Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (36 page)

Malofeev’s other great strength was his ability to handle players and get the best out of them. It is an over-simplification to say Lobanovskyi saw his payers as tools to be deployed, but not much of one; Malofeev, though, was concerned with individuality and self-expression. ‘The main thing about Malofeev was his psychology,’ explained Mikhail Vergeenko, Dinamo Minsk’s goalkeeper in the early eighties. ‘We would have a team-talk three hours before each game. He would gather everyone together and read out the team. He looked into the players’ eyes, at each one, eye to eye. He was always looking, searching to discover something. He was like a doctor. He analysed players and he knew straightaway their strong points and their weak points. He was a person who could get to your heart, your soul. He knew how to talk to people.’ Malofeev’s failure at Hearts in 2006 - statistically, he is their worst ever manager, taking two points from his four games in charge - Vergeenko puts down to the absence of a good translator.

It didn’t take long for comparisons to be made with what was going on 270 miles to the south-east. ‘The rivalry between Minsk and Kyiv was the rivalry between two minds,’ Vergeenko explained. ‘Lobanovskyi was a coach by mathematics; Malofeev was more romantic. The main thing he wanted from the players was that they should express themselves on the pitch. If you give your all, he said, the fans will love you.’

The player the fans loved most was a man whose lifestyle would have disbarred him from getting anywhere near a Lobanovksyi side: Alexander Prokopenko. He was a heartbreak of a midfielder, a genius whose talent was as unbridled as his capacity for alcohol. A painfully shy man, he was so tormented by a speech impediment that he refused ever to be interviewed. It didn’t matter: Dinamo fans knew what he thought because he drank with them. More than that, he was one of them, just another worker from Minsk who happened to be a superb instinctive footballer, and an industrious one at that. ‘The tribune knew he would go for ninety minutes,’ the journalist Vasily Sarychev wrote in
The Moment and the Destiny
, his book celebrating Belarus’s top sportsmen. ‘He would sooner die than cease his motion on the pitch through tiredness or laziness.’

His drinking after the USSR team of which he had been a part finished third in the 1980 Olympics led him to miss the end of the season, but he returned in glory and scored the iconic goal of the 1982 campaign, a backheel against Dynamo Kyiv. As Dinamo’s form slid in the mid-eighties, his alcoholism got worse, and he was forced to spend time at LTP, a state-sponsored rehab clinic. The club, acting under the instructions of the local Communist Party, refused to take him back, but Abramovich, whom he came to refer to as a second father, persuaded the second division side Dnepr Mogilev to take him on. After a season there he moved to Azerbaijan with Neftchi Baku, playing against Dinamo Minsk and scoring against Spartak.

It was only a brief respite, though, and he began drinking heavily again. He was readmitted to the LTP in 1989, but died two months later, aged just thirty-five. ‘He was followed by the smell of grass and of skin, by the joy of his goals and by empty cans,’ Sarychev wrote. ‘When the need for football went, the urge died in him, the urge he was born to fulfil.’

Brilliant but unpredictable, his demons masked by the charm of his play, Prokopenko was the model of a Malofeev footballer. Lobanovskyi, predictably, was scathing of Malofeev’s idealism. As he pointed out, for all Dinamo Minsk fans raved about the Prokopenko backheel, the match had ended in a draw and a valuable away point for Dynamo. ‘When somebody mentioned it,’ Abramovich recalled, ‘he slapped his hand to his head and said, “In my life I have seen many things, but never
sincere
football.”’

Nonetheless, at least for one glorious season, it worked. ‘What happened with Dinamo in 1982 was about the harmony of youth and experience,’ the midfielder Sergei Aleinikov wrote in his autobiography. ‘Everybody, whether they were veterans or novices, played every game like it was the last of his career. But the main thing was that Malofeev was the head of the team, the unique and only one. That was his victory, the triumph of his principles and his understanding of football.’

That year, every ploy Malofeev initiated paid off. Vergeenko remembers in particular the game away to Pakhtakor Tashkent, who went on to finish sixth that season. ‘It was forty degrees plus in the shade,’ he said. ‘The game was at 6 p.m., but at noon, Malofeev said, “OK, let’s go and train.” Everybody was stunned. Even in the hotel it was over thirty-five at night, no air-conditioning. Imagine: we were just thinking how to escape the heat; then Malofeev says we’re training at noon. “But afterwards,” he said, “you will see - just thirty minutes, you will sweat, but you will be OK.” We had thirty minutes training. The workers in the ground were shocked. They were sitting there out of the heat drinking water, and Malofeev brings his team for training. But that evening, we knew we could deal with the heat and we won 3-0, and they were a good team at that time.’

Dinamo Minsk 1982

Malofeev’s team talks were equally eccentric. Dinamo went into their final league game away to Spartak Moscow needing a win to clinch the title. Twenty-nine years earlier, it was widely believed in Belarus, Spartak had cheated Dinamo Minsk out of second place in the league with a bout of late-season match-fixing, and the fear was they would do something similar to hand the title to Dynamo. Malofeev knew he had to break down his side’s cynicism, to persuade them that defeat was not inevitable, and so came up with something that sounds like the rejected draft of a Just So story.

‘“Imagine there is a troop of monkeys crossing a field,”’ Vergeenko remembers him telling a hushed dressing room. ‘“On the other side of the field is a group of lions. Many different things could happen. Maybe the lions will tear the monkeys to pieces. Or maybe one of the monkeys will go first, and will distract the lions, and will sacrifice himself so the other monkeys will live. Today, as monkeys, we must sacrifice ourselves for the victory.”

‘I thought: I am the goalkeeper, maybe I will be injured, but the main thing is that the team will win.’ And they did, by the typically Malofeevan score of 4-3. ‘When the team got back from Moscow to Minsk, it was amazing,’ Vergeenko went on. ‘There were people with flowers and kisses and love: nothing organised, just love.’

Malofeev promptly left for Moscow to take charge of the USSR Olympic side, leaving him ideally placed to step in when Lobanovskyi’s second spell in charge of the main national team came to an end. All had seemed to be progressing well for him, particularly after a 5-0 demolition of Portugal in Moscow in qualifying for Euro 84. Away in Lisbon, though, Lobanovskyi - as he always did in tough away games - set out for the draw, only to be undone by a penalty awarded for a foul that clearly took place outside the box. Portugal won 1-0, the USSR failed to qualify, and Lobanovskyi, blamed for his pragmatism, was dismissed.

Lobanovskyi’s star had never been lower, and only the personal intervention of Scherbytskyi saw him reinstated at Dynamo. Even that looked an error when Dynamo finished that 1984 season tenth. Lobanovskyi, though, stuck to his guns. ‘A path always remains a path,’ he said. ‘It’s a path during the day, it’s a path during the night and it’s a path during the dawn.’ The next season, Dynamo did the double, before adding the Cup-Winners’ Cup.

Malofeev, meanwhile, was faltering. The USSR won just one of their opening five qualifiers for the Mexico World Cup, but salvaged a place in the finals by winning their last three games. ‘Malofeev became very nervous, and there was no clear pattern to our football, but Mexico was waiting,’ Aleinikov wrote in his autobiography. ‘The media was attacking both the players and the coaches. The final straw was the grey 0-0 draw against Finland [in a friendly] at the Luzhniki Stadium. It was rumoured that Malofeev might be replaced, and Lobanovskyi had just won the Cup-Winners’ Cup, but I didn’t believe it would come to reality before the start of the World Cup.’

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 perhaps 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.