, Jair, the inside-left, as the ponta da lança and Zizinho the deeper-lying inside-forward. The result was an enhanced fluidity and flowing triangles of passes. Brazil swept to victory in the 1949 Copa América scoring thirty-nine goals in seven games before a playoff, in which they demolished Fleitas Solich’s Paraguay 7-0.

  Zizinho was injured for the start of the World Cup, but Brazil were still overwhelming favourites, and lived up to that billing in their opening match, hitting the post five times on their way to a 4-0 win over Mexico in the inaugural game at the Maracanã. Their problems began when they left Rio for their second match, against Switzerland in São Paulo. As was common at the time, Flávio Costa made several changes, bringing in three Paulista midfielders to appease local fans. Perhaps that disrupted the side, perhaps it was the 1-3-3-3 verrou system favoured by Switzerland, but Brazil were nowhere near their usual fluency and, despite twice taking the lead, could only draw 2-2, meaning they had to beat Yugoslavia in their last group game to qualify for the final group.

  Fit again, Zizinho returned in place of the robust centre-forward Baltazar, allowing Ademir to resume his role as a mobile No. 9. That would have allowed a return to the side that had won the Copa so impressively the previous year, but the draw against Switzerland seems to have caused Flávio Costa to lose faith with the diagonal and switch to a more orthodox W-M, perhaps reasoning that with such an adventurous and fluid central attacking three, his two half-backs, Danilo and Carlos Bauer, could both play deeper and offer additional defensive solidity.

  Initially, the change worked. Yugoslavia began with ten men as Rajko Mitić received treatment after gashing his head on an exposed girder shortly before kick-off, and by the time he had made it onto the field, Ademir had given Brazil the lead. Zizinho sealed an otherwise tight game in the second half.

  Yugoslavia were physically tough, technically adept opponents and, having seen them off, confidence appears to have been restored. In the opening two games of the final group, Brazil were sensational. As they hammered Sweden 7-1 and Spain 6-1, Glanville wrote of them playing ‘the football of the future… tactically unexceptional but technically superb’.

  They may have been unexceptional tactically, but they were far more advanced than Uruguay, who were still playing a version of Pozzo’s metodo, with a ball-playing centre-half in Obdulio Varela. They had equalised late to draw 2-2 with Spain
in their opening game of the final stage, and had required two goals in the final quarter hour to beat Sweden 3-2 in their second. Brazil needed only a draw in the final match to be champions, but nobody in Rio expected anything other than victory. The early editions of O Mundo on the day of the final even carried a team photograph of the Brazil side under the headline ‘These are the world champions’. Varela, Teixeira Heizer recounts in The Tough Game of the World Cups, saw the newspaper on display at the newsstand in his hotel on the morning of the final, and was so enraged that he bought every copy they had, took them back to his room, laid them out on his bathroom floor and then encouraged his team-mates to urinate on them.

  Before the game, ngelo Mendes de Moraes, the state governor, gave an address in which he hailed, ‘You Brazilians, whom I consider victors of the tournament… You players who in less than a few hours will be acclaimed champions by millions of your compatriots…. You who have no equals in the terrestrial hemisphere… You who are so superior to every other competitor…. You whom I already salute as conquerors.’

  Only Flávio Costa seemed at all concerned by the possibility of defeat. ‘The Uruguayan team has always disturbed the slumbers of Brazilian footballers,’ he warned. ‘I am afraid that my players will take to the field on Sunday as though they already had the Championship shield sewn on their jerseys. It isn’t an exhibition game. It is a match like any other, only harder than the others.’