Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (23 page)

Kanevskyi, though, insists Galinsky has exaggerated the episode. He was at the meal and agrees there was
horilka
and that everybody apart from the fastidious Lobanovskyi drank the toast, but he also maintains that Lobanovskyi’s strict self-discipline was well known, even admired, and that Maslov was unconcerned by his abstinence. ‘Maslov said nothing to him,’ he recalled, ‘and certainly he didn’t use any insulting words.’

Others believe their relationship broke down during a game in Moscow against Spartak on 27 April 1964. Lobanovskyi had given Dynamo the lead, and they were still 1-0 up when he was substituted - for the first time in his career - with twenty minutes to go. Spartak then equalised and the game ended in a draw, leading to speculation that Maslov had arranged the result in advance with the Spartak coach Nikita Simonyan, and that Lobanovskyi was taken off because he had refused to go along with their agreement. True or not, the next game, away to Shinnik in Yaroslavl, was Lobanovskyi’s last for the club.

Then again, it may be there was no falling out. Maslov was just as swift to get rid of Mikhail Gershkovich, David Pays and Grigory Yanets - all leading players - when he returned to Torpedo in 1971, apparently for no other reason than that they did not fit his system, and it is easy to see why Lobanovskyi would not have fitted Maslov’s plans, whatever Galinsky may say. Nicknamed ‘Cord’ in the Moscow press because of the way the ball at times appeared to be tied to his boot-laces, Lobanovskyi was a genuine star, talented and popular with the crowd. On his death in 2002, several messages of condolence from fans recalled how they had gone to Dynamo games in the early sixties excited by the prospect of watching him take corners packed with backspin so they dropped almost vertically in the box - a variant of the ‘falling leaf’ free-kicks devised by Didi a few years earlier. The problem was that he was a left-winger, and wingers had no place in Maslov’s plan.

‘I’d not call what happened between Maslov and Lobanovskyi a conflict,’ Biba explained. ‘It was just that Valeriy often opposed the coach’s directions. Maslov was seeking new forms of football and footballers who held on to the ball for too long didn’t suit him. Even the “banana shot” invented by Lobanovskyi couldn’t persuade him. But then, after becoming a coach, Valeriy acknowledged that Lobanovskyi the player could not have played in his team.’ This was the debate raised by Mihkail Yakushin’s preference for the collective over the individualism of a Stanley Matthews taken to its logical extreme. No matter how talented the individual, if they did not function as part of the collective, they had no place within it.

That is not to say that Maslov was opposed to great individuals
per se
. On the contrary, Biba was one of the most gifted midfielders Ukraine has ever produced, functioning in Maslov’s system as Bobby Charlton did in Ramsey’s England side. ‘When he gets the ball, he knows in advance what his team-mates and his opponents are going to do,’ said Iosif Betsa, who was part of the USSR team that won gold at the 1956 Olympics and who went on to become a respected coach. ‘He has a plan of his next actions and with his first touch puts the ball in a comfortable position to execute it quickly. And if the opponent has guessed his intentions, he changes the direction of the attack immediately. At the same time, Biba possesses a magnificent long shot and can finish off attacks arriving in the right place at just the right time.’

Biba reached his peak in 1966. In the spring he beat Lev Yashin with a 40-yard drive in a game against Dinamo Moscow; he was superb in the crucial 4-0 victory over CSKA in the autumn, setting up two of Dynamo’s goals; and he rounded off the year with the decisive goal in the Cup final victory over Torpedo as Dynamo won the double. He was the creative hub of the team and, to widespread agreement, he was named Soviet Player of the Year.

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 Celtic 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.