Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (42 page)

There is, perhaps, a nod here back to the days of the head-down charging of the Victorians: where Italian paranoia led to
catenaccio
and a faith in strategy over ability, English insecurity led to a style that similarly distrusted ability, favouring instead a thoughtless physicality - keep battling, keep running, keep trying. As the German journalist Raphael Honigstein put it sardonically in the title of his work on English football, ‘
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
’. But not more skilful.

Although Hughes advocates increasing shooting practice to improve accuracy - and, supposedly, demonstrates his success in that area with England Under-16s, although his sample includes only four matches - this surely is just the kind of argument that had so appalled Jimmy Hogan almost a century earlier at Fulham: buy enough tickets and you’ll win the raffle eventually.

Quite aside from that there is a baffling lack of subtlety to Hughes’s work. He claims that by applying his ‘formula’ - which arguably just comes down to being better than the opposition anyway - a side has a greater than 85 percent chance of winning. The question then is whether there is a pattern to the other 15 percent. What Hughes’s statistics do not show is the possibility Taylor accepts, the possibility that feels intuitively true, that direct football can take a team only so far, that there comes a certain level of opposition capable of keeping the ball, capable of controlling possession, against which it is rendered ineffective. Brian Clough was typically unequivocal. ‘I want to establish without any shadow of a doubt that Charles Hughes is totally wrong in his approach to football,’ he said. ‘He believes that footballs should come down with icicles on them.’

That is an exaggeration, but the flaws were obvious enough. Chapman’s direct approach worked because he lured teams out and encouraged them to leave space behind them that his team then exploited. Taylor’s Watford, with their high-tempo pressing game, were vulnerable to just that kind of attack. Hughes’s formula makes no distinction as to the style played against. Given Taylor’s direct approach foundered against a Sparta Prague side adept at retaining possessing and launching astute counter-attacks, wouldn’t Hughes’s have too? Organisation and energy, Taylor found, will carry a team so far, but only so far.

The irony is that while Taylor was well aware of the defects of the method, it was he who was left to reap the pitiful harvest after Hughes had implemented Reep’s principles as FA policy. Yes, there were players missing through injury, but still, have England ever sent out a weaker team in a major championship than that which lost 2-1 to Sweden in the final group game of Euro ’92: Woods; Batty, Keown, Walker, Pearce; Daley, Webb, Palmer, Sinton; Platt; Lineker? To rub salt into the wound, when England then failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, they were knocked out by Norway, a side practising the Reepian model taken to its extreme.

The links between Britain and the Scandinavian game had always been strong. Football was introduced to Sweden through the usual route of British sailors, with a little help from Anglophile Danes. When the Swedish Football Federation (SvFF) decided to appoint their first professional coach after the Second World War, they sought advice from the FA, and appointed George Raynor, who had been reserve team coach at Aldershot. Under his guidance, and advantaged by their wartime neutrality, Sweden won gold at the 1948 London Olympics, finished third at the 1950 World Cup and then reached the final against in 1958. There, they played a typical W-M with man-marking, something that, largely because of the amateur ethos of the SvFF, did not change until the late sixties.

Professionalism was finally sanctioned in 1967, and, in the aftermath of Sweden’s failure to qualify for the 1970 World Cup, Lars Arnesson, a leading coaching instructor, was appointed to work alongside the national manager, Georg Åby-Ericson. Arnesson envisaged a unified playing style across Swedish football, and decided it should feature a German-style
libero
. That seemed to be vindicated at the 1974 World Cup, as Sweden finished third in their second-phase group, effectively fifth in the tournament. Although there had not been sufficient time for his idea of uniformity across all levels of coaching to have taken effect, that success did prove that Sweden could be internationally competitive with the system.

Almost immediately, though, a counter-movement sprang up as Eric Persson, an ageing autocrat who had been chairman-coach of Malmö FF, decided to stand down to allow greater specialisation of management roles at the club. A high-profile banker, Hans Cavalli-Björkman, was appointed as chairman, while for a manager, feeling local coaches were overly conservative, the club turned to a twenty-seven-year-old Englishman called Bobby Houghton.

Houghton had played at Brighton and Fulham, but decided early to become a coach. He came through Wade’s training course at the FA with top marks, and, in 1971-72, was appointed player-manager at Maidstone United. There he signed as player-coach a former school-mate, Roy Hodgson, who had also shown promise on Wade’s coaching courses.

Wade was a modernising force, who argued repeatedly against coaching drills that were not directly related to match-situations. His main concern was less individual skills than shape and the distribution of players on the pitch. It was those ideas Houghton instituted at Malmö. When, two years later, he installed Hodgson at Halmstads BK, a division was created between their modern English school and those who favoured the
libero
. Houghton and Hodgson employed a zonal defence, pressed hard and maintained a high offside line. They counter-attacked, not in the way of the Dutch or Dynamo Kyiv, but with long passes played in behind the opposition defence. According to the Swedish academic Tomas Peterson, ‘they threaded together a number of principles, which could be used in a series of combinations and compositions, and moulded them into an organic totality - an indivisible project about how to play football. Every moment of the match was theorised, and placed as an object-lesson for training-teaching, and was looked at in a totality.’

That, according to Arnesson, ‘stifles initiative, and turns players into robots’, and, as critics dismissed the English style as ‘dehumanising’, the debate about the relative merits of beauty and success came to Sweden. Peterson compares it to listening to Charlie Parker after Glenn Miller or viewing Picasso after classical landscapes: ‘the change does not just lie in the aesthetic assimilation, ’ he wrote. ‘The actual organisation of art and music happens on a more advanced level.’ Naivety is gone, and there is a second order of complexity.

Success Houghton and Hodgson certainly had. They won five out of six league titles between them, while Houghton took Malmö to the 1979 European Cup final, where they were narrowly beaten by Clough’s Nottingham Forest. At the 1978 World Cup, though, Sweden finished bottom of a first-phase group that included Austria, Brazil and Spain, a poor showing that was blamed on the corrosive influence of the English style (England themselves, of course, had failed to qualify).

When Sweden then failed to reach the finals of the 1980 European Championship, the SvFF was moved to act and, on 11 December 1980, formally declared that the English-style would not be played by the national team, nor taught at any national institution. As Houghton and Hodgson left to take up positions at Bristol City, it seemed that the
libero
may prevail, but their influence was carried on by Sven-Göran Eriksson, who as part of his coaching education had observed Bobby Robson at Ipswich Town and Bob Paisley at Liverpool.

Eriksson had worked as a PE teacher in Orebro, playing at right-back for BK Karlskoga, a local second division side. There, his thinking on the game was heavily influenced by his player-manager, Tord Grip, who had himself become convinced of the merits of the English style. After his retirement as a player, Grip became manager of Orebro before moving on to Degerfors IF. When, at the age of twenty-eight, Eriksson was badly injured, Grip asked him to join him as assistant coach. Grip was soon appointed as assistant to Georg Ericsson with the national side, leaving Eriksson, in 1976, to take over at Degerfors.

He twice led them to the playoffs, finally winning promotion to the second division in 1979, at which, to widespread surprise, he was appointed manager of IFK Gothenburg. ‘Here was this really shy man, who had been the manager of a little team called Degerfors,’ said the defender Glenn Hysen, ‘and now he was suddenly in charge of the biggest club in the country. We had never heard of him, as a player or as a coach, and it took us a while to get used to him and respect him.’

Gothenburg lost their first three games under Eriksson, at which he offered to quit. The players, though, encouraged him to stay, their form improved and Gothenburg finished runners-up in the league, winning the cup. That did not, though, make him popular. ‘Eriksson has been at variance with the ideals of the fans since, like most managers, he wants results before anything,’ the journalist Frank Sjoman wrote. ‘Before long, he had introduced more tactical awareness, work-rate and had tightened the old cavalier style. The result has been that while Gothenburg are harder to beat, they are harder to watch.’ Their average gate fell by 3,000 to 13,320.

Eriksson, like Wade, was obsessed by shape. ‘Svennis would place us like chess pieces on the training pitch,’ the midfielder Glenn Schiller said. ‘“You stand here, you go there,” and so on… The biggest problem was fitting all the pieces together and getting them to move in harmony. The defensive part was the key to it all. When we were attacking, there was a fair amount of freedom to express ourselves, but we had to defend from strict, zonal starting positions.’

Gothenburg finished second again in 1981, but they settled the debate decisively the following year, winning the league and cup double and, improbably, lifting the Uefa Cup. Although Eriksson soon left for Benfica, the English 4-4-2 was firmly established.

In Norway, the debate was less ferocious, and more decisively won by the pragmatists. Wade and Hughes had visited repeatedly in the sixties and seventies, and Wade’s
The FA Guide to Training and Coaching
became central to Norwegian coaching and thinking, as is evident from
Understanding of Football
, the manual written by Andreas Morisbak, the technical director of the Norwegian football federation, in 1978.

The Norwegian University of Sport and Physical Education was established in 1968 and, in 1981, a lecturer there, Egil Olsen, who had won sixteen caps for Norway, dissected Wade’s model and presented a revised version. He argued that Wade had made possession too much of a priority, almost an end in itself, whereas he believed attaining it should be the aim of defensive play and the application of it to produce goals the aim of attacking play. That may seem obvious, but the slight semantic clarification was to have radical effects, as Olsen extended the thought. He felt that in Wade’s model too little attention was paid to penetration, that it was more important to pass the opposition longitudinally than to retain possession.

His work came just as the Swedish debate between system and beauty spread to Norway, stimulated largely by Vålerenga IF’s title success in 1983 under Gunder Bengtsson, a Swede who had become convinced by Houghton and Hodgson’s methods. He was followed at Vålerenga and FK Lyn by another Swede, Olle Nordin - ‘Marching Olle’ as he was mocked after the 1990 World Cup, at which his highly-regarded Sweden lost all three games by the same scoreline: 1-2, 1-2, 1-2 - and Grip then became national manager.

Olsen and his colleagues at NUSPE had begun statistically analysing games, the results of which led Olsen to a series of conclusions outlined in his Masters thesis, the most eye-catching of which is that the probability of scoring before the ball goes dead again is higher when it is with the opposing goalkeeper than with your own. This in turn led him to postulate that position of the ball is more important than possession.

In 1987 Olsen presented a paper at the Science and Football conference in Liverpool. While there, he met George Wilkinson, who was a match analyst for Howard Wilkinson, then the manager of Leeds. Through them he came upon the work of Reep, which to his mind confirmed his own theories about the role of chance in football and the inutility of possession. Olsen met Reep in 1993, and the two maintained a friendship so close that when Olsen was appointed manager of Wimbledon in 1999, Reep, then ninety-five, offered to act as his analyst.

Olsen became Norway national coach in 1990. He implemented a 4-5-1 formation, often playing a target man - Jostein Flo - wide to attack the back post where he would habitually enjoy a height advantage over the full-back who was supposed to be marking him. Taylor, interestingly, did something similar with Ian Ormondroyd at Aston Villa, and the theory was at least partially behind the use of Emile Heskey wide on the left under Gérard Houllier at Liverpool and for Eriksson’s England. Olsen, nicknamed ‘Drillo’ because of his dribbling skills as a player, demanded balls be pumped into the ‘
bakrom
’ - ‘the backroom’ - that is, the area behind the opponent’s defensive line, as his own side followed up with attacking runs. The phrase ‘
å være best uten ball
’ - ‘to be the best at off-the-ball running’ - initially attached to the midfielder Øyvind Leonhardsen, became a signature. Olsen was stunningly successful. Norway had not been to a World Cup since 1938, but he led them to qualification in both 1994 and 1998 and, briefly, to second in Fifa’s world rankings.