Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  After the 1974 World Cup, in which Argentina had been humiliated by Holland, Menotti was appointed national coach. The irony, of course, was that the great validation of that ideological shift was played out in a political environment with which it could hardly have been more at odds. Isabel Perón had been deposed as president in a coup in 1976 and replaced by a right-wing military junta that savagely repressed dissent. Onganía’s right-wing dictatorship had led to a ruthlessness in sport and a disregard for the woolly virtues of artistry, but the relationship between football and the military government of the late seventies was far more complex. In that Menotti self-consciously harked back to a lost golden age - ‘our victory is a tribute to the old and glorious Argentinian football,’ he said after the 1978 World Cup - he appealed to the conservatism of the generals and that, plus the fact that he was successful, compensated for a worldview wholly opposed to the ideology of the junta.

  The way the triumph of 1978 was exploited clearly made Menotti uncomfortable, and he addresses the issue at length in his autobiography Football without Tricks. What should he have done, he asked, ‘To coach teams that played badly, that based everything on tricks, that betrayed the feelings of the people? No, of course not.’ Instead, he argued, his football, being free and creative, offered a reminder of the free, creative Argentina that existed before the junta.

  Yet that is to idealise his side. It is notable that his belief in artistry did not extend so far as giving a seventeen-year-old Diego Maradona a place in his squad, even though he had handed him an international debut almost a year earlier. Perhaps the comparison with Feola and his treatment of Pelé twenty years before is unfair, but it is hard to avoid. Yes, an aggressive 4-3-3, the direct running of Mario Kempes, Leopoldo Luque and Oscar Ortiz, along with the more cerebral plotting of Osvaldo Ardiles and the erratic brilliance of René Houseman, meant that their football was at times thrilling, but it was not la nuestra.

  Abraham goes so far as to suggest a level of duplicity on the part of Menotti. ‘He spoke a traditional discourse,’ he said, ‘but in 1978 he shut the players in a laboratory for months, without women, eating vitamins … [and playing] … a pace of game that when they went out on River’s pitch, even the Hungarians said looked desperate.’ Hungary, beaten 2-1 at El Monumental in Argentina’s first game of the tournament, became so frustrated by a series of niggling fouls that Tibor Nyilasi and András Töröcsik were both sent off for retaliation in the final three minutes - almost the only thing that united the two great rivals in their careers. ‘Menotti prepared the players physically with technical advances,’ Abraham went on, ‘but his discourse was this: the important thing is to feel the ball, to pass it, to knead it, to dribble with it.’

  Given the developments in defensive organisation and physiological preparation perhaps a certain level of compromise between the scientific and the artistic is only realistic, but it can hardly be denied that Argentina’s success came with a measure of chicanery. Most notoriously, there was the second-phase game against Peru. Moronic scheduling meant Argentina went into that match knowing that they needed to win by three, while scoring at least four, to make it to the final. They did that, and more, winning 6-0, but the result has always been tainted by suspicion.

  In 1986, the Sunday Times cited an anonymous civil servant claiming that the Argentinian government shipped 35,000 tons of grain - and possibly some arms - to Peru and that the Argentinian central bank released $50million of frozen Peruvian assets, but proof is hard to come by and the fact that the story was published on the day England met Argentina in the World Cup quarter-final does not suggest meticulously researched, impartial journalism.

  It is doubtful that anybody watching the video of the game with no knowledge of context would see anything untoward. Juan José Muñante hit the post for Peru early on, while their goalkeeper Ramón Quiroga, who had been born in Argentina and would later take much of the blame, made a number of scrambling saves. If the game really were fixed, it looked as though nobody had told Peru until midway through the first half. Certainly Peru wilted after Alberto Tarantini’s diving header made it 2-0 just before half-time, but that is hardly surprising. They were already out of the tournament, there were 37,000 rammed into the Arroyito creating a fearsome atmosphere, and Argentina’s passing was at times sensational. The Kempes volley that made it 3-0 and Luque’s late sixth both followed bursts of magnificent football.

  Where there was clear malpractice - viveza, gamesmanship, cheating, whatever term is used - was ahead of the final against Holland. The bus carrying the Dutch team took a deliberately circuitous route from their hotel to the stadium, and fans were allowed to crowd around it, hammering on the windows, chanting and being generally intimidating. Argentina then delayed their arrival on the pitch before kick-off, leaving Holland standing around, exposed to the full fury of the crowd, and when they finally did emerge, they protested about the cast on René van der Kerkhof’s arm. Given he had been wearing it without controversy all tournament, their only purpose can have been to try to unsettle their opponents. The refereeing of the Italian Sergio Gonella was weak, and Argentina seemed to get the benefit of a number of decisions, but, after Rob Rensenbrink’s last-minute effort had come back off the post, extra-time goals from Kempes and Daniel Bertoni gave them the title.

  Argentina 2 Holland 1, World Cup Final, El Monumental, Buenos Aires, 25 June 1978

  Victory for Argentina, victory for the junta, victory for Menotti and, slightly tarnished, slightly modified for the modern age, victory for the ideals of la nuestra.

  Chapter Twelve

  Total Football

  ∆∇ Sometimes the world is simply ripe for innovation. Just as Newton and Liebniz happened upon calculus independently and roughly simultaneously, so, on opposite sides of Europe, Rinus Michels and Valeriy Lobanovskyi each came to the same realisation about how football should be played. The game, as they saw it, was about space and how you controlled it: make the pitch big when you have the ball and it is easy to retain it; make it small when you do not and it becomes far more difficult for the opposition to keep it.

  Both encouraged their players to interchange positions, both relied on team-mates being able to cover, and both produced sides that were capable of exhilarating football. In that, they were the logical next step from the passovotchka of the forties or the Hungarian style of the fifties - certainly it was to the latter that the Dutch were frequently compared - but what allowed Ajax and Dynamo to do that was their implementation of an aggressive offside trap. Pressing was the key, but it was probably only in the mid- to late-sixties that it became viable.

  In an amateur context, pressing is all but impossible. It is hugely demanding physically, requiring almost constant motion and thus supreme levels of fitness. By the time of Michels and Lobanovskyi, the shortages of the war years were over, nutrition was good, and sports science (both legal and illicit) had advanced sufficiently that players could keep running for ninety minutes. This was a stage of football’s development that stemmed as much from enhanced physical possibility as from advances of theory.

  It is difficult now, given its modern reputation for liberalism and excess, to imagine how Amsterdam must have been in the years immediately following the war. There has been an undeniable commodification of its bohemian nature, but it is still readily comprehensible that the city should nurture revolutionary ideas. Back in the fifties, it was not. In The Fall, which was published in 1955, Albert Camus writes of how bored he was by Amsterdam, a city where ‘for centuries, pipe smokers have been watching the same rain falling on the same canal’.

  Dutch football was similarly staid. The moustaches and the Victorian stylings of the early Anglophile clubs may have gone by the fifties, but the style was still backward-looking, and the result was a national side that was barely even a joke. Between a 4-1 win over Finland in June 1949 and a 1-0 win over Belgium in April 1955, Holland played twenty-seven internationals, winning just two, and twice contriving to lose to Norwa
y. When England hammered Holland 8-2 at Huddersfield in 1948, the Dutch, long after the W-M had become the default across Europe, were still using a classic 2-3-5 formation, leading the England centre-forward Tommy Lawton, who scored four that day, to marvel that he’d ‘never had so much room’.

  The coming of a limited form of professionalism in 1954 was the main stimulus for the rise of Dutch football in the sixties, but it does not explain why the upsurge took the form it did. It helped that the Netherlands all but skipped the W-M phase of evolution, meaning that the notion of rigid one-to-one marking never became instilled, and they were fortunate also that their earliest teachers themselves seemed to flourish outside the pressures of the league structure. It may strike modern readers as eccentric when Brian Glanville writes of the ‘incubus of the league’, but it does explain why so many European nations found their football development enhanced by enlightened British coaches. Perhaps it was not so much that they themselves were forward thinkers - although the fact they were prepared to emigrate in itself suggests a level of open-mindedness - but that the new environments in which they found themselves allowed them to pursue experiments that back home would have been dismissed as hopelessly idealistic.

  Dutch football’s founding father was Jack Reynolds. Although he had once been a second-string player at Manchester City he, like so many influential coaches, pursued a far from stellar playing career, moving from Grimsby Town to Sheffield Wednesday and then Watford. In 1912, Reynolds moved to Switzerland to become manager of St Gallen, and he was set to take charge of the Germany national side when war broke out in 1914. He sought refuge in the Netherlands, and was appointed manager of Ajax - for the first time - in 1915. Over the following thirty-two years, he would spend twenty-five years at the club in three separate spells. His first departure was caused by a row with directors; his second by the Second World War, during which he was interned in the Tost detention centre in Upper Silesia, a former lunatic asylum. There he was held with PG Wodehouse, who had been picked up in the French resort of Le Touquet. ‘An Associated Press man, who came down to interview me later,’ Wodehouse said, ‘wrote in his piece that Tost Lunatic Asylum was no Blandings Castle. Well, it wasn’t of course, but still it was roomy. If you had had a cat, and wished to swing it, you could have done so quite easily…’

  When Reynolds returned to Amsterdam in 1945, Michels came under his tutelage, and the similarities in their styles of management are obvious. Reynolds was a strict disciplinarian, and believed in the primacy of technique, encouraging his players to work with a ball in training. He also laid the foundations of the Ajax youth system, commonly working a fourteen-hour day to ensure that teams at each level played the same style of football. He transformed what had been a minor team into one of national importance, while maintaining an attacking ethos. ‘For me,’ he said in an interview in 1946, ‘attack is and remains the best form of defence.’ Ajax’s philosophy was encapsulated by a couplet of the thirties: ‘Open game, open game/You can’t afford to neglect the wing.’

  Those were the seeds, but it wasn’t until Vic Buckingham arrived in 1959 that they began to sprout. He had played in the same Tottenham Hotspur side as Arthur Rowe, and inherited similar ideas about the value of pass-and-move football, retaining possession rather than endlessly lumping it long. ‘Possession football is the thing, not kick and rush,’ he said in a 1993 interview with David Winner quoted in Brilliant Orange. ‘Long-ball football is too risky. Most of the time what pays off is educated skills. If you’ve got the ball, keep it. The other side can’t score…’

  His own beliefs, he discovered, gelled with what he found at Ajax. ‘Dutch football was good,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a rough-tough, got-to-win-things mentality. Their skills were different, their intellect was different and they played proper football. They didn’t get this from me; it was there waiting to be stirred up … it was just a case of telling them to keep more possession. I’ve always thought possession is nine-tenths of the game and Ajax played possession football… I influenced them, but they went on and did things above that which delighted me. For instance, two of them would go down the left side of the field passing to each other - just boom-boom-boom - and they’d go 30 yards and two men would have cut out three defenders and created a vast acreage of space.’

  Buckingham was a devotee of W-M, and it was with that formation - albeit a far more fluid version of it than would have been found in Britain at the time - that Ajax won the Dutch league title in 1960, playing an attacking style that brought them an average of 3.2 goals per game. Buckingham left after two seasons to join Sheffield Wednesday, and when he returned in 1964, he struggled to replicate his earlier success. By January 1965, Ajax were struggling near the relegation zone, and Buckingham was sacked.

  He was replaced by Michels who, after retiring in 1958, had studied at the Amsterdam sports academy and taught gymnastics at a local school before becoming coach of the amateur side JOS. Like Lobanovskyi, by the time he returned to the club at which he had spent the bulk of his playing career, his outlook had undergone a radical overhaul. Michels the player, Winner says, had been ‘an easy-going artist on the pitch with a taste for practical jokes off it’. As a coach, he was completely different, as the long-time Ajax assistant coach Bobby Haarms recalls. ‘The main thing with him was now discipline,’ he said. ‘Fantastic discipline. Even with the assistant coaches he was like an animal trainer.’

  Michels kept Ajax up in his first season; the next, they won the league. Although they played attractive and fluent football in doing so, there was no talk of Total Football at that stage, and certainly Michels did not turn up clutching a blueprint of how he believed football should be played. ‘In starting,’ he said, ‘you have no exact idea about the aims after which you are going to strive.’ His immediate task was to avoid relegation. ‘To do that I especially needed to change the team spirit, and I had to change the team tactically,’ he explained. ‘Of course, the team-spirit development, the team’s tactical development, that just went on.’

  He altered the nature of training, prioritising ball-work even more than Reynolds had and so putting in place the structures that would produce the technical proficiency that became such a key feature of the Ajax style. Crucially, he modernised the management of the club so that by the end of his second full season every player in his squad was fully professional and could commit absolutely to his training schedule. Tactically, his first change was to abandon the W-M for a 4-2-4, with Piet Keizer, Johan Cruyff, Sjaak Swart and Henk Groot up front and the combative Bennie Muller alongside the more technical Klaas Nuninga in midfield.

  That in itself was not especially radical - rather, it was part of a wider trend that swept Europe in years that followed the 1958 World Cup - but there was a radicalism in the air. Amsterdam in the sixties was, as the British anarchist Charles Radcliffe said, ‘the capital of the youth rebellion’. The establishment after the war of the welfare state, and the growing prosperity of Europe, had led, as elsewhere, to a blurring of society’s traditional divisions. Art and culture became increasingly avant garde and, in December 1962, Amsterdam witnessed its first ‘happening’ with the poet Simon Vinkenoog’s ‘Open the Grave’ event, which insisted that ‘the victory over old ways begins in Magic Centre Amsterdam’.

  By the middle of the decade, the whole atmosphere of Amsterdam was surreal and anarchic, with the ‘Provos’, dressed all in white, holding regular anti-consumerist demonstrations. Most significant was their reaction in 1966 to the wedding of Princess Beatrix to Claus von Amsberg, a German aristocrat who had served in the Wehrmacht. They announced they would attempt to disrupt the ceremony, and encouraged the circulation of rumours listing a series of ingenious ways by which they would do so. It was said that LSD would be introduced to the water supply, that lion dung would be spread on the streets to spook the horses pulling the wedding-carriages, and that laughing-gas would be pumped into the church through the organ pipes. In the end, the protest amounted to nothing more
than setting off smoke bombs on the Raadhuisstraad, but that was enough. The police panicked and, over-reacting as they had repeatedly through the Provos’ campaign, set about protestors with batons. Similar incidents had happened before, but never on this scale, and never live on national television. Viewers were horrified and, when a strike over holiday pay three months later led to further rioting, public attitudes were set on the way to change.

  An inquiry into the riots led to the dismissals of the mayor and the chief of police, and the authorities decided that the best way to deal with the youth rebellion was simply to tolerate it. Within a couple of years Dam Square had become a camp for foreign hippies and the Amsterdam police had a reputation as the most easy-going in Europe. It is no coincidence that it was in the Amsterdam Hilton in 1969 that John Lennon and Yoko Ono celebrated their marriage with a week-long ‘Bed-In’.

  Most of Michels’s Ajax side are dismissive of the links between the cultural and football revolutions, but it is difficult to disagree with Winner when he concludes that they are there, even if they extend no further than a self-confidence that was prepared to question the orthodoxy. Structures and traditions were not to be accepted, but to be challenged.

  At the centre of that lay Cruyff, even at that stage very obviously the leader of the team. Young, iconoclastic and unselfconscious about ensuring he was paid what he was worth - itself a product of the new classlessness - he became an icon of the burgeoning Dutch youth movement of the time, the equivalent, the former Ajax youth coach Karel Gabler said, of Lennon in Britain. In 1997, in a piece in Hard Gras magazine marking Cruyff’s fiftieth birthday, the journalist Hubert Smeets wrote that: ‘Cruyff was the first player who understood that he was an artist, and the first who was able and willing to collectivise the art of sports.’

  Cruyff was not a Provo - his conservatism in such matters as family values was diametrically opposed to their beliefs - and yet he shared with them an awkwardness, an anarchic attitude and a love of provoking the establishment. Most famously, he refused to wear the three Adidas stripes on his shirt during the 1974 World Cup, honouring his contract with Puma by insisting on wearing only two. ‘The Dutch,’ Smeets went on, ‘are at their best when they can combine the system with individual creativity. Johan Cruyff is the main representative of that. He made this country after the war. I think he was the only one who understood the sixties.’