Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  Nonetheless, it did, as Malofeev was called away from a training camp in Novogorsk and didn’t return. ‘There was a strange atmosphere in the squad,’ Aleinikov went on. ‘The Kyiv boys liked the decision, as you can imagine, because most of them were not in favour of Malofeev’s ideas. On the other hand, there were the boys who understood there were no positions for them in the squad under Lobanovskyi. They were prepared for Mexico, but they knew they would not be going.

  ‘Lobanovskyi made us train harder. To say it was difficult would be an understatement. In the evening I was just looking to get to bed as soon as possible. For Lobanovskyi the game was about the result, not about fun. Football had to be rational. For him, 1-0 was better than 5-4.’

  For all the doubts, Lobanovskyi received immediate vindication as his side hammered the much-fancied Hungary 6-0. In the second round, though, the USSR, let down by poor refereeing and a catastrophic performance from defender Andriy Bal, were beaten 4-3 by Belgium in one of the greatest games the World Cup has known. ‘As a coach you can’t account for individual errors and you certainly can’t account for refereeing blunders,’ said Lobanovskyi said - an acknowledgement that there were factors beyond the control of even a system as scientific as his.

  Two years later at the European Championship in West Germany, the USSR came as close to glory as they ever would under Lobanovskyi. They beat Holland and England in the group stage, and then outplayed Italy in the semi-final. So impressed was the former Italy coach Enzo Bearzot by the USSR’s 2-0 win that he sought out Lobanovskyi after the final whistle. ‘I realised once again that you are a great team,’ he told him. ‘You play modern football at 100km/h. The pressing you showed today is the sign of great ability, and the physical shape of the Soviet players is clearly the result of great self-sacrifice and professionalism.’

  The only flaw in an otherwise awesome performance was the booking collected by the sweeper Oleh Kuznetsov, which ruled him out of the final against Holland. ‘Have you seen how bees fly?’ asked Zelentsov. ‘A hive is in the air, and there is a leader. The leader turns right and all the hive turn right. It turns left and all the hive turn left. It is the same in football. There is a leader who takes a decision to move, say, here. The rest need to correct their motion to follow the leader. Every team has players who link coalitions; every team has players who destroy them. The first are called on to create on the field, the latter to destroy the team actions of the opponent.’ Without their leader, the USSR missed a penalty, suffered Marco van Basten’s preposterous volley and lost 2-0.

  After a disappointing World Cup in 1990, Lobanovskyi left the USSR for the Middle East, but he was persuaded back to Dynamo in 1996, partly by the riches promised by new investors, but mainly by the potential of the generation of Shevchenko, Oleh Luzhny, Serhiy Rebrov and Vyacheslav Vashchuk. He inspired them to a Champions League semi-final in 1999 - his third great team - but, by the time of his death from a stroke in 2002, the suspicion was that he was struggling as, having been forced to sell the majority of his better players, he was forced to turn to imports. According to Serhiy Polkhovskyi, the Dynamo vice-president, it had become apparent in his final months that he was having difficulty dealing even with local players who had not been brought up under Communism. ‘He had internal torments,’ Polkhovskyi said. ‘Previously a word, a glance, was enough to assert his authority and explain what he wanted. Maybe it was typical of the Communist system, but now players have a greater freedom and an individuality.’

  Still, his legacy is secure. As Marcello Lippi, who coached Juventus to the Champions League and Italy to the World Cup, said, ‘Everybody plays a pressing game now.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fly Me to the Moon

  ∆∇ The 1970 Mexico World Cup now stands, mythically and perhaps in fact, as the apogee of football. In the popular consciousness, it was a festival of attacking football, and the Brazil side that won the tournament - Pelé, Tostão, Gérson, Rivellino et al - is regarded as some unmatchable paradigm, the greatest side the world has known, and probably will ever know. And yet there is also an acceptance that their style of play would be impossible today, their achievement was an achievement of the old football, before system had taken charge.

  As part of their build-up for the tournament, Brazil’s squad underwent a NASA training programme, the metaphorical significance of which seems to have been lost on nobody. The Jornal do Brazil is usually an austere newspaper, but on 22 June 1970, it made an observation that was startling in its boldness. ‘Brazil’s victory with the ball,’ it said, ‘compares with the conquest of the moon by the Americans.’

  At first the comparison seems ludicrous, and yet there is something there, some grain of truth. To begin with, there is the use of abstract terms: ‘victory with the ball… conquest of the moon’. The Americans beat the Soviets in the space race, and Brazil beat Italy in the World Cup final, yet neither opponent is mentioned. Rather the triumphs, which happened less than a year apart, come to be regarded as a greater endeavour, a victory attained less against corporeal rivals than over external, non-human elements, as though to play football of that majesty were somehow a victory for all of humanity.

  It is surely significant that all the most memorable moments of the 1970 tournament are essentially non-competitive: Pelé’s lob from the halfway line against Czechoslovakia did not go in; having extravagantly dummied the Uruguay goalkeeper Ladislao Mazurkiewicz in the semi-final, he then missed an open goal. Even Carlos Alberto Torres’s famous goal in the final came with four minutes to go when the outcome was already decided. This was futebol arte in a very literal sense: celebrating not events that determined the result, but passages of play that transcended the immediate context of the matches of which they were part - although, that said, had Brazil not won the tournament, they may be remembered not with the fondness that they are, but as counter-productive extravagances.

  Whether the moon landing was the supreme technological achievement of the twentieth century, whether Brazil’s 1970 World Cup success was the supreme sporting achievement, is debatable, but what is sure is that no other event in either sphere had such an immediacy of impact, such a universal symbolic importance. The reason for that is simple: television. Instantly, to a watching audience of millions across the world, Neil Armstrong’s one small step and Carlos Alberto’s thunderous strike became icons, destined from the moment of their happening to be reproduced again and again in a multiplicity of forms. These were the first two great global events of the telecultural age. As if to seal the symbolic link, the second moon landing happened on the same day that Pelé converted a penalty for Santos against Vasco da Gama to reach 1,000 career goals.

  It helped that Brazil played in vibrant yellow with shorts of cobalt blue: they were perfect for the new age of colour television. Under the iridescent heat of the Mexican sun, it seemed as though this was the future: bright and brilliant. Brazil kept just one clean sheet in the tournament, but it didn’t matter. Fallibility was part of their charm: there was a naivety about them that gave them a universal appeal - apart, perhaps, from in Argentina. ‘Those last minutes,’ Hugh McIlvanney wrote in his match report of the final, ‘contained a distillation of their football, its beauty and élan and almost undiluted joy. Other teams thrill us and make us respect them. The Brazilians at their finest gave us pleasure so natural and deep as to be a vivid physical experience… the qualities that make football the most graceful and electric and moving of team sports were being laid before us. Brazil are proud of their own unique abilities but it was not hard to believe they were anxious to say something about the game as well as themselves. You cannot be the best in the world at a game without loving it and all of us who sat, flushed with excitement, in the stands of the Azteca sensed that we were seeing some kind of tribute.’

  The moon landing was the culmination of a project in which the USA had concentrated their scientific, technological, financial and emotional resources. Once Kennedy had acknowledged the start of
the space race in 1962, conquering the moon became the USA’s great goal. In 1962, Brazil won their second World Cup, and set about directing their resources into winning a third. By 1970, as the military government became involved in football, players underwent preparatory programmes of previously unimaginable sophistication. ‘We knew we needed to do something to improve our physical condition,’ Gérson said, noting that was where the European nations had progressed. ‘In 1966 we were in good physical condition, but not as good as theirs.’ Each Brazilian player went to Mexico with pairs of individually fitted handmade boots, while a fortnight before departure they began living on Mexican time with a strictly controlled programme of diet and sleep. Even their kit was redesigned so as not to become weighed down by sweat. Brazil’s triumph was one of imagination and spontaneity, but it was backed up by science and preparation - and by economic circumstance.

  The long economic boom that lasted from the end of the Korean War to the mid-seventies - and so effectively funded the space programme in the USA - created a wider market for Brazil’s raw materials, leading to rises in employment and wages through the fifties. That prompted a rise in consumption among the working-classes and the creation of an urban middle-class, but the gap between city and country widened, leading to an influx of migration and the escalating growth of favelas. Put bluntly, the conditions were perfect for football. As David Goldblatt notes in The Ball is Round, ‘Too little wealth and the football infrastructure cannot be maintained. Too much wealth and the social production line of malandros and pibes cannot be maintained.’

  An ageing side was found out at the 1966 World Cup in England, their cause not helped by lax refereeing that allowed Pelé effectively to be kicked out of games. Hugely frustrated, he retired from international football, only returning to the national side two years later. ‘I had found the violence and the lack of sportsmanship as dispiriting as the weak refereeing that had allowed it to go unchecked for so long,’ he explained in his autobiography. Even in Brazil, though, football had become increasingly violent, mirroring the trend in a society in which guerrilla groups regularly launched attacks against the military regime, and met with savage reprisals in their turn.

  When General Médici took control in October 1969, football had an advocate in power. Dissent had been quelled, and the general, a staunch Flamengo fan, quickly realised that football could give him the popular legitimacy he desired. That was good news for Brazilian football generally, in that it ensured there would be significant investment in the 1970 campaign, but it was bad news for the national coach João Saldanha. He had been a member of the Communist Party in his youth and, with his habitual candour, he made little secret of his ideological opposition to the regime.

  Saldanha had played for Botafogo, and became a journalist after his playing career had come to an end. He gained the nickname ‘João sem Medo’ - ‘Fearless João’ - for his outspoken style and, after regularly criticising his former side, he was appointed manager in 1957. He promptly led them to the Carioca championship and, although his subsequent lack of sustained success meant a return to journalism, he was given the national job in 1969. He was, Pelé said, ‘smart and sharp-tongued and he brought a new directness to the job of national coach’. There, the refusal to play the diplomatic game that had made him so popular as a columnist proved his undoing. His demise, though, was precipitated by a tactical issue.

  Saldanha’s side had cruised through World Cup qualifying, totalling twenty-three goals in winning six games out of six against Colombia, Venezuela and Paraguay in 1969. In those days he would proudly announce, ‘what I want is goals’, but he went on a scouting trip to Europe that October and was troubled by the muscular, defensive football, the ‘brutal play and lenient referees’ he saw there. ‘The finals,’ he announced, after the draw had grouped Brazil with England, Czechoslovakia and Romania, ‘will develop into a brawl if we are not vigilant and the European teams with the best boxers and wrestlers will win it.’

  Although emotionally opposed to negativity, Saldanha recognised that it had been a naive faith in improvisational football that had led to Brazil’s underperformances in the thirties, and he was terrified of making the same mistake again. On his return, he tried to set Brazil up to deal with increasingly physical opponents, changing personnel so as to raise the average mass of his defence by five pounds and their average height by three inches. His modifications, though, led only to confusion. ‘He couldn’t take criticism and the relationship between him and his former colleagues in the press deteriorated,’ Pelé said. ‘He liked a drink and started to behave erratically.’

  Matters came to a head in March 1970 as Brazil faced back-to-back warm-up games against Argentina. He dropped Dario, a forward whose move from Atlético Mineiro to Flamengo had been engineered by Médici. That probably would not have mattered had a journalist not asked whether he were aware that Dario was a favourite of the general. ‘I don’t choose the president’s ministry,’ Saldanha said, ‘and he doesn’t choose my forward line.’ Médici had already been offended by Saldanha’s refusal to adjust his training schedule to allow the players to attend a banquet at the presidential palace, and from that moment the coach was living on borrowed time.

  Defeat at home to Argentina, who had failed to qualify for the Mexico World Cup, pushed him closer to the edge, particularly when the Argentina defender Roberto Perfumo described Saldanha’s side as ‘the poorest Brazil team I have played against’. Wilson Piazza and Gérson had been swamped in the middle of the midfield, something for which Saldanha blamed Pelé, accusing him of having failed to follow his orders to track back and help. This was seen as insanity: criticising Pelé at all was bad enough, but to tell him to defend was heretical.

  Saldanha’s temper only made things worse. In 1967 he had twice fired a gun into the air after a confrontation with Manga, a Bangu goalkeeper he had accused of match-fixing, and he reacted similarly when Yustrich, the Flamengo coach, called him ‘a coward’ during a radio interview, storming into the lobby of the Rio hotel where Yustrich was staying and brandishing a loaded handgun. Yustrich, fortunately, had gone out.

  Yet somehow, amid the madness, Saldanha pulled a master-stroke in the second game, as he brought on the nineteen-year-old Clodoaldo of Santos for Piazza. He immediately gave the midfield added zest and resolve, and Pelé scored a late winner. Still, though, Saldanha felt Pelé was not doing sufficient defensive work, and publicly admitted he was considering dropping him. He was promptly sacked amid accusations of emotional instability. Public sympathy was limited, and the little that remained was lost as he responded with a bizarre outburst in which he claimed that claimed Gérson had mental problems, Pelé was too short-sighted to play and that Emerson Leão, the reserve keeper, had short arms.

  After Dino Sani and Oto Gloria had both turned down the job, Mário Zagallo, the shuttling left-winger of 1958 and 1962, was appointed as his replacement. He had been Saldanha’s protégé at Botafogo, but, more importantly, he was seen as a safe pair of hands, unencumbered by any dangerously left-wing political beliefs. When the military government installed Captain Cláudio Coutinho to work as his fitness coach - it was he who went on the fact-finding mission to NASA - and added Admiral Jerônimo Bastos to the touring party, he raised no fuss. He did not, though, pick Dario.

  In fact, Zagallo was faced with only two significant selection decisions. By the time he arrived, Pelé said, ‘the team was more or less chosen but there were a few changes to be made’. Saldanha had based his squad around Santos and Botafogo, working on the same logic as Vittorio Pozzo and Gusztav Sebes: that players who play together on a regular basis will have a greater understanding. Zagallo, though, brought in Roberto Rivellino from Corinthians and confirmed the importance of Cruzeiro’s Tostão. When critics suggested they were too similar to Gérson and Pelé, Zagallo replied, ‘What this team needs is great players, players who are intelligent. Let’s go with that and see where it takes us.’

  It took them to heights that per
haps remain unsurpassed. ‘Our team was the best,’ said Gérson. ‘Those who saw it, saw it. Those who didn’t will never see it again.’ The final against Italy was billed as a battle for football’s soul, between the futebol arte of the Brazilians and the futebol de resultados - as the Brazilians had it - of the Italians. Art won, but never again would a side enjoy such success simply by throwing their best players on the field and asking them to play.

  It was not, of course, quite so simple as that, although it is difficult to know just how central Zagallo was. Gérson, Pelé and Carlos Alberto formed a sub-committee of senior players - the cobras, as they became known - and it was they who suggested the line-up to Zagallo after a warm-up game against Atlético Mineiro had ended with them being booed off following an uninspiring 3-1 win. The back four was relatively straightforward, with Piazza being used as the quarto zagueiro. So, too, was the selection of Gérson, the elegant, deep-lying playmaker - playing as what the Italians would call a regista. He needed protection, so Clodoaldo, untouchable after that second Argentina game, operated alongside him, a more physical, defensive presence - he may be best remembered for his part in Brazil’s final goal in the final, dribbling nonchalantly through three Italians in his own half, but that was utterly uncharacteristic.

  But what then? Could Pelé and Tostão really play together? ‘Tostão was not a typical centre-forward,’ said the historian Ivan Soter. ‘He was a ponta da lança like Pelé. So he would drop off and Pelé would become the centre-forward. It was very fluid.’ The danger then was that there would be nobody in the box to take advantage of their attractive approach play, but that was alleviated by Jairzinho, a rapid right-winger (he more than lived up to his nickname of ‘Furacão’ - ‘the Hurricane’) with an eye for goal. His strike against England, hurtling late into the box to hammer an angled finish across Gordon Banks after Pelé had held up and then laid off Tostão’s cross was typical, and he finished the tournament as the only man to score in every game in the finals. In training Gérson spent hours practising clipping diagonal balls for Jairzinho to run onto, in effect calibrating his left foot, making adjustments for the thinness of the Mexican air. Jairzinho’s forward surges left space behind him, but that was no problem because Carlos Alberto was an attacking right-back in the sprit of Nílton Santos. He advanced and the defence shuffled over.