Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  Soviet football seems to have become obsessed by Didi after the 1958 World Cup and, more particularly, by the lack of such playmakers in their own game. In the sixties there were only two: Biba and Gennady Gusarov of Dinamo Moscow.

  Crucially, Maslov was able to develop in his side an understanding of how best to make use of a playmaker, something that wasn’t always clear. Galinsky, for instance, recalls Beskov in 1968 responding to Gusarov’s retirement by attempting to retrain the forward Yuri Avrutsky as a playmaker. ‘He treated the role quite seriously,’ Galinsky wrote. ‘He was always finding space, offering himself to his team-mates, moving, and when he got the ball, executing good passes, but when he found space again he almost never got the ball back. I don’t know whether the players didn’t follow Beskov’s directions, or whether they weren’t clear enough, but often when Avrutsky was free of his marker the other players preferred to dribble with the ball or pass it forwards themselves. But in such a situation a playmaker is pointless. Even worse, he becomes a burden for his team because he isn’t marking any specific opponent while they are attacking.’

  It remains a common complaint, and the distrust of ‘luxury players’ remains widespread, at least in northern Europe. Galinksy was scathing of the special treatment granted them, but in his mockery he happened upon the truth. ‘Some coaches in football,’ he wrote, ‘interpret the playmaker to be something like a patient at a health resort. It might be all right to release one or two forwards from their defensive obligations, but to do the same with a midfielder? Is he Charlton or Didi?’

  Maslov’s solution was exactly that which had allowed Didi such freedom. It was the forgotten innovation, the one devised by Zezé Moreira and used by Brazil for the first time at the World Cup in 1954: zonal marking. It was the theory that had prepared the ground for Brazil’s blossoming in 1958 and 1962, but it didn’t find immediate favour in the USSR. The difficulty with zonal marking is that it requires organisation and understanding between defenders. It is not quite so easy as a defender merely picking up any player in his area. Two forwards could come into his zone, or over-manning in another zone could require him to track a forward outside his zone, which then requires another defender to pick up anybody coming into the zone the original defender has just vacated, and that is not something that can simply be improvised.

  An attempt by Nikolai Morozov to introduce zonal marking with the national team ahead of the 1966 World Cup was a failure. After six goals were conceded over the course of pre-World Cup friendlies against France and CSKA, Morozov became so paranoid that he ended up fielding five defenders, with a sweeper picking up the pieces behind the other four and the midfielders encouraged to drop deep whenever possession was lost, attacking only on the counter. The USSR reached the semi-final of that tournament, their best placing in a World Cup, but the ultra-defensive approach, which mimicked that of Helenio Herrera’s Internazionale, was never seen as anything other than a one-off solution to a particular problem.

  Maslov, though, remained convinced zonal marking was the right way to proceed, something that seems almost to have been for him almost an ethical principle. ‘Man-marking,’ he once said, ‘humiliates, insults and even morally oppresses the players who resort to it.’

  Biba didn’t pick up any specific opponent, but then neither did any other Dynamo midfielder. ‘Only Biba retains full rights of democracy,’ Maslov said. ‘He is a very clever and honest player, who would never allow himself any excess and never abuses his skills. Andriy will do exactly what is necessary. He has the right to construct the game as though he were the coach himself during the match, making decisions as to how to shape it. The others then grasp his ideas and develop them as far as they can.’

  Maslov believed that through good organisation, it was possible to over-man in every part of the pitch, an idea the journalist Georgiy Kuzmin suggested in Kiyevskiye Vedomosti that he took from basketball. With Biba in a free role, though, to do that he needed a fixed defensive point in his midfield to allow the full-backs to step up from the back four as required. That was provided by the veteran defender Vasyl Turyanchyk, who was deployed in front of the back four, becoming the first holding midfielder in Soviet football. His job, as Maslov put it, was to ‘break the waves’, presenting the first line of resistance to opposing forwards, while also to initiating Dynamo’s attacks. In other words, he played almost as József Zakariás had for Hungary. In that context, it helped that he had begun his career as a forward, but it is perhaps just as significant that, like Szabo and Medvid, he came from Zakarpattya, where the Hungarian influence was strong.

  Most crucially of all, though, Turyanchyk was instrumental in the application of the pressing game. Would Maslov have tried it - would he even have thought of it? - if he hadn’t had a player as commanding and with such a fine grasp of the geometry of the game? Given the absence of a diary or journals, it is impossible to say. As in his use of Biba, his genius was, having spotted the possibilities offered by Turyanchyk’s ability to step out from the back, to teach the rest of the team how best to make use of it. By the time Dynamo won their first title under Maslov in 1966, their midfield was hunting in packs, closing down opponents and seizing the initiative in previously unexpected areas of the pitch. The Moscow press was appalled, one newspaper printing a photograph of four Dynamo players converging on an opponent with the ball with the caption: ‘We don’t need this kind of football.’

  Pressing, demanding as it did almost constant movement from the midfielders, required supreme physical fitness, which may explain why it had not emerged earlier. Full-time professionalism was a prerequisite, as was a relatively sophisticated understanding of nutrition and condition. Dynamo had been noted for their physical fitness when they had won the title for the first time under Vyacheslav Solovyov in 1961, but Maslov took things to a new level. ‘He was the first Dynamo coach really to put an emphasis on the physical preparation of players,’ the midfielder Volodymyr Muntyan said. ‘Not Lobanovskyi as is often thought, but Maslov, although he did what felt right, whereas Lobanovskyi was acting on a scientific basis.’

  Dynamo Kyiv 1 Celtic 1, European Cup First Round Second Leg, Olympyskyi, Kyiv, 4 October 1967

  The statistics are telling. When Dynamo won the title in 1961, they conceded twenty-eight goals in thirty games, so they had a history of defensive soundness. The following season, when they were fifth, they let in forty-eight in forty-two, and in 1963, as they slipped to ninth, forty-eight in thirty-eight. Maslov arrived the following season, and twenty-nine goals were conceded in thirty-two games as Dynamo came sixth. They were runners-up in 1965, letting in twenty-two in thirty-two, and it got better in their three championship seasons: seventeen in thirty-six games in 1966, a staggering eleven in thirty-six in 1967 and twenty-five in thirty-eight in 1968. Not surprisingly, the debate over Maslov’s tactics soon abated. In his review of the 1967 season, Martin Merzhanov, the doyen of Soviet football journalism and the founder of Futbol magazine, wrote that ‘zonal defence, when defenders base their play on mutual understanding and mutual securing, and are dealing with not one concrete opponent but whoever comes into their zone, has proved far more efficient [than man-marking].’

  It was not, though, foolproof, and Dynamo’s 2-1 defeat to Shakhtar Donetsk in 1967 hinted at things to come. After leaving Dynamo, Lobanovskyi spent two seasons with Chornomorets Odessa before moving east to Shakhtar. In that time, his tactical thinking had evolved and, with the coach Oleg Oshenkov, he came up with a plan to combat Dynamo’s system. Where most sides sought to do no more than contain the champions, Lobanovskyi insisted Shakhtar should attack them, and so they adopted a 4-2-4, but with their two midfielders man-marking Muntyan and Szabo. That left Medvid, a less creative player, free, but that didn’t bother Lobanovskyi: although he wanted to blunt Dynamo’s cutting edge as far as possible, his greater concern was to overwhelm their defence by weight of numbers. The pattern was repeated in the European Cup that year when Dynamo, having beaten the holders Celt
ic in the first round, lost 3-2 on aggregate to the Polish champions Górnik Zabrze in the second, undone by the pace and mobility of Włodzimierz Lubański and Zygfryd Szołtysik.

  Still, those were rare examples, and Dynamo, regularly changing their approach according to the opposition - something extremely rare at the time - proved adept at dealing with the many stylistic variations presented by the Soviet League. ‘This team has something like two different squads,’ Galinsky wrote. ‘One is fighting, engaging in a frank power struggle if that is offered by the opponent, while the other plays in the “southern” technical, combinational style, at an arrhythmic tempo. But the transformation from one squad to the other happens very simply at Dynamo. One or two changes before the match and sometimes even one substitution in the course of it is enough. They can go straight from the southern style to a much more simple game with runs down the flanks, crosses, shots and long aerial balls.’

  Maslov would have gone further. Having instigated the move to just two forwards, he speculated that a time would come when sides only used one up front. ‘Football,’ he explained, ‘is like an aeroplane. As velocities increase, so does air resistance, and so you have to make the head more stream-lined.’ In terms of range, novelty and success, his work is extraordinary enough as it is, but there was one more step he wanted to take. His conception would be realised soon enough by Dynamo and by Ajax, but it never quite came to fruition under his management, although, by instituting zonal marking and pressing he had lain the groundwork.

  In October 1981, Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo beat Zenit Leningrad 3-0 to win the Soviet title for the tenth time. A piece in Sportyvna Hazeta eulogising their fluidity of movement in that game and over that season makes the progression clear: ‘Viktor Maslov dreamt once of creating a team that could attack with different groups of players. For instance [Anatoliy] Byshovets and [Vitaliy] Khmelnytskyi would start the match battering the opposition defence, but then at some point they could drop back into midfield and their places could be taken by, say, Muntyan and Serebryanykov. But at that time such a way of playing didn’t come together. It is an achievement of the present day.’

  And yet every now and again Maslov’s players did, by chance or by instinct, switch positions. ‘The 4-4-2 system introduced by Grandad was only a formal order; in the course of the game there was complete inter-changeability,’ Szabo said. ‘For example, any defender could press forward without fear because he knew that a team-mate would cover him if he were unable to return in time. Midfielders and forwards could allow themselves a much wider variety of actions than before. This team played the prototype of Total Football. People think it was developed in Holland, but that is just because in Western Europe they didn’t see Maslov’s Dynamo.’

  Maslov was eventually sacked in 1970 as Dynamo slipped to seventh in the table. In 1966, with several members of the squad away at the World Cup, he had managed to maintain Dynamo’s league form because of the emergence of a number of players from the youth team. In 1970, he found no such reserves. ‘Any coach’s fate depends on results,’ said the defender Viktor Matviyenko. ‘After the spring half of the season we were second in the table, and I’m sure Grandad would have kept his job if we’d have maintained that position to the end. He just needed to repeat the experience of 1966 when the outstanding youth players kept the players who had come back from England out of the squad. It was a similar situation in 1970. The Dynamo players who were at the World Cup in Mexico were absent for a month and a half, and played only a couple of games. They lost more there than they gained simply because they had no match practice. But Grandad didn’t take it into account and brought straight back players who had lost their sharpness, and so we began to fall in the standings.’

  Perhaps that was understandable. Maslov had, after all, been at the club for seven years, and the feeling was that he had perhaps gone stale. The manner of his dismissal, though, leaves a sour taste; Koman called it ‘the most disgraceful episode in Dynamo’s history’. It was decided that it was more politically expedient to dismiss him away from Kyiv, and so when, towards the end of the 1970 season, Dynamo travelled to Moscow for a game against CSKA, they were joined by Mizyak, the deputy head of the Ukrainian SSR State Sport Committee. He usually had a responsibility for winter sports, but in the Hotel Russia before the game, he made the official announcement that Maslov had been removed from his position.

  With Maslov sitting in the stand and no replacement appointed, Dynamo lost 1-0. After the game, as the team bus carried the players to the airport for the flight back to Kyiv, they stopped at the Yugo-Zapadnaya metro station and dropped Maslov off. As he walked away, he looked back over his shoulder and slowly raised a hand in farewell. ‘If I hadn’t seen it myself,’ Koman said, ‘I’d never have believed a giant like Maslov could have wept.’

  Maslov returned to Torpedo, and won the cup with them, and then had a season in Armenia with Ararat Yerevan, where he again won the cup, but he never had the resources - or perhaps the energy - to repeat the successes of Dynamo. By the time he died, aged sixty-seven, in May 1977, Lobanovskyi, the player he had exiled, was ensuring his legacy lived on. His impact was perhaps less direct than that of Jimmy Hogan, but no coach since has been so influential.

  Nereo Rocco, one of the pioneers of catenaccio (PA Photos)

  Helenio Herrera, the grand wizard of catenaccio (PA Photos)

  Ronnie Simpson claims a cross as Celtic beat Inter in the 1967 European Cup final (Getty Images)

  César Luis Menotti, who won the World Cup with his reinterpretation of la nuestra … (Getty Images)

  … and his ideological opposite, Carlos Bilardo, who won the World Cup after devising 3-5-2 (PA Photos)

  Rinus Michels on the Dutch bench at the 1974 World Cup … … and Johan Cruyff, with whom he developed Total Football (both pics © Getty Images)

  The two schools of Soviet football, Eduard Malofeev (left) and Valeriy Lobanovskyi (right) (Igor Utkin)

  Sacha Prokopenko: playboy and player (both pics © Dinamo Sports Society)

  Graham Taylor, who introduced pressing to the English game, and Elton John, his chairman at Watford (Getty Images)

  Arrigo Sacchi makes a point to Marco van Basten (PA Photos)

  Pelé heads home the opener in the 1970 World Cup final (Getty Images)

  Mario Zagallo, the coach who oversaw the greatest display of football’s pre-systemic age (Getty Images)

  The last of the old-style play makers, Juan Roman Riquelme … (Rex Pictures)

  … and Luka Modrić, the first of the new (PA Photos)

  Chapter Ten

  Catenaccio

  ∆∇ There is no tactical system so notorious as catenaccio. To generations, the word - which means ‘chain’, in the sense of a chain on a house door - summons up Italian football at its most paranoid, negative and brutal. So reviled was it in Britain that when Jock Stein’s Celtic beat Helenio Herrera’s Internazionale, its prime exponents, in the European Cup final of 1967, the Liverpool manager Bill Shankly congratulated him by insisting the victory had made him ‘immortal’. It later emerged that he had instructed two Celtic coaches to sit behind the Inter bench and abuse Herrera throughout the game. Herrera would always insist he was misunderstood, that his system, like Herbert Chapman’s, had acquired an unfavourable reputation only because other, lesser sides attempting to copy his team’s style implemented it so badly. That remains debatable but, sinister as catenaccio became, its origins were homely.

  It began in Switzerland with Karl Rappan. Softly-spoken, understated and noted for his gentle dignity, Rappan was born in Vienna in 1905, his professional career as a forward or attack-minded half coinciding with the golden age of Viennese football in the mid-to late twenties. So rooted was he in coffee-house society that later in life he ran the Café de la Bourse in Geneva. He was capped for Austria and won the league with Rapid Vienna in 1930, after which he moved to Switzerland to become player-coach at Servette. His players there were semi-professional and so, according
to Walter Lutz, the doyen of Swiss sportswriting, Rappan set about devising a way of compensating for the fact that they could not match fully professional teams for physical fitness.

  ‘With the Swiss team tactics play an important role,’ Rappan said in a rare interview with World Soccer magazine shortly before the World Cup in 1962. ‘The Swiss is not a natural footballer, but he is usually sober in his approach to things. He can be persuaded to think ahead and to calculate ahead.

  ‘A team can be chosen according to two points of view. Either you have eleven individuals, who owing to sheer class and natural ability are enabled to beat their opponents - Brazil would be an example of that - or you have eleven average footballers, who have to be integrated into a particular conception, a plan. This plan aims at getting the best out of each individual for the benefit of the team. The difficult thing is to enforce absolute tactical discipline without taking away the players’ freedom of thinking and acting.’

  His solution, which was given the name verrou - bolt - by a Swiss journalist, is best understood as a development from the old 2-3-5 - which had remained the default formation in Vienna long after Chapman’s W-M had first emerged in England. Rather than the centre-half dropping in between the two full-backs, as in the W-M, the two wing-halves fell back to flank them. They retained an attacking role, but their primary function was to combat the opposition wingers. The two full-backs then became in effect central defenders, playing initially almost alongside each other, although in practice, if the opposition attacked down their right, the left of the two would move towards the ball, with the right covering just behind, and vice versa. In theory, that always left them with a spare man - the verouller as the Swiss press of the time called him, or the libero as he would become - at the back.