Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  Juve developed the metodo at roughly the same time as the national coach Vittorio Pozzo, but Cesarini had a very specific role in it, often man-marking the opponents’ most creative player. Not surprisingly, when he returned to Argentina in 1935 - initially as a player with Chacarita, and then with River - he brought those ideas with him. Cesarini is often described as having introduced the W-M to Argentina, but, like Dori Kürschner in Brazil, his version of it would not have been recognised as such in Britain. Rather what he brought was the metodo, as he deployed Néstor Rossi, a forward-thinking centre-half, slightly deeper than the wing-halves, in the manner of Luisito Monti (himself, of course, an oriundo). Although Rossi had to provide defensive cover, the ‘Howler of the Americas’ - as fans dubbed him for the ferocity of his organisational shouting - was also expected to initiate attacks. ‘Rossi was my idol,’ said the great holding midfielder Antonio Rattín, who was Argentina’s captain at the 1966 World Cup. ‘I tried to do everything Rossi did. Not just the way he played, but the way he yelled, the way he moved, the way he did everything. My first game for Boca Juniors was against River. I was nineteen, he was thirty-one. The first thing I did after that first match, which we won 2-1, was to get a picture with him.’

  From the late twenties, inside-forwards in both Uruguay and Argentina had begun pulling deep from the front line, but under Cesarini, River took such movement to extremes. The front five of - reading from right to left - Félix Loustau, Ángel Labruna, Adolfo Pedernera, José Moreno and Juan Carlos Muñoz became fabled (although they only played as a quintet eighteen times over a five-year period). Rather than the two inside-forwards withdrawing, it was Moreno and Pedernera who dropped off into the space in front of the half-line. Loustau, meanwhile, patrolled the whole of the right flank, becoming known as a ‘ventilador-wing’ - ‘fan-wing’ (‘puntero-ventilador’ is used, but the half-English term seems more common) - because he was a winger who gave air to the midfield by doing some of their running for them.

  La Máquina

  Loustau’s running meant that Norberto Yácono, the nominal right-half, could be given a more defensive brief, and he became known as ‘The Stamp’ for the way he would stick to the player he was marking. (Everybody and everything at the time, it seems, had nicknames, an indication perhaps of how central football was to popular culture and everyday conversation in Argentina at the time.) As other teams replicated Yácono’s role, Argentinian football gradually developed what was effectively a third-back, but rather than it being the centre-half, the No. 5, dropping in between the two full-backs (Nos. 2 and 3), it was the right-half, the No. 4, operating to the right of them. When 4-2-4 was adopted in the aftermath of 1958, it was - as elsewhere - the left-half, the No. 6, who moved back into a central defensive position, alongside the No. 2 and with the No. 3 to his left, while the centre-half, the No. 5, remained as a holding midfielder. (Even today in Argentina, positions tend to be known by their numbers, so Rattín, for instance, was a ‘five’, while Osvaldo Ardiles was an ‘eight’.) So, where a typical English back four would read, from right-to-left, 2, 5, 6, 3, an Argentinian one would read 4, 2, 6, 3.

  In Uruguay, meanwhile, where there was no corresponding movement of the right-half backwards, and so no consequent shuffle of the two full-backs to the left. When the 2-3-5 (or the metodo) became 4-2-4, the two wing-halves simply dropped straight in as wide defenders (what would in Britain today be called full-backs), and a back-four there would read, 4, 2, 3, 6, although the 2 would often - as Matías González had in the 1950 World Cup final - play behind the other three defenders as a sweeper, thus replicating the numbering system in the Swiss verrou.

  Cesarini’s River side, la Máquina, became the most revered exponents of la nuestra. ‘You play against la Máquina with the intention of winning,’ said Ernesto Lazzatti, the Boca Juniors No. 5, ‘but as an admirer of football sometimes I’d rather stay in the stands and watch them play.’ As befits the self-conscious romanticism of the Argentinian game at the time, though, River were not relentless winners. Although they were, by general consent, the best side in the country, between 1941 and 1945 River won just three titles, twice finishing second to Boca. ‘They called us the “Knights of Anguish” because we didn’t look for the goal,’ said Muñoz. ‘We never thought we couldn’t score against our rivals. We went out on the pitch and played our way: take the ball, give it to me, a gambeta, this, that and the goal came by itself. Generally it took a long time for the goal to come and the anguish was because games were not settled quickly. Inside the box, of course, we wanted to score, but in the midfield we had fun. There was no rush. It was instinctive.’ La Máquina was a very different machine to that of Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal.

  Numbering in the 4-2-4

  As such, they were the perfect representatives of the Argentinian golden age, when football came as close as it ever would to Danny Blanchflower’s ideal of the glory game. Isolation - brought about by war and Perónist foreign policy - meant there were no defeats to international sides to provoke a re-think, and so Argentinian football went ever further down the road of aestheticism.

  It may have been insular, but that is not to say that the impression of superiority was necessarily illusory. On the odd occasion when foreign opposition was met, it tended to be beaten. Over the winter of 1946-47, for instance, San Lorenzo toured the Iberian peninsular, playing eight games in Spain and two in Portugal. They won five, lost just once, and scored forty-seven goals. ‘What would have happened if Argentina had played in the World Cup at that time?’ asked the forward René Pontoni. ‘I feel like I have a thorn stuck in my side that has not gone away over the years. I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I believe that if we’d been able to take part, we’d have taken the laurels.’

  Victory in the representative game over England in 1953 seemed only to confirm what everybody in Argentina had suspected: that their form of the game was the best in the world, and that they were the best exponents of it. Who, after all, was leading Real Madrid’s domination of the European Cup but Alfredo di Stéfano, brought up in the best traditions of la nuestra at River? That conclusion was corroborated as Argentina won the Copa América in 1955 and retained it in Peru two years later.

  That latter side bubbled with young talent, the forward-line of Omar Corbatta, Humberto Maschio, Antonio Angelillo, Omar Sívori and Osvaldo Cruz playing with a mischievous verve that earned them the nickname ‘The Angels with Dirty Faces’. They scored eight against Colombia, three against Ecuador, four against Uruguay, six against Chile and three against Brazil. They lost their final game to the hosts, but by then the title was won and Argentina’s isolation emphatically over. They weren’t just back: they were the best side in South America, and possibly the world.

  By the time of 1958 World Cup, though, Maschio, Angelillo and Sívori had moved to Serie A, and all three ended up playing international football for Italy. Di Stéfano, similarly, had thrown in his lot with Spain. Come Sweden, Argentina were so desperate for forwards that for cover they were forced to turn to Labruna, who was by then approaching his fortieth birthday. A 3-1 defeat to the defending champions West Germany was no disgrace, but it did suggest Argentina weren’t quite as good as they had believed themselves to be. ‘We went in wearing a blindfold,’ Rossi admitted.

  Still, self-confidence was restored as they came from behind to beat Northern Ireland 3-1 in their second game. They ended with party-pieces - ‘taking the mickey’ said the Northern Ireland midfielder Jimmy McIlroy - but the warning signs were there. Northern Ireland had been told of Argentina’s great tradition, of the skill and the pace and the power of their forward play, but what they found, McIlroy said, was ‘a lot of little fat men with stomachs, smiling at us and pointing and waving at girls in the crowd’.

  That left Argentina needing a draw in their final group game against Czechoslovakia to progress. Czechoslovakia didn’t even make it to the quarter-finals, losing in a playoff to Northern Ireland, but they blew Argentina away. ‘We were use
d to playing really slowly, and they were fast,’ said José Ramos Delgado, who was in the squad for the tournament but didn’t play. ‘We hadn’t played international football for a long time, so when we went out there we thought we were really talented, but we found we hadn’t followed the pace of the rest of the world. We had been left behind. The European teams played simply. They were precise. Argentina were good on the ball, but we didn’t go forwards.’

  Milan Dvorák put Czechoslovakia ahead after eight minutes with an angled drive, and before half-time Argentina were three down as individual errors handed two goals to Zdenek Zikán. Oreste Corbatta pulled one back from the penalty spot, but Jiri Feureisl had restored the three-goal margin within four minutes, before two late strikes from Václav Hovorka completed a 6-1 humiliation.

  ‘If I had to look for an explanation to explain such a bad performance, I would sum it up with one word: disorganisation,’ said the goalkeeper Amadeo Carrizo. ‘We travelled to Sweden on a flight that took something like forty hours. It was not the best way to start. Compare that to Brazil, who went in a private plane and after making a tour in which the team adapted their tactics. The football was disorganised as well. We didn’t know anything about our rivals. The Czechs scored four goals past me that were identical. They pulled a cross back and it was a goal. They pulled another cross back and it was another goal. They grew tired of scoring in that way. We stepped off the plane thinking it would all be easy for us. We came back having made it all easy for everybody else.’

  The reaction was furious. Players were pelted with coins and vegetables at Buenos Aires airport, and the coach, Guillermo Stábile, who had been in charge since 1941, was dismissed. ‘He didn’t know about tactics,’ said the historian Juan Presta. ‘He just picked the best players and told them to play. He was a romantic.’

  ‘It was terrible,’ Ramos Delgado recalled. ‘In every stadium, we were abused by everyone; even those of us who had not played. The national team had to be modified. A different kind of player was looked for, players who were more about sacrifice than play. Football became less of an art after that.’

  The reaction against la nuestra was brutal. There was a realisation that the metodo was outdated, but the backlash went far further than a simple switch to a 4-2-4. Crowds for league matches fell sharply, partly because of a sense of disillusionment, and partly because the growing middle-class began watching games on television rather than at the stadiums. Clubs, which had enjoyed state support under Perón, lost their subsidies. Many turned to foreign talent in an attempt to woo back spectators with exoticism, further diluting the culture of la nuestra, but, most crucially of all, the ethos changed. With the financial stakes raised, football became less about the spectacle than about winning, or at least, not losing. As in Italy in the late twenties, the result was that tactics became increasingly negative.

  ‘It was then that European discipline appeared,’ said the philosopher Tomás Abraham. ‘That was the way that modernity, which implies discipline, physical training, hygiene, health, professionalism, sacrifice, all the Fordism entered Argentinian football. There came these methods for physical preparation that gave importance to defence - and who had cared about defence before? It’s a strange thing that it should come then, in parallel with the Brazilian triumph, which really should be an argument for our own local football.’

  Boca, at least, did try to repeat the Brazilian success, appointing Vicente Feola, although he lasted only a season before being replaced by José D’Amico. Feola brought with him two Peruvians and six Brazilians, the most significant of whom was probably Orlando, his World Cup-winning central defender from 1958. ‘It was Orlando who introduced us to the idea of a caged No. 6, sitting in defence rather than in midfield,’ said Rattín. ‘Feola was unlucky. Under him we kept hitting the post or missing penalties, and then D’Amico won the championship with the same team.’

  The triumph of 1962, sealed with a 1-0 victory over River as Antonio Roma saved a late penalty, was achieved with a 4-3-3, but with Alberto González operating as a ventilador-wing (or tornante, as the Italians would have called him), tracking back to become a fourth midfielder to add solidity. That defensive resolve reached its apogee two years later as, under Pedernera, Boca won the title again, conceding just fifteen goals in thirty games - only six in their final twenty-five - and scoring a mere thirty-five. Pedernera may have been a member of la Máquina, but he was unapologetic about his side’s approach. ‘The Bohemian from before doesn’t exist anymore,’ he said. ‘Today the message is clear: if you win, you are useful, if you lose, you are not.’ Significantly, Boca proved just as useful overseas, going unbeaten through an eight-game tour of Europe in 1963.

  The Independiente coach Manuel Giúdice, who led his side to the league title in 1960 and 1963, and then to successive Libertadores triumphs, was more of a traditionalist, but even his side were known for their garra - their ‘claw’, forcefulness or fighting spirit. ‘Independiente and Boca in the early sixties were very strong marking sides and played a lot on the counter-attack,’ said Ramos Delgado.

  ‘There’s a first modernity there,’ said Abraham. ‘For many years this would divide Argentinian football between those who want to keep the tradition and those who insist that we’ve been left behind.’ That would find its most famous manifestation in the disputes between Carlos Bilardo and César Luis Menotti, but it existed earlier, most notably in the tension between Labruna, who coached at River and Rosario Central, and Juan Carlos Lorenzo, who led the Spanish side Real Mallorca to successive promotions and then interspersed spells with San Lorenzo with several years in Italy. He was unequivocal about his methods. ‘How do you beat a team that has a great forward?’ Lorenzo asked. ‘Very simple. If you don’t want somebody to eat, you have to stop the food coming out of the kitchen. I don’t send somebody to mark the waiter; I have to worry about the chef.’

  When Lorenzo was appointed as national coach ahead of the 1962 World Cup, the football federation was explicitly seeking a European approach. He tried to install a catenaccio system - even having the libero wear a different coloured shirt in training so the players could better see his role - but found he had too little time to implement something wholly alien and returned to a 4-2-4 for the tournament itself.

  He was reappointed in 1966, and during the tournament instituted for the first time what would become the classic Argentinian formation: the 4-3-1-2, essentially a midfield diamond, with Rattín at its base, Jorge Solari and Alberto González, the ventilador-wing of Boca, shuttling up and down on either side of him as what were known as carrileros, and Ermindo Onega given the playmaking brief at the diamond’s point. Width was provided by forward surges from the two full-backs, Roberto Ferreiro and Silvio Marzolini. Once it became apparent that there was no need for out-and-out touchline-hugging wingers, the midfield four became far more flexible. England’s shape was essentially similar, the major difference being that where England had a designated defensive midfielder in Nobby Stiles, Argentina had a designated attacking midfielder in Onega. English and Argentinian sources agree on little about their quarter-final meeting in that tournament, but both accept that the major reasons for England’s victory - once the refereeing conspiracies and Fifa’s supposed financial need for the home team to reach the final in the days before satellite television are put to one side - were that Stiles silenced Onega, and that Alan Ball, attacking from the right side of midfield, prevented Marzolini getting forward.

  The major change in the Argentinian game in the years following 1958, though, was less the system than the style. Their football became increasingly violent, as Celtic discovered against Racing Club in the Intercontinental Cup final of 1967. Celtic won the first tie in Glasgow 1-0, but then walked into a storm in Buenos Aires. As far as Argentinian football was concerned, there was a score to be settled after the national side’s controversial defeat to England in the World Cup quarter-final a year earlier, and distinctions between the component parts of Great Britain meant li
ttle.

  Argentina 1966

  Celtic took to the field amid a hail of missiles. Ronnie Simpson, their goalkeeper, was struck on the head by a stone during the warm-up and had to be replaced. An intimidated referee denied them a clear penalty before he finally did award one and, although that was converted by Tommy Gemmell, Norberto Raffo levelled for Racing before half-time with a header from what Celtic claimed was an offside position. Celtic were further unsettled when they returned to their dressing room at half-time to find there was no water. It got worse in the second half. Juan Carlos Cárdenas scored early to give Racing the lead, after which they set about wasting time, with the crowd hanging onto the ball for long periods.

  A win apiece meant a playoff in Montevideo, and this time Celtic decided to fight back. ‘The time for politeness is over,’ said Jock Stein. ‘We can be hard if necessary and we will not stand the shocking conduct of Racing.’ The game was even more brutal than the first. It was settled by another Cárdenas goal, but the result hardly mattered amid the violence. Celtic had three men sent off and Racing two, but it could easily have been many more. Celtic fined their players, Racing bought theirs new cars: victory was everything.

  Racing may have been representative of the way things had gone in Argentina, but they certainly weren’t the worst exponents of the win-at-all-costs mentality. That prize, without question, went to the Estudiantes de la Plata of Osvaldo Zubeldía.

  Juan Carlos Onganía seized power in a coup in June 1966 and, realising the power of sport, made money available to the clubs to clear their debts. In return, the championship was revised, being split into two - the Metropolitano and the Nacional - the aim being to encourage the development of sides from outside Buenos Aires. The stranglehold of the big five was broken and, in 1967, Estudiantes became the first Metropolitano champions.