Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  What made it particularly hard was the acuity of Juan López, the Uruguay coach. The war in Europe had meant an end to the tours, so, playing largely South American opposition the Rioplatense School had had little chance to witness tactical developments elsewhere. López, though, saw how Switzerland had unnerved Brazil, and drew inspiration from their system. He instructed the full-back Matias Gonzalez to stay deep, almost as a sweeper, which meant that Eusebio Tejera, the other full-back, became effectively a centre-back. The two wing-halves, Schubert Gambetta and Victor Andrade, were set to man-mark the Brazilian wingers, Chico and Albino Friaça, while Varela and the two inside-forwards played deeper than usual in a system approaching Rappan’s 1-3-3-3.

  Officially there were 173,850 at the Maracanã that day; in reality there were probably over 200,000. So overcome by nerves was Julio Pérez, Uruguay’s inside-right - or right-half, in the revised formation - that he wet himself during the anthems. Gradually, though, the pressure shifted. Brazil controlled the early stages - López’s tactics perhaps subdued Brazil, but they did not neutralise them - but the opening goal would not come. Jair hit the post; Roque Máspoli, in Glanville’s words, ‘performed acrobatic prodigies in goal’; but at half-time it was still goalless. Home nerves were mounting.

  Hindsight suggests the turning point came after twenty-eight minutes, when Varela punched Bigode, Brazil’s left-back. Both players agree it was barely more than a tap, but in the mythology of the game it was at that moment that the fear enveloped Bigode, at that moment that he became ‘a coward’, the taunt that would pursue him for the rest of his life.

  Two minutes after half-time, a reverse ball from Ademir laid in Friaça. He held off Andrade and, with a slightly scuffed cross-shot, gave Brazil the lead. In the first half, it might have been devastating, but having held out for so long, Uruguay knew they could live with Brazil, that they would not be overwhelmed.

  Whether it was a deliberate policy or not is difficult to say, but Uruguay seemed to prefer to attack down their right. That was the side that, when Brazil had played the diagonal, had been the more vulnerable, with Danilo the more advanced of the two half-backs. In a W-M, he couldn’t help himself but push forwards, which created a fatal space, because Bigode was now operating as an orthodox left-back rather than in the slightly advanced role he would usually have adopted. Alcide Ghiggia, Uruguay’s frail, hunched right-winger, could hardly have dreamed he would have been granted so much room.

  Brazil 1 Uruguay 2, World Cup final pool, Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro, 16 July 1950

  Brazil were twenty-four minutes from victory when the first blow fell. Varela, who was becoming increasingly influential, advanced, and spread the ball right to Ghiggia. He had space to accelerate, checked as Bigode moved to close him down, then surged by him, crossing low for Juan Schiaffino to sweep the ball in at the near post. ‘Silence in the Maracanã,’ said Flávio Costa, ‘which terrified our players.’ As blame was apportioned after the game, even the crowd did not escape. ‘When the players needed the Maracanã the most, the Maracanã was silent,’ the musician Chico Buarque observed. ‘You can’t entrust yourself to a football stadium.’

  A draw would still have been enough for Brazil, but the momentum had swung inexorably against them. Thirteen minutes later, Ghiggia again picked up the ball on the Uruguayan right. This time Bigode was closer to him, but isolated, so Ghiggia laid it back to Perez. Nerves forgotten, he held off Jair and slipped a return ball in behind Bigode. Ghiggia ran on, and with Moacyr Barbosa, the Brazilian goalkeeper, anticipating a cross, struck a bobbling shot in at the near post. The unthinkable had happened, and Uruguay, not Brazil, were world champions.

  Brazil, only founded as a nation in 1889, has never been in a war. When Rodrigues spoke of the 1950 World Cup final as his country’s ‘Hiroshima’, he meant it was the greatest single catastrophe to have befallen Brazil. Paulo Perdigão expresses the same point less outrageously in Anatomy of a Defeat, his remarkable meditation on the final, in which he reprints the entire radio commentary of the match, using it as the basis for his analysis of the game almost as though he were delivering exegesis upon a biblical text. ‘Of all the historical examples of national crises,’ he wrote, ‘the World Cup of 1950 is the most beautiful and most glorified. It is a Waterloo of the tropics and its history our Götterdämmerung. The defeat transformed a normal fact into an exceptional narrative: it is a fabulous myth that has been preserved and even grown in the public imagination.’

  Bigode, Barbosa and Juvenal - probably not by coincidence Brazil’s three black players - were held responsible. In 1963, Barbosa, in an effort to exorcise his demons, even invited friends to a barbecue at which he ceremonially burned the Maracanã goalposts, but he could not escape the opprobrium. The story is told of how, twenty years after the final, he was in a shop when a woman pointed at him. ‘Look at him,’ she said to her young son. ‘He’s the man who made all of Brazil cry.’

  ‘In Brazil,’ he said shortly before his death in 2000, ‘the maximum sentence is thirty years, but I have served fifty.’ Yes, it was a mistake, but if a reason is to be found for the defeat, Zizinho insists, it is the use of the W-M. ‘The last four games of the World Cup were the first time in my life I played W-M,’ he explained in an interview with Bellos. ‘Spain played W-M, Sweden played W-M, Yugoslavia played W-M. The three that played W-M we beat. But Uruguay didn’t play W-M. Uruguay played with one deep back and the other in front.’ They played, in other words, a system whose defensive base was the same as that used by Brazil to win the Copa América in 1919.

  Just as England reacts to any set-back by lamenting technical inadequacy, so Brazil blames defensive frailties. Perdigão’s reference to Götterdämmerung, of course, echoes the Mirror’s ‘Twilight of the Gods’ headline after England’s 6-3 defeat to Hungary, and that is not coincidence. The plaintiveness comes from the same source - a railing against habitual failings, an angry realisation that the traditional way of playing is not innately superior. The irony is that Brazil’s traditions and England’s could hardly be more different. There is no right way of playing; at some point every football culture doubts its own strengths and looks wistfully to the greener grass abroad.

  No matter that twenty-two goals had been scored in six games; what was important was those two that had been conceded at the last. Clearly, Brazil’s pundits decided, the defence needed bolstering. By the time of the 1954 World Cup, the attack-minded Flávio Costa had been supplanted by the more cautious Zezé Moreira. It was, a French journalist said, like replacing an Argentine dancer with an English clergyman.

  The great trio of inside-forwards was gone, and a stopper centre-half was introduced in Pinheiro, a far more defensive player than Juvenal. Brazil swatted Mexico aside, but then drew with Yugoslavia before going out to Hungary in a vicious quarter-final, beaten 4-2 in the so-called ‘Battle of Berne’. In his official report on the tournament, the head of the Brazilian delegation, João Lyra Filho, concluded that ‘flashy trim lends artistic expression to the match, to the detriment of yield and results’, something he blamed largely on black players. He was, fortunately, ignored, and the consensus agreed with Garrincha’s complaint - or at least that ghosted for him in Stratton Smith’s collection The Brazil Book of Football - that ‘Brazil planned to win the World Cup by burying the individual in a general team plan. So they went to Europe to play like Europeans… What counted in Brazilian football was the ability of our players to improvise.’

  Garrincha was never a player for tactical discipline, but improvisation couldn’t be allowed to run anarchically unchecked. What was needed was a structure in which improvisation could flourish, without leaving the defence as exposed as poor Bigode had been. The answer, strangely, had been practised in Brazil almost since the beginning of the decade.

  Just who invented the 4-2-4 is a matter of some debate: as Assaf says, ‘it has many fathers’. Some credit Zezé Moreira, some Fleitas Solich, some Martim Francisco; there are even some who say it didn�
�t emerge in its true form until Lula applied it at Santos. If Axel Vartanyan is right, it is possible that it is not even a Brazilian invention, but one of a number of variations employed by Boris Arkadiev at Dinamo Moscow. The truth is that Brazil, with the diagonal, and Hungary, with their withdrawn centre-forward (and correspondingly withdrawn left-half), had independently moved to a position from which the 4-2-4 was an inevitable development.

  The Paraguayan coach Fleitas Solich certainly had a key role in promoting the 4-2-4, winning three Carioca titles in a row with it at Flamengo between 1953 and 1955, but the first man consciously to employ the system seems to have been Martim Francisco. He was coach of Vila Nova, a club from Nova Lima, a town about twenty miles from Belo Horizonte. He pushed his left-half, Lito, back to play as the ‘quarto zagueiro’ - the ‘fourth defender’ - the term that is still used today in Brazil for the defender whose job it is to step up and join the midfield. Right from the start, though, there was a recognition that that wasn’t enough to prevent a two-man midfield being swamped, and so one of the front four also had a brief to drop back. In Francisco’s team, it was Osório, the right-winger. In practice, the 4-2-4 almost never appeared in that form. In possession, while attacking, it would be a 3-3-4; out of possession, a 4-3-3. The system was widely adopted, and soon developed two further modifications.

  The 4-2-4: Vila Nova 1951

  The first was a system of zonal marking, introduced by Zezé Moreira at Fluminense, which obviated the need for the strict man-to-man marking of the W-M - the aspect that had failed so disastrously in 1950 - and also permitted a greater fluidity. When Arsenal toured Brazil in 1949, they had been struck by the willingness of Brazilian sides to attack from all positions, something they seem both to have feared and regarded as a weakness, a sign of tactical indiscipline. ‘Suddenly, a bloke comes dashing through and he’s had a shot at goal and the ball went wide,’ said the full-back Laurie Scott, describing Arsenal’s 5-1 win over Fluminense to Aidan Hamilton. ‘And we started looking around to see who we’d got to blame for this. We couldn’t find it. We found out it was their full-back. See, they didn’t care. I never went up there like that.’ Attacking full-backs would become an increasingly important part of the Brazilian game. Given the space in front of the full-backs, 4-2-4 was a system that encouraged them to advance, while at the same time providing immediate cover. Once marking had ceased to be man-to-man, it became a simple process for the ‘fourth defender’ to react to the forward movement of the full-back by not pushing out himself, leaving his side still with the three-man defensive cover they would have had in the W-M.

  The second was the reintroduction of the ponta da lança, one of the two central forwards dropping slightly deeper than his partner, providing a natural link with the midfield. This was nothing particularly new - it was no different to the attacking inside-forward role in the diagonal, and Puskás had been performing a similar function for years in the Hungarian system - but it was a position that seems to have been naturally suited to the temperament of the Brazilian game. It soon found its apogee in a scrawny teenager from Três Corações. Pelé was sixteen when Lula gave him his debut at Santos; within a year he was inspiring his national side to their first World Cup.

  For all Guttmann’s claims, when he arrived with Honvéd in November 1956, their system caused few surprises. If anything, Brazil was further down the road to 4-2-4 than the Hungarians, although the similarity of shape was obvious. ‘Basically, the only difference between Brazil’s interpretation of the system and that of Hungary was in the number worn by the forward who withdrew into midfield,’ said Nándor Hidegkuti. ‘In 1958, the Brazilians opted for inside-right Didi, while for Hungary it was the centre-forward who fell back. In both teams the withdrawn forward operated in what we might call left midfield, and again in both teams the left-half fell back to play a more defensive role, while the right-half maintained the balance in midfield by playing a more open attacking game.’

  Guttmann’s impact was less to do with system than with style, and this is where the orthodoxy - or at least the British orthodoxy - about the great Hungary side requires a gloss. English observers tended to be overwhelmed by the Aranycsapat’s technical ability and the fluidity facilitated by the withdrawn centre-forward. Perhaps they differed marginally in degree, but had that been all they were about, they would not have been substantially different from the Austrian Wunderteam. Hungary, though, also had a briskness about them, a sense of purpose: their artistry was directed towards the end of winning, and in that they were very much Jimmy Hogan’s heirs. Geoffrey Green perhaps flattered England when he spoke of the Hungary of 1953 as having hit a midpoint between British directness and continental elaboration, but the general point was sound. English advocates of the long-ball game would later see validation for their methods in the fact that, so often in that game at Wembley, Hungary transformed defence into attack with a counter of two or three passes. It was not 4-2-4 itself that Guttmann brought to Brazil, but that sense of purpose.

  The difference in approach was perhaps best summed up by Nélson Rodrigues, who often wrote brief dramatic scenes featuring real-life personalities - effectively imaginary interviews. He responded to Honvéd’s tour with a piece featuring Ferenc Puskás and Zizinho, still Brazil’s great hero, ending by asking each what was the most magical thing for them to do during a game. Zizinho answered that it was setting up a team-mate to score a goal, while for Puskás it was, not surprisingly, scoring a goal. The example may be whimsical, but it does give an indication of Brazilian football’s lack of pragmatism at the time.

  São Paulo had had a poor season in 1956, finishing second in the Paulista championship, seven points behind the champions Santos, and they did not begin 1957 well, lying fifth after the first half of the championship, seven points behind the leaders Corinthians. Gradually, though, Guttmann’s methods began to take effect.

  He had a grid painted on a wall at the training ground, and in practice sessions would roll the ball to his forwards, shouting to them which square he wanted them to hit. He worked on long balls aimed for the centre-forward to flick on for the wingers. He discouraged dallying on the ball, drilling his players in rapid passing to such an extent that his calls of ‘tat-tat-tat’ and ‘pingpang-pong’ became catchphrases. Everything was about moving the ball at speed, about getting his side playing by instinct. Perhaps most crucially, he signed Zizinho, then thirty-four, from the Rio club Bangu, and - in a foreshadowing of what he would later do with Mario Coluna at Benfica - installed him as the more creative of the midfield two, with Dino Sani, who had been the playmaker, dropping into the more defensive midfield role. ‘It was only then,’ he said, ‘that I really began to play.’

  São Paulo won the Paulista championship that year, at which Guttmann decamped for Europe. His influence, though, was carried on by Vicente Feola. Little more than an average player, Feola had led São Paulo to the Paulista championship in 1949, and had stayed on at the club after standing down as coach, serving as Guttmann’s assistant. When he was appointed as national coach for the 1958 World Cup, it came as something of a surprise. Osvaldo Brandão had been forced to stand down after Brazil had finished third in the Copa América in 1957 and neither Silvio Pirilo nor Pedrinho, his two immediate successors, really impressed. There was a movement to have Solich appointed, but the fact he was Paraguayan counted against him, and so the Brazilian federation turned to Feola as a safe, uncontroversial choice. He was a bon vivant so relaxed, rumour said, that he was prone to cat-napping on the bench during training, although it is doubtful how true that is. Ruy Castro argues in his biography of Garrincha that Feola suffered coronary problems brought on by his excessive weight, and would occasionally suffer a stabbing pain in his chest. The best way to deal with it, he had learned, was to close his eyes, lower his head and wait for the spasm to pass, which a hysterical press supported by paparazzi photographs interpreted as sleeping.

  Antonio Rattín, the Argentinian centre-half who played under Feol
a during his brief spell at Boca Juniors, though, insists that, on at least one occasion, he did drift off. ‘Every training session we ended with a game,’ he said. ‘One day, a very hot day, we started playing, and kept playing, and kept playing. We were waiting for him to blow the whistle for half-time, but he just sat there. We kept looking at him, waiting for him to do something. So eventually I went over to him, and he was snoring. He’d been asleep all the time.’

  Yet while Feola may have been a jovial fat man who enjoyed playing up to the stereotype, he was not the pushover the federation had imagined him to be. With funding from the Juscelino Kubitschek government, the squad for the 1958 World Cup was the best-prepared in Brazil’s history. Officials visited twenty-five different locations in Sweden before selecting a training base, and then had all twenty-five female staff at that hotel replaced to minimise potential distractions. They even campaigned, without success, to have a local nudist camp closed for the duration of the tournament.

  The backroom staff included a doctor, a dentist, a trainer, a treasurer, a psychologist and, in the former Fluminense coach Ernesto Santos, a spy, employed to gather information on opponents. After initial medical tests, the doctor prescribed the majority of the squad medication to tackle intestinal parasites, while one player had to be treated for syphilis. The dentist was just as busy, extracting a total of 470 teeth from the thirty-three players in the provisional squad. Feola was happy enough to go along with those measures, but he was openly dismissive of the psychologist Dr João Carvalhães.

  Carvalhães, who usually assessed the psychological suitability of those applying to be bus drivers, had performed a series of tests on the squad, the most derided of which involved asking them to draw a picture of a man. The results were intriguing - the more instinctive the player, apparently, the more likely he was to draw a stick figure or something representational rather than attempting mimetic detail - but his conclusions were laughable. Pelé, he said, was ‘obviously infantile’ and did ‘not possess the sense of responsibility necessary for a team game’. As Garrincha had scored just thirty-eight out of a possible 123 on his test - lower than the minimum required to drive a bus in São Paulo - Carvalhães suggested he was unsuited to high-pressure games. Feola ignored him and insisted both should be in his squad.