Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  Nonetheless, as time went by, Ramsey’s pragmatism became increasingly wearing. McIlvanney spoke for many when he noted caustically, after the 3-1 defeat at home to West Germany in 1972, that ‘cautious, joyless football was scarcely bearable even while it was bringing victories. When it brings defeat there can only be one reaction.’ As England, thanks to Jan Tomaszewski’s heroics for Poland at Wembley, failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup, Ramsey was sacked.

  For all the terseness of his dealings with the media, the antipathy to Ramsey was rooted in a re-casting of the old tension between aesthetics and results. There was no question on which side Ramsey lay. He despised Argentina’s approach, and his sides were certainly not guilty of the excesses of anti-fútbol, but he would have agreed with Osvaldo Zubeldía’s thoughts on the role of a manager. ‘I’m employed to win football matches,’ Ramsey said. ‘That’s all.’

  Chapter Nine

  The Birth of the New

  ∆∇ Perhaps all football pundits are condemned to reiterate the fears of their forbears. Take the following two examples: ‘Speed was made a fetish. Quick was equal to good - no, better’; ‘hurried clearances… the panicky power game… the terror of failure, the inability to keep the ball and stay calm, the howling from without that freezes the blood and saps all creativity’. The first is Willy Meisl writing in 1957, the second Martin Samuel in The Times two days after the 3-2 defeat to Croatia in 2007 that confirmed England would not qualify for Euro 2008. Both, of course, are right in highlighting the principle failing of the English game: if something goes wrong for England it tends to be rooted in a mistrust of technique, and that was as true a century ago as it is today and at all points in between.

  And yet complaints about speed are relative. If the English game in the mid-fifties was too quick for Meisl’s tastes, what on earth would he have made of the Premiership in the early years of the third millennium? To look at videos from the years immediately following the Second World War is to see a game played almost in slow motion by the standards of the modern game - and it is getting quicker. Watch the Hungarians of the fifties or the Brazilians of the sixties and what is noticeable to the modern eye is how long players have on the ball - and not just because their technical ability gave them instant control. It is simply that nobody closes them down. A player receiving the ball had time to assess his options. The dribbling technique of Garrincha or Stanley Matthews doesn’t exist in today’s game, not because the skills have been lost, but because no side would ever give them the three or four yards of acceleration room they needed before their feints became effective. Would they have been great players in today’s game? Probably, but not by dribbling like that.

  It is that diminution of space, that compression of the game - pressing, in other words - that marks out modern football from old. It is such a simple idea that once one side had started doing it, and had had success by doing so, it is baffling that everybody did not follow them, and yet the spread of pressing is curiously patchy. It arrived in Germany only in the nineties. When Arrigo Saachi imposed it on AC Milan in the late eighties, it was hailed as ground-breaking, yet Rinus Michels’s Ajax and Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv - even Graham Taylor’s Watford - had been using it for years. It was central, too, to the success of the Argentinian side Estudiantes de la Plata under Osvaldo Zubeldía in the late sixties. It was invented, though, by a Russian working in Ukraine, by a coach virtually unknown today outside the former Soviet bloc. The game’s evolution, of course, is not linear, and there are others who have had significant roles to play, but if there is a single man who can claim to be the father of modern football, it is Viktor Maslov.

  He was an unlikely revolutionary, noted at the time less for his vision or any kind of explosive leadership than for his warmth. ‘It always intrigued me that he was known as Grandad,’ said Mykhaylo Koman, probably Dynamo’s best forward of the fifties. ‘The players who played under him could have been his sons, but he was far too young for them to have been his grandsons. It seems the nickname had stuck before he arrived in Kyiv, and that it had nothing to do with his age. Maybe the way he looked contributed to his grandfatherly image: he was of plump constitution, had a bald head, and thick, bushy eyebrows. Still, the main reason for the name was his colossal wisdom, humanity and kindness.’

  Born in Moscow in 1910, Maslov had been one of the leading players of the early years of the Soviet league, a robust and authoritative half capable of a wide range of passing. He was in the Torpedo side that finished second in the Moscow championship in 1934 and 1935, and then captained the club between 1936 and 1939, leading them to victory in an international tournament in France in 1938. After ending his playing career in 1942, he took over as coach of Torpedo, and had four spells in charge of them before leaving for Rostov-na-Donu in 1962. The last of those, beginning in 1957, was by far the most successful, as Maslov led Torpedo twice to second place in the Soviet league and, in 1960, to their first championship. It was after arriving at Dynamo Kyiv in 1964, though, that he really began to give free rein to his ideas, as he wrenched the centre of Soviet football from Moscow to the Ukrainian capital.

  Avuncular he may have been, but a feat like that was not achieved without a certain toughness and an ability to play the political game. He, for instance, made the most of the love Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, who ran the Ukrainian Communist Party central committee’s ideological department, had for football (Lobanovskyi maintained the strong relations after Shcherbytskyi had become head of the party in Ukraine). Dynamo had always been able to recruit from across the republic - Dynamo’s side in the fifties, for instance, included several players from Zakarpattya - but under Maslov almost all the best Ukrainian players gravitated to Dynamo, attracted by apartments in Kyiv and other benefits that could be conferred by the Party leadership.

  At the same time, though, he was strong enough to maintain his independence. On one occasion, Kyiv legend has it, the assistant of a senior party official came to berate the team at half-time of a game in which they were playing badly. ‘Tomorrow I have a free day,’ Maslov is supposed to have said as he shepherded him to the door. ‘I’ll come and see your boss then and answer all his questions. As for today … could you close the door on your way out?’ The tale may be apocryphal - there is no agreement as to the game at which the incident happened or which functionary was involved - but the fact that it is widely repeated suggests a basic truth behind it.

  ‘We appreciated Grandad first for his human qualities and only second as a coach,’ said Andriy Biba, Dynamo’s captain between 1964 and 1967. ‘And for his part, he looked at us first of all as people with all our positives and negatives, and only after that as footballers. He managed his relations with the players in such a manner, and was so sincere with us that it was impossible to have any bad feelings against him. He trusted us and we responded in the same way.’

  Perhaps that was true for those who were members of the inner circle, but Eduard Streltsov, the great star of Maslov’s Torpedo side before his imprisonment in 1958 on a - possibly trumped-up - charge of rape, remembers a different side to him. ‘If Maslov disliked any of his players,’ he said, ‘he could never hide his antipathy.’

  Either way, there is no doubting that, to those with whom he did get on, Maslov was an inspirational figure. ‘His pre-match instructions lasted no more than five minutes,’ Biba went on. ‘He could never remember things properly, and he distorted the names of opposing players hopelessly, but he was always precise in telling us how to counteract their strengths. He would always finish with an aphorism to touch our hearts: “Today you must be strong like lions, fast like stags, agile like panthers!” And we would always do our best…’

  Certainly there was in him none of the authoritarianism that would later characterise Lobanovskyi, his greatest disciple. Rather, he was willing to discuss and compromise, and on occasions even seemingly to be over-ruled by his players, as Arkady Galinsky, one of the most popular football journalists of the sixties and
seventies, recalled. ‘At one of Torpedo’s league matches I was sitting close to the pitch and the reserve bench,’ he wrote. ‘The team wasn’t doing well and the coach decided to substitute one of his players… The substitute took off his coat and tracksuit and after a short warm-up, he went to the half-way line, waiting to replace one of his team-mates the next time the referee stopped the game.

  ‘It was just as usually happens in football. But what happened next I found extremely interesting. The Torpedo captain, the well-known forward [Valentin] Ivanov, came running over to this player after the referee had whistled and told him the team needed no substitute. After spending some time in confusion, the reserve player returned to the bench. I glanced at the coach: how would he react? But he simply shrugged his shoulders, looking indifferent to what had happened.

  ‘I supposed this to be an attempt to motivate the player who was to be substituted, pre-conceived by the coach and the captain, but it appeared after the match that the team had simply rejected the substitution proposed by the coach. I have never seen anything like this in football before. A few years later I witnessed the same episode once again. The match was played at the same stadium - the Central Lenin Stadium [now the Luzhniki] in Moscow - the coach was the same, only the team was different: Dynamo Kyiv. Once again Maslov expressed no emotion.’

  During his time as the Kyiv correspondent of Sovetsky Sport, Galinsky became noted for his pro-Moscow sympathies. He was critical of Dynamo’s use of a zonal marking system, and seems to have had various personal spats with Maslov, who, however Biba saw it, had a tendency to be at times rather more ‘sincere’ than tactful. Galinksy’s conclusion, though, was that the two incidents were indicative not of any weakness on Maslov’s part, but rather of his strength. ‘He understood that the players rejected the substitution not to undermine his authority,’ he wrote, ‘but for the benefit of the affair. Dynamo players - like the Torpedo ones formerly - were telling their coach: don’t worry, everything is OK, we’ll soon turn the game in our favour. And that was what happened in both cases.’

  Consultation was a key part of the Maslov method. The evening before games he would gather together his squad - or the senior players at least - to talk through the next day’s match, canvassing their thoughts before drawing up his final game plan. It was that level of trust and mutual understanding that allowed Maslov to implement his more radical tactical innovations. And they were radical, almost incomprehensibly so in the context of the times.

  In the early sixties, the USSR, like most of the world, had begun to turn to the 4-2-4, a process pioneered by the national coach Gavriil Kachalin. He had led the USSR to victory at the 1956 Olympics and to success in the inaugural European Championship with a W-M, but he had seen in Brazil’s performances in the 1958 World Cup the way football was headed. Several club coaches followed his lead and, for once, the habitually conservative Soviet establishment supported his experiments. The change, or at least the pace with which it had been imposed, was widely blamed for the USSR’s disjointed showing at the 1962 World Cup, when they beat Yugoslavia and Uruguay but went out in the quarter-final against Chile, but the Brazilian method was so in vogue that Konstantin Beskov, Kachalin’s successor, continued to insist he was using a 4-2-4 when he had actually reverted to a W-M for his eighteen months in the job.

  Maslov was rather more astute than Beskov. Like Sir Alf Ramsey, he recognised how important Zagallo had been to Brazil’s success, tracking back to become a third midfielder. Maslov went one further, and pulled back his right-winger as well. Ramsey is regularly given the credit (or the blame) for abolishing the winger and, given the lack of communication between the USSR and the West in those days, there is no suggestion he did not come up with the idea independently, but the 4-4-2 was first invented by Maslov.

  Like Ramsey, though, and unlike so many who followed, Maslov withdrew his wingers in such a way that it did not impinge upon his side’s creative capacity. The likes of Andriy Biba, Viktor Serebryanykov and Josef Szabo all began their careers as forwards before being converted into midfielders by Maslov, and they and more orthodox halves such as Volodymyr Muntyan and Fedir Medvid retained a creative brief, functioning almost as a second line of attack. There were, though, casualties. Maslov may have coached by consensus, but he could be ruthless when he saw a player who did not fit his system. Former stars such as Viktor Kanevskyi and Oleh Bazylevych were swiftly dispensed with, and so too, most controversially, was Lobanovskyi.

  Quite why Maslov and Lobanovskyi fell out - if indeed they did - remains unclear. Their conceptions of football were very different but, if Galinsky is to be believed, there was also a personal antagonism. Then again, it should be borne in mind that Galinsky was one of the prime movers in attempting to lure Lobanovskyi away from Ukraine to Moscow, so his evidence may not be entirely objective. According to his version of events, the problems flared after a training camp on the Caucasian Black Sea coast ahead of the 1964 season.

  ‘Everything seemed to be going well,’ Galinsky wrote. ‘The players seemed to be fond of their new coach, the team had worked well, and Maslov seemed pleased with Lobanovskyi.’ On the flight home, though, bad weather forced Dynamo’s aeroplane to land at Symferopol. Their departure was repeatedly postponed, until eventually Maslov ordered lunch. To the amazement of the players, he also ordered them each a glass of horilka - Ukrainian vodka.

  ‘They couldn’t believe their eyes,’ Galinsky. ‘Nothing like this had been seen before at Dynamo. Maslov proposed a toast to good luck in the coming season. Everybody drank to it, apart from Lobanovskyi, who didn’t even touch his glass. Seeing this, Maslov asked him to drink to the team’s success. When Lobanovskyi again refused to do so, Maslov cursed him. Lobanovskyi swore back at him.’ From then on, Galinsky claimed, there was bad blood between them.

  Kanevskyi, though, insists Galinsky has exaggerated the episode. He was at the meal and agrees there was horilka and that everybody apart from the fastidious Lobanovskyi drank the toast, but he also maintains that Lobanovskyi’s strict self-discipline was well known, even admired, and that Maslov was unconcerned by his abstinence. ‘Maslov said nothing to him,’ he recalled, ‘and certainly he didn’t use any insulting words.’

  Others believe their relationship broke down during a game in Moscow against Spartak on 27 April 1964. Lobanovskyi had given Dynamo the lead, and they were still 1-0 up when he was substituted - for the first time in his career - with twenty minutes to go. Spartak then equalised and the game ended in a draw, leading to speculation that Maslov had arranged the result in advance with the Spartak coach Nikita Simonyan, and that Lobanovskyi was taken off because he had refused to go along with their agreement. True or not, the next game, away to Shinnik in Yaroslavl, was Lobanovskyi’s last for the club.

  Then again, it may be there was no falling out. Maslov was just as swift to get rid of Mikhail Gershkovich, David Pays and Grigory Yanets - all leading players - when he returned to Torpedo in 1971, apparently for no other reason than that they did not fit his system, and it is easy to see why Lobanovskyi would not have fitted Maslov’s plans, whatever Galinsky may say. Nicknamed ‘Cord’ in the Moscow press because of the way the ball at times appeared to be tied to his boot-laces, Lobanovskyi was a genuine star, talented and popular with the crowd. On his death in 2002, several messages of condolence from fans recalled how they had gone to Dynamo games in the early sixties excited by the prospect of watching him take corners packed with backspin so they dropped almost vertically in the box - a variant of the ‘falling leaf’ free-kicks devised by Didi a few years earlier. The problem was that he was a left-winger, and wingers had no place in Maslov’s plan.

  ‘I’d not call what happened between Maslov and Lobanovskyi a conflict,’ Biba explained. ‘It was just that Valeriy often opposed the coach’s directions. Maslov was seeking new forms of football and footballers who held on to the ball for too long didn’t suit him. Even the “banana shot” invented by Lobanovskyi couldn’t persuade him. But t
hen, after becoming a coach, Valeriy acknowledged that Lobanovskyi the player could not have played in his team.’ This was the debate raised by Mihkail Yakushin’s preference for the collective over the individualism of a Stanley Matthews taken to its logical extreme. No matter how talented the individual, if they did not function as part of the collective, they had no place within it.

  That is not to say that Maslov was opposed to great individuals per se. On the contrary, Biba was one of the most gifted midfielders Ukraine has ever produced, functioning in Maslov’s system as Bobby Charlton did in Ramsey’s England side. ‘When he gets the ball, he knows in advance what his team-mates and his opponents are going to do,’ said Iosif Betsa, who was part of the USSR team that won gold at the 1956 Olympics and who went on to become a respected coach. ‘He has a plan of his next actions and with his first touch puts the ball in a comfortable position to execute it quickly. And if the opponent has guessed his intentions, he changes the direction of the attack immediately. At the same time, Biba possesses a magnificent long shot and can finish off attacks arriving in the right place at just the right time.’

  Biba reached his peak in 1966. In the spring he beat Lev Yashin with a 40-yard drive in a game against Dinamo Moscow; he was superb in the crucial 4-0 victory over CSKA in the autumn, setting up two of Dynamo’s goals; and he rounded off the year with the decisive goal in the Cup final victory over Torpedo as Dynamo won the double. He was the creative hub of the team and, to widespread agreement, he was named Soviet Player of the Year.