Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  Honvéd struck twice in the opening quarter-hour, but the conditions soon began to take their toll. ‘Honvéd gradually got bogged down,’ Atkinson went on. ‘Their tricks got stuck in the mud.’ Cullis determined to bring the mud into play as little as possible and at half-time ordered his players to hit more long passes, to get the ball forward quickly to try to catch out the Honvéd full-backs, whom he felt were playing too square.

  Four minutes into the second half, Wolves got the lifeline they needed as Johnny Hancocks converted a penalty. ‘Bit by bit Wolves began to tighten the screws…’ wrote Geoffrey Green. ‘They seemed to double in number and swarm everywhere. The pitch, more and more churned up, resembled thick glue. And the Molineux crowd surged, tossed and roared like a hurricane at sea, and called for the kill.’ With fourteen minutes remaining, Dennis Wilshaw, who had almost been ruled out through injury after crashing his bike on the way to the game, crossed for Roy Swinbourne to head an equaliser. Within ninety seconds the same pair had combined for the winner.

  After a year of misery, English football revelled in the victory. ‘I may never live to see a greater thriller than this,’ wrote Peter Wilson in the Daily Mirror. ‘And if I see many more as thrilling I may not live much longer anyway.’ Charlie Buchan, in his column in the News Chronicle, hailed the affirmation of the English style. The Daily Mail captured the sense of ecstasy as it ran the headline: ‘Hail Wolves, “Champions of the World”.’ It was a proclamation that so riled Gabriel Hanot he was inspired to institute the European Cup to disprove it.

  Only Willy Meisl remained aloof, pointing out that only a few days earlier Honvéd had also lost to Red Star Belgrade, who at the time were seventh in the Yugoslav league, well adrift of the leaders Partizan. ‘No one called Partizan champions of the world,’ he said. ‘Dare I also remark in passing that quagmires are not usually considered the best pitches on which world championships ought to be decided, not even neutral quagmires.’ When it came to a battle of physique against technique, England could still mix it with the best of them, and yet the emptiness of such consolation was exposed in the years that followed. Wolves went on - admittedly in the void left by the Munich air crash - to win the league in 1958 and 1959, and the FA Cup in 1960, but the impression they made in formalised European competition, which began in 1955, was all but nil. Herrera’s jibe stung because it was so accurate.

  Like so many managers, Cullis’s style as a coach bore little relation to the player he had been. He was generally regarded as a cultured, attack-minded centre-half. Even Puskás spoke of his reputation as ‘the most classical centre-half of his time’. His leadership skills became apparent early and he captained Wolves at nineteen and England at twenty-two. So, too, did his meticulousness, as he kept a book in which he recorded his impressions of the centre-forwards against whom he played. Tommy Lawton said that to beat Cullis a forward needed ‘the penetrative powers of a tank and the pace of a racing whippet’. Cullis also developed a reputation for scrupulous fairness, famously deciding against hacking down Albert Stubbins when the forward got behind him to score for Liverpool in a title-decider against Wolves. John Arlott referred to him as ‘the passionate puritan’.

  In terms of his coaching education, Cullis had the advantage of playing under the eccentric Major Frank Buckley, one of the more adventurous managers of the thirties. In the dressing room at Molineux, Buckley had installed a therapeutic diathermy machine, a universal machine for galvanism, sumsoidal and paradic treatments and a machine that gave out ultra-violet rays for irradiation. He also, notoriously, ahead of the 1939 FA Cup final had his players injected with ‘animal secretions’, supposedly taken from monkey’s glands, although Cullis believed they were placebos designed more to enhance self-belief than muscle mass.

  Encouraged to question the orthodoxy, Cullis went back to basics. ‘There is no substitute for hard work,’ he always insisted, and he was one of the first coaches in England to take fitness training seriously. He would have his players go on pre-season stamina-building runs across Cannock Chase, and employed Frank Morris, a former international runner, as a fitness coach. His players, he said, ‘must have tremendous team spirit, they must be superbly fit, and they must use the correct tactics on the field.’

  Those tactics mainly comprised a W-M in which every effort was taken to play the ball forward quickly. Wolves, Cullis insisted, as countless managers of similar philosophy would, did not hit aimless long balls, but rather attempted to transfer the ball swiftly to the two wingers, Jimmy Mullen and Johnny Hancocks. ‘Some ill-advised critics called it kick and rush,’ the centre-half and captain Billy Wright said. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. Every phase is strictly logical and, although placing unselfish coordination before individualism, Cullis has never scorned ball players.’

  While he accommodated such gifted players as Peter Broadbent, Jimmy Murray and Bobby Mason in his side, skill, for Cullis, was to be harnessed for the ends of the team, and was certainly not an end in itself. Although he believed devoutly in the importance of fairness, notions of there being a ‘right way’ to play meant nothing to Cullis; for him the game was about winning. ‘Because we insist that every player in possession of the ball makes rapid progress towards the business of launching an attack,’ he said, ‘our forwards are not encouraged to parade their abilities in ostentatious fashion, which might please a small section of the crowd at the cost of reducing the efficiency of movement.’

  Where others praised Hungary’s 6-3 victory at Wembley as a festival of passing and individual skill, Cullis instead saw a vindication of his own beliefs. The goalkeeper, Gyula Grosics, he pointed out, had a tendency to clear the ball long. Only one of Hungary’s goals, he noted, came from a move begun in their own half of the field: three resulted from moves of one pass, one from a move of two passes and one from a free-kick. The pass-and-move football that was so admired, he said, came only in the second half when Hungary were keeping possession from England. ‘The number of scoring chances which will arrive during the course of a match is in direct proportion to the amount of time the ball spends in front of goal,’ he explained. ‘If the defenders in the Wolves team delay their clearances, the ball will be in front of our goal for too long a period and the scoring chances will go to the other side. If too much time is spent in building up our own attacks, the ball will spend less of the game in the other team’s penalty area and, of course, we shall score fewer goals.’

  In that, Cullis found an ally in Wing-Commander Charles Reep, an RAF officer stationed at nearby Bridgnorth. Reep had been based at Bushy Park in south-west London in the thirties, and had become fascinated by the style of Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal after attending two three-hour lectures given by their right-half, Charles Jones, in 1933. In them, Jones emphasised the need for the rapid transfer of ball from back to front, and explained Chapman’s concept of the functional winger.

  Reep was posted to Germany at the end of the war, and on his return in 1947, was disappointed to find that although the W-M shape had been adopted, Chapman’s other ideas had not. The play, he felt, was too slow, while the winger had again become a figure who performed his tricks almost in isolation before sending over crosses that rarely produced goals. Reep became increasingly frustrated, until, as he wrote in an autobiographical article for the Scottish fanzine The Punter in 1989, he finally lost patience during a Swindon Town match at the County Ground on 19 March 1950.

  There was no game on 19 March 1950, which is troubling given Reep’s concern for statistical accuracy (although he may, in fairness, have been let down by a subbing error), but Swindon did beat Bristol Rovers 1-0 at home in Division Three (South) on 18 March, so it seems probable that that is the game to which he refers. After a first half in which he saw attack after attack come to nothing, Reep decided to record them in the second. Swindon, his notes showed, had 147 attacks in the second half. Reep, extrapolating this, and assuming 280 attacks per game and an average of two goals scored, realised this equated to a fail
ure rate of 99.29 per cent, which meant that an improvement of only 0.71 per cent was necessary for a side to average three goals a game. That, he saw, would almost certainly guarantee promotion.

  Reep made his analysis more sophisticated and began recording attacking moves for both sides. ‘Back in 1950,’ he wrote, ‘these findings were by no means firmly established, but time was to prove them correct… Only two goals out of nine came from moves which included more than three received passes.’ He also observed that a long pass from inside a team’s own half appeared to make a move more effective; that possession regained either inside or just outside the opponents’ box was the most effective way of scoring; and that it took roughly eight attempts on goal to produce a goal.

  At the time, Reep was stationed at Yatesbury, and he began working with the RAF team there. He developed a theory about how wingers should play, and although no contemporary record survives, Øyvind Larson, in an essay on Reep’s influence on Norwegian football, discusses a report Reep sent to the then Norway manager Egil Olsen in the nineties. It was initially produced for Walter Winterbottom (although there is no evidence Winterbottom ever read it), ahead of England’s friendly against Uruguay in 1954, and was based on his observations of Uruguay’s 7-0 victory over Scotland in the World Cup earlier that year. In it he argued that wingers should remain as high up the pitch as they could while remaining onside, almost on the touchline, waiting for long balls out of defence; that in possession they should head always for the near-post and then either shoot or cross; and that when out of possession they should make for the far post (in relation to the ball) in order to support their centre-forward. That, loosely, was how Chapman’s wingers behaved and, if it was how Yatesbury’s were performing, it brought them success, as they won the Army Southern Commands’ knockout cup in 1950.

  Reep was redeployed back to Bushy Park in 1950. While there, his theorising caught the attention of Jackie Gibbons, the manager of Brentford and, from February 1951, Reep was employed on a part-time basis by the club. When he arrived, with fourteen games of the season remaining, they were in danger of relegation, but with Reep advising, their goals per game ratio went up from 1.5 to 3, and they took 20 of 28 possible points to stay up comfortably. Later that year, though, Reep was transferred back to Bridgnorth.

  Between 1953 and 1967, he and Bernard Benjamin, the head of the Royal Statistical Society, studied 578 games - taking in three World Cups, but mainly English league matches - and discovered that only five percent of all moves consist of four or more received passes and only one per cent of six or more. ‘The reason for this is clear,’ Ken Bray, a visiting Fellow in the Sport and Exercise Science group at the University of Bath, wrote in his book How to Score. ‘Long chains of passes require repeated accuracy, very difficult to sustain as defenders move in to close down space - man-mark the targets as the sequence stretches out.’ Reep’s conclusion was that possession football was counterproductive and, at a low level, such as an RAF side or Brentford, there is probably a large element of truth to that. Reep never differentiated, but Bray is strangely uncritical of either him or Charles Hughes, the FA technical director who developed similar theories in the eighties. Just because long passing moves were rare in the English game of the fifties does not mean they were not desirable. Common does not necessarily equal good. From Chapman’s time players had been encouraged to hit the ball long and early, and given the mudbaths that passed for pitches for the middle portion of the season, with good reason. Given long chains of passes were rare, it is hardly surprising so few goals resulted from them.

  There is, anyway, a startlingly obvious flaw in the arguments of those who would use Reep’s analysis to argue that direct football is more effective. His figures show that 91.5 percent of moves in the games he studied consisted of three received passes or fewer. If the number of passes in a chain before a goal made no difference, then logically the percentage of goals resulting from moves of three or fewer received passes would also be 91.5 percent. If direct football were more effective, this figure should be higher. Yet Bray concludes from Reep’s figures that ‘around 80 percent of all goals resulted from moves of three passes or fewer’. As has already been noted, Reep himself claimed that ‘only two goals out of nine came from moves which included more than three received passes’ (so seven out of nine, 77.8 percent, came from moves of three or fewer). Admittedly, Watford in 1981-82 scored 93.4 percent of their goals from moves of three received passes or fewer, but, then, only 72 of 106 goals at the 1982 World Cup (67.9 percent) resulted from moves of three passes or fewer.

  If, as those figures suggest, roughly 80 percent of goals result from moves of three received passes or fewer, but 91.5 percent of moves consist of three received passes or fewer, then it surely follows - even within the unsubtle parameters Reep sets out - that moves of three passes or fewer are less effective than those of four or more. And these figures do not even take into account the goals scored when long chains of passes have led to a dead-ball or a breakdown; or even the fact that a side holding possession and making their opponents chase is likely to tire less quickly, and so will be able to pick off exhausted opponents late on. It is, frankly, horrifying that a philosophy founded on such a basic misinterpretation of figures could have been allowed to become a cornerstone of English coaching. Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrong-headed pseudo-intellectualism is far worse.

  One significant statistic does emerge from the article Reep published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, although, as it runs counter to his thesis, it goes unremarked. At the 1958 World Cup, 1.3 percent of all moves comprised seven or more passes, as opposed to 0.7 percent in his selection of English league games (across all divisions) for 1957-58. At the 1962 World Cup, it was 2.3 percent compared to 1.3 percent in league games the previous season, and in 1966, 2.6 percent compared to 1.2 percent. That would seem to lead to two conclusions (in as much as any meaningful conclusions can be drawn from such a small sample). Firstly, that long chains of passes became increasingly common between 1958 and 1962, and secondly that international football - at the time surely still the pinnacle of the game - was roughly twice as likely to produce long chains of passes as club football. If long, direct play really were superior, surely there would be more of it the higher the level? Given the percentage of long chains of passes went up between the World Cups in Chile and England, it is not even that that disparity can be dismissed on the grounds of climate and the greater need to retain possession in hot weather (although Reep, anyway, shows no awareness of the possible implications of such outside agencies).

  That is not to say that direct football is wrong at all times, merely that fundamentalism in tactics tends to be as misguided as in any sphere. Tactics must rather be conditioned by circumstances and the players available. Reep’s apologists misinterpret the figures, but even if they had not, his method is so general as to be all but meaningless. Why would it follow that an approach suited to a Third Division match in Rotherham in December would be equally applicable to a World Cup game in Guadalajara in July? Part of the genius of the great tacticians is their ability to apply the right system at the right time. Even Alf Ramsey, adopting a more possession-based approach for the Mexico World Cup of 1970, acknowledged that.

  Still, Reep’s statistics supported Cullis’s instincts, and - in the English league at least - the two enjoyed a fruitful working relationship. ‘It helped me modify and improve points of tactics which were either costing us goals or reducing our scoring potential,’ Cullis said. He was also much taken by Reep’s isolation of the Position of Maximum Opportunity (POMO), an area a short distance from goal towards the back post from which a striking percentage of goals were scored, and into which Reep encouraged wingers to run. ‘Reep’s recordings of the Hungary match showed in exact detail the principles which I believed to be true,’ Cullis said. ‘He was able to establish in black and white the facts for which I was forced to trust my memory where, inevitably, some would become l
ost or confused.’

  Just as convinced that the 6-3 defeat to Hungary was illusory was Alf Ramsey, who played at right-back in that game, and scored England’s third goal from the penalty spot. He too noted how many of Hungary’s goals had come from long passes, and suggested, in a veiled criticism of Gil Merrick, the England goalkeeper, that they’d just had one of those days when every shot they took flew in. That is disingenuous, ignoring the fact that Hungary had thirty-five shots to England’s five, and the almost embarrassing ease with which Hungary kept possession from England in the second half, but it is intriguing. Perhaps it was simply a function of Ramsey’s blinkeredness when it came to foreigners (this, after all, was a man who once turned down the chance of watching Sleeping Beauty at the Bolshoi so as not to miss a screening of an Alf Garnett film at the British Embassy Club in Moscow), or perhaps, having developed as a player at a club whose style was not too far removed from that of the Hungarians, a side moreover in which forward players were encouraged to drop off to create space, he was simply not so awestruck as others by the technical and tactical mastery of his opponents. Ramsey, certainly, was not a man to be blinded by beauty.

  Given he led England to their only success, it seems bizarre that the general assessment of him should be so ambivalent. While there are those who look back on 1966 - as others before them had looked back to Chapman, or to the 2-3-5 - and see it as the blueprint for all football to come, and there are those who seem somehow to blame Ramsey for having such devotees, as if it were his fault that, having been successful, others without the wit to evolve should seek to copy him. Even as England won the World Cup, respect for him was grudging. ‘His detractors would point to his dissection of the game as though it were a laboratory animal, arguing that it robbed football of its poetry, reduced it to a science,’ as his biographer Dave Bowler put it. ‘It’s an assessment he would not disagree with, one which he might well take as a compliment. For he saw football as a tactical exercise, a mental as much as a physical sport.’ Not that he cared, but it did not help Ramsey’s reputation that he was so wilfully cussed.