Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (6 page)

‘We founded the school of Uruguayan football,’ said Ondino Viera, who would go on to manage the national side and who had a turn of phrase only marginally less colourful than Galeano’s, ‘without coaches, without physical preparation, without sports medicine, without specialists. Just us alone in the fields of Uruguay, chasing the leather from the morning to the afternoon and then into the moonlit night. We played for twenty years to become players, to become what players had to be: absolute masters of the ball … seizing the ball and not letting it go for any reason … It was a wild football, our game. It was an empirical, self-taught, native style of football. It was a football that was not yet within the canons of the management of football in the Old World, not remotely … That was our football, and that’s how we formed our school of play, and that’s how the school of play for the entire continent of the New World was formed.’

In Paris, word soon got around. ‘Game after game,’ Galeano wrote, ‘the crowd jostled to see those men, slippery as squirrels, who played chess with a ball. The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball, but these disinherited children from far-off America didn’t walk in their father’s footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling.’

Chess with a ball? Charles Alcock would scarcely have recognised it, although he would presumably have appreciated the goal-scoring ability of the centre-forward Pedro Petrone, even if he did refuse to head the ball for fear of disturbing his heavily brilliantined hair. Those who were there, though, were enraptured as Uruguay maintained their form through the competition, scoring a total of seventeen goals and conceding two in their four games before beating Switzerland 3-0 in the final. The reaction of the French essayist and novelist Henry de Montherlant was typical. ‘A revelation!’ he wrote. ‘Here we have real football. Compared with this, what we knew before, what we played, was no more than a schoolboy’s hobby.’

Gabriel Hanot, who would go on to edit
L’Équipe
, but was then coming to the end of a distinguished playing career, offered a less emotional response. Uruguay, he wrote, showed ‘marvellous virtuosity in receiving the ball, controlling it and using it. They created a beautiful football, elegant but at the same time varied, rapid, powerful and effective.’ As to the thought that British football might still be superior, Hanot was dismissive: ‘It is like comparing Arab thoroughbreds to farm horses.’

Uruguay returned home and were promptly challenged to a game by Argentina, who insisted that their subsequent 3-2 aggregate win - achieved thanks to a 2-1 second-leg victory in Buenos Aires in a game halted early by crowd trouble - demonstrated that they would have been Olympic champions, if only they had turned up. Perhaps, perhaps not; it is impossible to say, but the Buenos Aires side Boca Juniors certainly impressed on a tour of Europe in 1925, losing just three of nineteen games.

Argentina did travel to Amsterdam for the Olympics four years later and, fittingly, met Uruguay in the final, losing 2-1 after a replay. Two years later, the two sides met again in the first World Cup final, and again Uruguay were triumphant, winning 4-2. As far as it is possible to judge from contemporary reports, Uruguay’s advantage seems to have been that, for all their artistry and for all Viera’s claims of a raw spontaneity, they were able to retain a defensive shape, whereas Argentina’s individualism led at times to confusion. According to the Italian journalist Gianni Brera in
Storia critica del calcio Italiano
, the 1930 World Cup final was evidence that, ‘Argentina play football with a lot of imagination and elegance, but technical superiority cannot compensate for the abandonment of tactics. Between the two
rioplatense
national teams, the ants are the Uruguayans, the cicadas are the Argentinians.’ This is a fundamental: it could be said that the whole history of tactics describes the struggle to achieve the best possible balance of defensive solidity with attacking fluidity.

So grew up the theory of
la garra charrúa
- ‘
charrúa
’ relating to the indigenous Charrúa Indians of Uruguay and ‘
garra
’ meaning literally ‘claw’ or, more idiomatically, ‘guts’ or ‘fighting spirit’. It was that, supposedly, that gave a nation with a population of only three million the determination to win two World Cups, and it was also that which gave a tenuous legitimacy to the brutality of later Uruguayan teams.

Romanticised as that theory may have been - there was, after all, next to no Charrúa involvement in football - what was obvious to everybody outside of Britain was that the best football in the world was being played on the River Plate estuary, and that it was a game far advanced from the predictable 2-3-5 as practised in Britain. ‘The Anglo-Saxon influence has been disappearing, giving way to the less phlegmatic and more restless spirit of the Latin...’ a piece in the Argentinian newspaper
El Grafi
in 1928 asserted. ‘They soon began modifying the science of the game and fashioning one of their own… It is different from the British in that it is less monochrome, less disciplined and methodical, because it does not sacrifice individualism for the honour of collective values… River Plate football makes more use of dribbling and generous personal effort, and is more agile and attractive.’

Uruguay 4 Argentina 2, World Cup final, El Centenario, Montevideo, 30 July 1930

Imagination was prized to the extent that certain players were lionised as the inventors of certain skills or tricks: Juan Evaristo was hailed as the inventor of the ‘
marianella
’ - the volleyed backheel; Pablo Bartolucci of the diving header; and Pedro Calomino of the bicycle-kick, although this last example is disputed. Some say the bicycle-kick was invented in Peru in the late nineteenth century; most seem to credit Ramón Unzaga Asla, a native of Bilbao who emigrated to Chile and first used it in 1914 (hence the use of term
chilena
throughout Spanish-speaking South America, unless that refers to David Arellano, a Chilean who popularised the technique on a tour of Spain in 1920); while others follow Leônidas, the Brazilian forward of the thirties, in attributing it to Petronilho de Brito. Weirdly, the former Aston Villa chairman Doug Ellis also claimed to have invented the bicycle-kick, even though he never played football to any level and was not born until ten years after the first record of Unzaga performing the trick. Who actually invented it is less important in this context than what the arguments show of the value set on imagination around the River Plate estuary in the twenties. The shaming thing for British football is that the game’s homeland was so ill-disposed to innovation that it is just about conceivable that Ellis
was
the first man to perform a bicycle-kick on British soil.

Argentinian football developed its own foundation myth, based largely around the visit of the Hungarian side Ferencváros in 1922, which, exposing locals to the style of the Danubian School, supposedly revolutionised their thinking on the game. Given the process of creolisation had been going on for at least a decade, though, it seems probable that the tour simply confirmed changes that were already afoot, that in their early stages the Danubian and
rioplatense
games were similar and almost simultaneous shifts away from the physicality of the British style towards something based more on individual technique.

With the technical experimentation came a willingness to tinker - albeit gently - with tactics. ‘South American teams treated the ball better and were more tactical in outlook,’ said Francisco Varallo, Argentina’s inside-right in the first World Cup final. ‘It was the era when we had five forwards with the No.8 and the No.10 dropping back and wingers sending in passes.’ Those inside-forwards came to be seen as the key to creativity, and the game developed a cult of the
gambeta
, the slaloming style of dribbling. In both Argentina and Uruguay the story is told of a player skipping through the opposition to score a goal of outrageous quality, and then erasing his footsteps in the dust as he returned to his own half so that no one should ever copy his trick.

Mythic, evidently, but indicative of the prevailing system of values, which became even more pronounced as Argentinian football drifted into reclusiveness. Undermined by the emigration of players ahead of the 1934 World Cup - there were four Argentinians in the Italy side that won it - they were beaten in the first round by Sweden, and then refused to send a team to France in 1938 after their own bid to host the tournament was turned down. As the Second World War took hold, and then Juan Perón led the country into isolation, Argentina did not appear again on the world stage until 1950, and in the interim enjoyed a golden age. A professional league began in 1931, big stadiums brought big crowds and newspaper and radio coverage both drew off, and fuelled, the nationwide interest in the game. So central did football become to Argentinian life that when Jorge Luis Borges, who hated the sport, and Adolfo Bioy Casares, who loved it, collaborated on the short story ‘
Esse est percipi
’, it was football they chose to demonstrate how perceptions of reality could be manipulated, as they imagine a fan’s disillusionment as he learns from a conversation with a club chairman that all football is staged, with results pre-ordained and players played by actors.

The style that had begun to emerge in the twenties developed into something even more spectacular,
la nuestra
- ‘ours’ or ‘our style of play’ - which was rooted in the
criolla viveza
- ‘native cunning’. The term itself seems to have been popularised in the aftermath of Argentina’s 3-1 victory over an England XI in 1953: ‘
la nuestra
’, ‘our style’, it had been seen, could beat that of the
gringos
(although technically that was only a representative game, not a full international). What it describes, though, is the whole early philosophy of Argentinian football, which was founded on the joy of attacking. Between September 1936 and April 1938, there was not a single goalless draw in the Argentinian championship. Yet goals were only part of the story. In a much-cited anecdote from his novel
On Heroes and Tombs
(annoyingly missing from the English translation), Ernesto Sábato discusses the spirit of
la nuestra
as the character Julien d’Arcangelo tells the hero, Martín, of an incident involving two Independiente inside-forwards of the twenties, Alberto Lalín and Manuel Seoane (nicknamed both la Chancha and el Negro), who were seen as embodying the two different schools of thought on how football should be played. ‘“To show you what those two modalities were,”’ D’Arcangelo says to Martín, “I am going to share with you an illustrative anecdote. One afternoon, at half-time, la Chancha was saying to Lalín: “Cross it to me, man, and I can go in and score.” The second half starts, Lalín crosses and sure enough el Negro gets to it, goes in and scores. Seoane returns with his arms outstretched, running towards Lalín, shouting: “See, Lalín, see?!” and Lalín answered, “Yes, but I’m not having fun.” There you have, if you like, the whole problem of Argentinian football.’

The tricks, entertainment, came to rival winning in importance. Half a century earlier, Britain had herself had the argument: to keep playing the ‘right way’, to keep dribbling (albeit in a far less flamboyant manner), or to adopt the style that won matches. In its twenty-year cocoon, in a culture obsessed by
viveza
and with few games against outsiders that might have brought defeat and a tactical rethink, the exuberant style flourished. It might not have been for the long-term good of Argentinian football, but it was fun while it lasted.

Chapter Three

The Third Back

∆∇ Part of football’s enduring fascination is that it is a holistic game, that the slightest change in one part of the pitch can have unexpected and radical effects elsewhere. When the home associations persuaded the international board in 1925 to liberalise the offside law, it was to answer the specific issue of a lack of goals. Notts County had begun the trend, but by then several clubs, most notably Newcastle United with their full-back pairing of Frank Hudspeth and Bill McCracken, had become so adept at setting an offside trap that games would be compressed into a narrow sliver either side of the halfway line. When Newcastle drew 0-0 at Bury in February 1925, it came as the final straw. It was Newcastle’s sixth goalless draw of a season that produced what at the time was an unthinkably low average of 2.58 goals per game. The football was boring, attendances were falling and the FA, for once, not merely recognised that something needed to be done, but set about doing it.

The offside law had remained unchanged since 1866, and demanded that, for a forward to be onside, three opposing players (usually a goalkeeper and two defenders) had to be between him and his opponent’s goal. The FA came up with two possible solutions - either to require only two players to be in advance of the forward, or to add a line in each half 40 yards from goal behind which a forward could not be offside - and set about testing them in a series of exhibition games, with one half being played under one alternative, and the other under the other.

At a meeting in London in June, the FA decided they preferred the version requiring only two defending players to play a forward onside. The Scottish FA soon adopted the amendment as well, and it was they who presented the proposed rule change to the International Board, the new variant being implemented ahead of the 1925-26 season. Previously a side looking to play the offside trap had been able to retain one full-back as cover as his partner stepped up to try to catch the forward; the new legislation meant that a misjudgement risked leaving the forward through one-on-one with the goalkeeper.

On the face of it, the amendment was an immediate success, with the average number of goals per game shooting up to 3.69 the following season, but it brought about significant changes in the way the game was played, and led directly to Herbert Chapman’s development of the ‘third back’ or W-M formation. And that, it is widely held, was what precipitated the decline and increasing negativity of English football.

The argument is put most strongly by Willy Meisl, the younger brother of Hugo, in
Soccer Revolution
, which was written in horrified response to England’s 6-3 defeat at home to Hungary in 1953. Meisl, it should be said, had been a devout Anglophile even before he fled rising anti-Semitism in Austria to settle in London, and his book reads as a lament for a past he experienced only second-hand and probably idealised. He became a respected figure in sports journalism, writing mainly on English football for foreign publications, but
Soccer Revolution
, for all its fine phrase-making, is, to modern eyes at least, a strikingly eccentric work. For him, the change in the offside rule was football’s version of the Fall; the moment at which innocence was lost and commercialism won out. Perhaps it was, but it was the very thin end of what is now a gargantuan wedge.

As he saw it, for he was no less a romantic than his brother, blinkered directors looking no further than their balance sheets had blamed the laws for football’s failings without ever considering that they may be ‘guilty of a wrong approach to the game’. And so they pressed ahead with a policy that ‘might have appeared to the layman a slight revision in the Laws of the Game’ but which ‘turned out to be the crack of a shot that started an avalanche’.

And here again the divide is reached between those who seek to win, and those who wish simply to play well. These days the debate often feels perfunctory, but in the twenties it was sufficiently alive that the notion of a league itself - ‘an incubus’ roared Brian Glanville - began to be questioned. ‘The average standard of play would go up remarkably if the result were not the all-important end of matches,’ Chapman admitted. ‘Fear of defeat and the loss of points eat into the confidence of players… What it comes to is that when circumstances are favourable, the professionals are far more capable than may be believed, and it seems that, if we would have better football, we must find some way of minimising the importance of winning and the value of points…’ Winning and losing in football, though, is not about morality any more than it is in life. Even those who agree most wholeheartedly with Danny Blanchflower’s dictum that ‘the great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning; it is … about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish’ would surely not have it decided in the manner of figure-skating, by a panel of judges awarding marks out of ten. It is a simple but unfortunate fact that eventually those who are looking to win games will toy with negativity. After the glorious excesses of
la nuestra
it came to the Argentinians; and for all the self-conscious aestheticism of the Austrians, it would just have surely have come to them had fascism not got there first. Golden ages, almost by definition, are past: gleeful naivety never lasts for ever.

The most obvious immediate effect of the change in the offside law was that, as forwards had more room in which to move, the game became stretched, and short passing began to give way to longer balls. Some sides adapted better than others, and the beginning of the 1925-26 season was marked by freakish results. Arsenal, in particular, seemed unable to settle into any pattern of consistency and, after beating Leeds United 4-1 on 26 September, they were hammered 7-0 by Newcastle United on 3 October.

Charlie Buchan, the inside-right and probably the team’s biggest star, was furious, and told Chapman he was retiring and wanted to stay in the north-east, where he had enjoyed considerable success with Sunderland. This Arsenal, he said, was a team without a plan, a team with no chance of winning anything. Chapman must have seen his life’s project begin to crumble, and Buchan’s words would have had a particular sting because, if nothing else, Chapman was a planner.

He had been born in Kiveton Park, a small colliery town between Sheffield and Worksop and, but for football, he would have followed his father into mining. He played first for Stalybridge, and then for Rochdale, then Grimsby, Swindon, Sheppey United, Worksop, Northampton Town, Notts County and, finally, Tottenham. He was a journeyman player, good enough to stay out of the pits, but little else, and if that part of his career was notable at all, it was for the pale yellow calf-skin boots he wore in the belief they made him easier for team-mates to pick out, an early indication of the inventiveness that would serve him so well as a manager.

His managerial career did not exactly begin with a fanfare. He was lying in the bath after playing in a friendly for Tottenham’s reserve side in the spring of 1907 when his team-mate Walter Bull mentioned that he had been approached to become player-manager of Northampton, but wanted to prolong his full-time playing career. Chapman said that he would be interested, Bull recommended him and Northampton, after failing to attract the former Stoke and Manchester City half-back Sam Ashworth, gave him the job.

A fan, as apparently all those who gave the matter any thought were, of the Scottish passing game, Chapman wanted his side to reproduce the ‘finesse and cunning’ he saw as integral to that conception of football. After a couple of promising early results, though, Northampton faded, and a home defeat to Norwich in November saw them fall to fifth bottom in the Southern League. That was Chapman’s first crisis, and he responded with his first grand idea, a recognition that ‘a team can attack for too long’. He began to encourage his team to drop back, his aim being less to check the opposition forwards than to draw out their defenders and so open up attacking space. By Christmas 1908, Northampton were top of the Southern League; they went on to win the title with a record ninety goals.

Chapman moved on to Leeds City in 1912 and, in the two seasons before the First World War, took them from second bottom of Division Two to fourth. He also hit upon one of his most notable innovations, instituting team-talks after watching players arguing passionately over a game of cards. The war interrupted their progress there, but just as damaging to Chapman and the club were accusations that the club had made illegal payments to players. He refused to hand over the club’s books, which led to Leeds City being expelled from the league and Chapman being banned from football for life in October 1919.

Two years later, though, while he was working for the Olympia oil and cake works in Selby, Chapman was approached by Huddersfield Town to become assistant to their manager Ambrose Langley, who had played alongside his late brother Harry before the war. Chapman was intrigued and appealed to the FA, noting that he had been away from the club working at the Barnbow arms factory when the supposed illegal payments had been made.

The FA showed mercy, Chapman took up the post, and when Langley decided a month later that he would rather be running a pub, he found himself installed as manager. He advised the directors that they had a talented young squad, but that they needed ‘a general to lead them’. Clem Stephenson of Aston Villa, he decided, was just the man. Stephenson was thirty-three and, crucially given Chapman’s belief in the value of counter-attacking, had developed a way of breaking the offside trap by dropping into his own half before springing forward. Performances and gates improved rapidly while Chapman, always looking at the bigger picture, re-turfed the pitch and renovated the press seats at Leeds Road. In 1922, despite their stuffed donkey mascot catching fire in the celebrations that followed the semi-final victory over Notts County, Huddersfield won the FA Cup, Billy Smith converting a last-minute penalty in the final at Stamford Bridge to see off Preston North End.

The authorities, though, were not impressed. The game had been a poor one, littered with niggling fouls, leading the FA to convey its ‘deep regret’ at the behaviour it had witnessed and to express a hope that ‘there will not be any similar conduct in any future final tie’. Huddersfield asked what was meant, to which the FA replied that the club should recognise indecency when it saw it, the lack of clarification prompting many to believe that Chapman was being censured for having deployed his centre-half, Tom Wilson, deeper than usual so that, in the words of the
Huddersfield Examiner
, he acted as ‘a great spoiler’.

It is impossible at this remove to determine whether the FA had anything so specific in mind, but again what is apparent is the perception that there was a ‘right way to play’ from which Chapman was deemed to have deviated. Equally, the deployment of Wilson with a brief, if not to man-mark, then certainly to check Billy Roberts, the opposing centre-forward, suggests that the stopper centre-half was on its way, and may have come into existence even without the change in the offside law.

There were other isolated incidents of clubs fielding their centre-half with a specific defensive brief - Queen’s Park, for instance, in danger of being overwhelmed by Rangers in a Glasgow Charity Cup tie in 1918, dropped Bob Gillespie back into what was effectively a central defensive role - but what was unique about Chapman’s Huddersfield was less the willingness to deploy the centre-half defensively as the fact that they developed a distinctive style, based around their manager’s distrust of the wing play that was so revered in Britain. Inside passing, Chapman argued, was ‘more deadly, if less spectacular’ than the ‘senseless policy of running along the lines and centring just in front of the goalmouth, where the odds are nine to one on the defenders’. As the
Examiner
noted in 1924 after Huddersfield had wrapped up the league title, ‘the low passing and the long-field play of the Leeds Road team has become famous.’

What was significant was not merely that Chapman had a clear conception of how football should be played, but that he was in a position to implement that vision. He was - at least in Britain - the first modern manager, the first man to have complete control over the running of the club, from signings to selection to tactics to arranging for gramophone records to be played over the public-address system to keep the crowd entertained before the game and at half-time. With Huddersfield on their way to defending their title in 1925, the
Sporting Chronicle
asked: ‘Do clubs realise to the full today the importance of the man who is placed in control? They are ready to pay anything up to £4,000 and £5,000 for the services of a player. Do they attach as much importance to the official who will have charge of the player…? The man behind the scenes who finds players, trains talent, gets the best out of the men at his command is the most important man in the game from the club’s point of view.’

The following year Huddersfield completed a hat-trick of league titles, but by then Chapman was gone, enticed south by what he saw as even the greater potential of Arsenal. It was not, it must be said, obvious. Arsenal were struggling to stay up and, in Sir Henry Norris, labouring under an idiosyncratic and domineering chairman. Leslie Knighton, Chapman’s predecessor, had been forbidden to spend more than £1,000 on a player in an age in which £3,000 fees were becoming common, while there was also a ban on bringing in players measuring less than 5’8”. When Knighton defied the height restriction to sign the 5’0” Hugh ‘Midget’ Moffatt from Workington in 1923, Norris had him offloaded to Luton Town before he had played a single league game. Knighton was dismissed at the end of the 1924-25 season, with Norris citing poor results, although Knighton claimed it was because the club wanted to avoid paying him a bonus he was due from a benefit match.