Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  If he had, though, the players evidently enjoyed the freedom. They rebelled, and Kovacs stayed. ‘The results show that Kovacs was not wrong,’ Cruyff said. ‘Our team was ready to take part in making decisions.’ They may not have impressed in the semi-final against Benfica, but the 2-0 victory over Internazionale in the final, with Cruyff getting both goals, confirmed the superiority of their method, and hammered yet another nail into the coffin of old-school catenaccio. ‘Ajax proved that creative attack is the real lifeblood of the game,’ the report in The Times read the following morning; ‘that blanket defence can be outwitted and outmanoeuvred, and by doing so they made the outlines of the night a little sharper and the shadows a little brighter.’

  The following year, by winning the European Cup again, Ajax became the first side since Real Madrid to complete a hat-trick of titles. Appropriately, having hammered Bayern Munich 4-0 in the first leg of the quarter-final, it was Real Madrid whom Ajax beat in the semi. The aggregate score of 3-1 barely does justice to their superiority, and the tie is better remembered for Mühren’s keepie-ups in the second leg at the Bernabéu, a moment of arrogance and joie de vivre that encapsulated the ethos of Kovacs’s Ajax. ‘I knew I was going to give the ball to Krol, but I needed some time until he reached me,’ Mühren recalls. ‘So I juggled until he arrived. You can’t plan to do something like that. You don’t think about that. You just do it. It was the moment when Ajax and Real Madrid changed positions. Before then it was always the big Real Madrid and the little Ajax. When they saw me doing that, the balance changed. The Real Madrid players were looking. They nearly applauded. The stadium was standing up. It was the moment Ajax took over.’

  In Belgrade in the final, they beat Juventus 1-0, but it was as emphatic as a one-goal victory can be as, having taken a fourth-minute lead, Ajax taunted the Italians with long strings of passes. A year later, Holland tried something similar in the World Cup final after going ahead in the first minute, and were beaten by West Germany.

  Winner claims that that Ajax side was ‘probably as close as anyone has ever come to running a major football team like a workers’ cooperative’, although there is no doubt that there was one major figure within that. ‘Cruyff was a big influence,’ Haarms said, ‘especially as he grew older and talked more and more about tactics with other players.’ Kovacs was close to Cruyff, but he wasn’t entirely cowed by him. On one occasion, it is said, when Cruyff complained of pains in his knee before a game, Kovacs, knowing his captain’s reputation for loving money, took a 1,000-guilder note and rubbed the afflicted area. With a smile Cruyff agreed he was feeling better, and played without any ill effect.

  He was not, though, tough enough. Where a ruthlessness lay beneath Paisley’s shabby cardigan, it seems probable that Kovacs was too nice, lacking the steel to rein in Cruyff as he took on an increasing prominence in that second season. Rep accuses Kovacs of ‘not having the guts’ to promote him in place of Swaart until Cruyff gave his approbation, and the players in time came to resent Cruyff’s influence.

  Ajax 2 Juventus 1, European Cup Final, Marakana, Belgrade, 30 May 1973

  Kovacs left after that second European Cup success to become manager of France, and when his replacement George Knobel held a vote on whom the club captain should be in the 1973-74 season, Cruyff was deposed in favour of Piet Keizer. Cruyff played only two more games for Ajax before joining Barcelona. The team rapidly disintegrated, and Knobel was sacked in 1974, shortly after a newspaper interview in which he accused his players of drinking and womanising - what many saw as the licence of the Kovacs days taken too far.

  Kovacs’s subsequent career never approached the same heights. He managed just one win in the qualifying competition for the 1976 European championship and was replaced by Michel Hidalgo, and although a subsequent spell with Romania saw him take them to the brink of qualification for the 1982 World Cup, it ended shamefully as the Communist authorities - ludicrously - accused him of throwing a game against Hungary. ‘We must accept,’ the veteran Romanian coach Florin Halagian said, ‘that Ajax was his opera. It was one of the greatest football has known.’ The paradox was that by giving that squad the freedom to reach its peak, Kovacs also paved the way for its destruction.

  Total Football itself, meanwhile, lived on under Michels at Barcelona.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Science and Sincerity

  ∆∇ Valeriy Lobanovskyi was a twenty-two-year-old winger when, in 1961, Dynamo Kyiv won the Soviet Supreme title for the first time. They had come so close so often that their fans had begun to despair of it ever happening, and the joy at their victory was heightened by relief. Amid the jubilation, though, Lobanovskyi wasn’t happy, as he made clear on what was supposed to be a celebratory visit to the Science and Research Institute of the Construction Industry with his team-mates Oleh Bazylevych and Vladimir Levchenko. ‘“Yes, we have won the league,”’ Volodymyr Sabaldyr, a Kyivan scientist and long-time amateur footballer, remembers him saying in the face of excited congratulations. ‘“But so what? Sometimes we played badly. We just got more points than other teams who played worse than us. I can’t accept your praise as there are no grounds for it.”’

  Sabaldyr asked him how it felt to have achieved something that had been a dream for Kyivans for decades. ‘A realised dream ceases to be a dream,’ Lobanovskyi replied. ‘What is your dream as a scientist? Your degree? Your doctorate? Your post-doctoral thesis?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sabaldyr replied. ‘But a real scientist dreams about making a contribution to scientific development, about leaving his mark on it.’

  ‘And there you have your answer.’

  Lobanovskyi the player was dilettantish, and opposed to Viktor Maslov’s strictures, and yet the perfectionist rationalism, the ambitious and analytic intelligence, was there from the start. Perhaps that is no great surprise. He was, after all, gifted enough as a mathematician to win a gold medal when he graduated from high school, while the era in which he grew up was obsessed by scientific progress. Born in 1939, Lobanovskyi was a teenager as the USSR opened its first nuclear power station and sent Sputnik into space, while Kyiv itself was the centre of the Soviet computer industry. The first cybernetic institute in the USSR was opened there in 1957, and quickly became acknowledged as a world leader in automated control systems, artificial intelligence and mathematical modelling. It was there in 1963 that an early prototype of the modern PC was developed. At the time Lobanovskyi was studying heating engineering at the Kyivan Polytechnic Institute, the potential of computers and their possible applications in almost all spheres was just becoming apparent. It was exciting, it was new, and it is no great surprise that Lobanovskyi should have been carried along by the wave of technological optimism.

  In him was acted out the great struggle between individuality and system: the player in him wanted to dribble, to invent tricks and to embarrass his opponents, and yet, as he later admitted, his training at the Polytechnic Institute drove him to a systematic approach, to break down football into its component tasks. Football, he explained, eventually became for him a system of twenty-two elements - two sub-systems of eleven elements - moving within a defined area (the pitch) and subject to a series of restrictions (the laws of the game). If the two sub-systems were equal, the outcome would be a draw. If one were stronger, it would win.

  So much is obvious, even if the manner of addressing it is not. But the aspect that Lobanovskyi found truly fascinating is that the sub-systems were subject to a peculiarity: the efficiency of the subsystem is greater than the sum of the efficiencies of the elements that comprise it. This, as Lobanovskyi saw it, meant that football was ripe for the application of the cybernetic techniques being taught at the Polytechnic Institute. Football, he concluded, was less about individuals than about coalitions and the connections between them. ‘All life,’ as he later said, ‘is a number.’

  It took time for Lobanovskyi, though, to come to that conclusion. As Maslov’s Dynamo wrapped up a third straight title in 1968, t
he Shakhtar side for whom he was playing finished a poor fourteenth. Thoroughly disillusioned, he decided to give up football altogether. His frustration, though, was less to do with their poor form than the reasons for it. As he saw it, they played ‘anti-football’ - although that had nothing to do with the term ‘anti-fútbol’ as applied to Zubeldía’s Estudiantes. ‘It’s impossible to play as we do,’ he wrote in his autobiography, Endless Match. ‘It is impossible to rely on luck or on accidents in modern football. It is necessary to create the ensemble, a collective of believers who subordinate themselves to the common playing idea.’

  Lobanovskyi contemplated a move back into plumbing, but he found himself unable to turn down Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, then in one of the four parallel second divisions, when they offered him the position of coach in 1969. There, he set about applying the scientific methods he had become convinced represented the future. ‘If you want to be a good coach, you must forget the player you were,’ he said. ‘My relationship with Maslov didn’t turn out well, but that’s not important. He was a great tactician who taught his players how to play football.’ By that stage, if he had a disagreement with Maslov’s philosophy, it was purely methodological. Maslov had worked by his instincts; Lobanovskyi wanted proof.

  In his third season with Dnipro, Lobanovskyi led them to promotion. The following season they finished sixth in the Supreme League, just a point behind Dynamo. 1972 was more significant, though, as the year in which Lobanovskyi met Anatoliy Zelentsov. Lobanovskyi had for some time been frustrated by the difficulties of evaluating the physical condition of his players and the strains placed on them by his attempts to institute a system of pressing. Zelentsov, a specialist in bioenergetics, he realised, was the solution.

  ‘Lobanovskyi and I became really inseparable,’ Zelentsov said. ‘He once told me in public at a party: “You know, if not for you, I might not have come off as a coach. I owe you my formation, my knowledge, skills, understanding and realisation of football.”’ The two of them would meet regularly with Bazylevych, who had become manager of Shakhtar. ‘We would analyse in detail our new training regimes,’ Lobanovskyi said. ‘It seemed to us that we were taking the process of training to a completely new level. In the course of one of these heated debates (Bazylevych and I were always questioning Zelentsov’s statements, believing them to be only theories) somebody suddenly exclaimed, “Wouldn’t it be great to do this at a higher level than Shakhtar or Dnipro?”’

  They soon got their chance. After Maslov’s dismissal in 1970, Dynamo turned to Alexander Sevidov, who had served a long apprenticeship with Dinamo Minsk before leading the Kazakh side Kairat Almaty to promotion. He won the title in his first full season in Kyiv, but his style was very different to Maslov’s as he abandoned both pressing and zonal marking. ‘The team played some really bright football that season,’ Oleh Blokhin, who was just beginning to emerge from the youth ranks, wrote in Full-life Football. ‘Synchronisation of the actions and thoughts of players, arrhythmia (a combination of fluent play with sudden bursts into the box), and an intensity of attacking action - they were the main principles of Dynamo in 1971. The team stopped physical pressing almost completely, and also aerial balls into the box. We strove for sharp combinations, and the creation of unexpected chances.’

  In contrast with the frank and emotional Maslov, Sevidov was always calm and business-like, even in defeat. A devotee of high culture, he preferred his players to continue their education, whereas Maslov had been committed to football and football alone. He was no great evangelist for his style of play, though, and admitted freely that part of the reason for Dynamo’s success was that their opponents expected them to play in a quite different way. ‘We need two or three years of planned work to consolidate our grip on first place,’ he said at the ceremony at which Dynamo were presented with the trophy. ‘We’ll have to spend time coming up with new combinations that our opponents aren’t used to. But that’s the law of any sport: to defend and counterattack is easier than to attack.’

  Over the next two seasons, Sevidov could not reproduce the same success, as Dynamo finished as runners-up up each year. As early as the end of 1972, it seems, the Party hierarchy had lost faith in him, and Lobanovskyi was offered the Dynamo job. The problem was probably less that Dynamo finished second than the identity of the team who finished first. Zorya, from the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk (or Voroshylovhrad, as it then was), had never threatened to win the title before, and never would again, but, as Volodymyr Shevchenko, the first secretary of the regional Communist Party, encouraged the local mines to back the club financially, they finished five points clear of Dynamo. That was a huge embarrassment to Shcherbytskyi, and Shevchenko was soon sacked, narrowly escaping prosecution for alleged financial malpractice. Zorya immediately fell away and finished in the bottom half of the table the following season.

  Lobanovskyi turned the job down then, but Sevidov was sacked with three games of the 1973 season remaining. Quite why he was dismissed at that particular moment remains unclear. Dynamo finished second behind Ararat Yerevan - another provincial side with no great history of success - but that was largely because they dropped three points in those final three matches. The official reason was that Sevidov had been removed ‘because of a collapse of pedagogical work in the team’, but no details were given. Arkady Galinsky claims that Shcherbytskyi had been persuaded by an administrator at Dnipro that the calm and reliable Lobanovskyi was just the man to help his son, Valeriy, a huge football fan, get over his problems with drug abuse. That sounds outlandish, but even if there is some truth to the theory, it does not adequately explain why Sevidov was dismissed just then, when a far smoother handover could have been enacted a couple of weeks later.

  Whatever the reason, Lobanovskyi returned to Kyiv late in 1973 to become Dynamo’s first Kyivan manager since Viktor Shylovskyi had been replaced by Vyacheslav Solovyov in 1958. By that stage, he saw a football team as a dynamic system, in which the aim was to produce the optimal level of energy in the optimal pattern. He had come to the conclusion that, to win titles, what happened off the field in terms of physical preparation and, particularly, rehabilitation, was just as important as what happened on it.

  Lobanovskyi arrived at Dynamo as part of a team of four. He had specific responsibility for modelling playing systems; Zelentsov was in charge of the individual preparation of players; Bazylevich, having been prised from Shakhtar, took care of the actual coaching; while Mykhaylo Oshemkov dealt with what was known as ‘informational support’ - that is, the collation of statistical data from games.

  Everything was meticulously planned, with the team’s preparation divided into three levels. Players were to have individual technical coaching so as to equip them better to fulfil the tasks Lobanovskyi set them during a game; specific tactics and tasks for each player were drawn up according to the opponents; and a strategy was devised for a competition as a whole, placing each game in context by acknowledging that it is impossible for a side to maintain maximal levels over a protracted period. Dynamo, accordingly, would regularly lose late-season games with the title already won, and habitually killed games away from home, looking only for a draw while attempting to conserve their energy.

  ‘When we are talking about tactical evolution,’ Lobanovskyi and Zelentsov wrote in their book, The Methodological Basis of the Development of Training Models, ‘the first thing we have in mind is to strive for new courses of action that will not allow the opponent to adapt to our style of play. If an opponent has adjusted himself to our style of play and found a counter-play, then we need to find a new strategy. That is the dialectic of the game. You have to go forward in such a way and with such a range of attacking options that it will force the opponent to make a mistake. In other words, it’s necessary to force the opponent into the condition you want them to be in. One of the most important means of doing that is to vary the size of the playing area.’

  Like Michels’s Ajax, Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo could press, seeking to
pen their opponents in and win the ball high up the field, but they were equally capable of sitting deep and striking on the counter-attack. As Lobanovskyi was always at pains to make clear, it all depended on circumstance. One thing remained central: keep the preferred playing area as large as possible while in possession, and as small as possible while out.

  ‘Sometimes people say that football’s meaning is only in attack,’ Lobanovskyi and Zelentsov went on. ‘But it is nearer the truth to say that when we possess the ball, we are attacking; when our opponents possess the ball, we are defending. From this fundamental, football strategy is derived: how, where and when to attack or defend.’ Possession was everything; their approach could hardly have been more different from that preached by the likes of Charles Hughes and Egil Olsen.

  On the wall at Dynamo’s training-base were hung lists of the demands Lobanovskyi placed on players. Significantly, of the fourteen defensive tasks, four concerned the distribution of the ball and the establishment of attacking positions once the ball had been won. There was no notion of simply getting the ball clear, for that would have been to surrender possession and thus place their side back on the defensive. The thirteen demands on forwards, as well as including a line about pressing and attempting to regain possession high up the field, are also dominated by calls for movement and the search for ways to shift the ball away from areas in which the opponent has a high concentration of players.