Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (15 page)

He helped Porto overhaul a five-point deficit to pip Benfica to the title, at which Benfica promptly appointed him themselves. He sacked twenty players on his arrival but, promoting youth players, won the league in 1960 and 1961. Even more significantly, Benfica’s free-flowing football saw off Barcelona 3-2 in the European Cup final in 1961, ending Real Madrid’s five-year monopoly.

But that wasn’t enough for Guttmann. A week after the final in Berne, he gave a debut to the player who would become the greatest in the club’s history: Eusébio. The Mozambican would probably have joined Sporting had Guttmann not bumped into Carlos Bauer, who had played for him in São Paulo, in a Lisbon barber’s shop. Bauer was leading a Brazilian side on a five-week tour of Africa, and Guttmann asked him to keep an eye out for fresh talent. Five weeks later, they met again in the same barber’s shop. Bauer spoke of a forward with Sporting’s feeder club in Lourenço Marques (as Maputo was then called), whom he wanted to sign but couldn’t afford, and who was, anyway, destined for Sporting. Guttmann phoned the Mozambican club, hijacked the deal and had Eusébio’s signature two days later. ‘By signing Eusébio,’ Guttmann said, ‘I was able to play Mario Coluna deeper, more as a wing-half than an inside-forward. He did not like it at first because he did not score so many goals, but he became my best player.’ He became, in other words, Benfica’s Hidegkuti.

Benfica finished third that season, conceding more goals than Sporting and Porto - the two teams who had finished above them - put together. Perhaps that was a sign that Guttmann’s attacking approach had had its day - ‘I never minded if the opposition scored, because I always thought we could score another,’ he said - but few thought that as Benfica came from 2-0 and 3-2 down to beat Real Madrid 5-3 in the European Cup final in Amsterdam. Puskás, having scored a hat-trick in a losing cause, sought out Eusébio at the final whistle and handed him his shirt, a gesture widely interpreted as a symbolic passing of the mantle of Europe’s greatest player. Benfica, similarly, seemed to have supplanted Madrid as Europe’s greatest team and, with Eusébio only twenty, there was little reason to believe that the club would not go on to dominate the sixties as surely as Real Madrid had the fifties. Had, that is, Guttmann stayed.

He did not. After the final, Guttmann approached Benfica’s directors and asked whether he mightn’t be due some kind of bonus. There was, the directors replied, no such provision in his contract. ‘I got $4,000 less for winning the European Cup than the Portuguese championship,’ Guttmann said. ‘No attempt was made by the directors to change the situation, so I began to think about moving on.’

Two months later, he did, ignoring the overtures of Third Division Port Vale to return to South America with the Uruguayan side Peñarol. There he constructed a side that would go on to win the Copa Libertadores, although he left before the final to take charge of the Austria national team. Driven out by anti-Semitism after five games, he wandered on to Benfica - briefly - and then to Servette of Geneva, Panathinakos and Porto before a final return to the city he adored with Austria Vienna. He was never, though, quite the same after Benfica, and neither was the club. The story has grown up that he cursed them, vowing they would never win another European trophy until he was paid what he was due; nonsense, of course, but Benfica have been in five European finals since, and lost them all.

In truth, football has never been quite the same. Guttmann, more than anybody since Chapman, had defined the cult of the manager; the man who would take on his mantle was Helenio Herrera, whose conception of the game could hardly have been more different. Out went all romantic notions of scoring one more than the opposition, and in came cynicism and
catenaccio
and the theory of conceding one fewer.

Chapter Seven

Harnesssing the Carnival

∆∇ The Brazil in which Béla Guttmann and Honvéd arrived in 1956 was far from the tactical wilderness he liked to portray. Individual technique and improvisation were prized, certainly, but having come to the W-M late, the 4-2-4 was already well developed - perhaps because the rigidity of the W-M, with its tight marking structure, did not sit easily with local demands for flair and self-expression.

If Brazilian football’s foundation myth is to be believed, and there seems little reason to doubt its fundamentals, the sport had arrived in Brazil with Charles Miller. The son of an English father and a Brazilian mother, members of the coffee and commerce elite of São Paulo, he was sent back to England to be educated. While there he learned the game at school, going on to represent Hampshire and play a handful of games for St Mary’s, the forerunner of Southampton. When he returned to São Paulo in 1894, he brought two footballs with him. The legend has him disembarking with a ball in each hand.

‘What are those, Charles?’ his father is supposed to have asked.

‘My degree,’ he replied. ‘Your son has graduated in football.’

The specifics of the story are almost certainly untrue, but it is not hard to see why it would gain currency. Here, from its origins, was Brazilian football as happy, smiling, impertinent and disrespectful of authority.

The sport spread quickly, both among the Anglo elite and the indigenous population. By 1902 there was a thriving league programme in São Paulo, while the game had been imported to Rio de Janeiro by another Anglo-Brazilian, Oscar Cox, who had picked up the game during his schooling in Switzerland. He founded Fluminense with some friends and, like the early Dutch and Danish clubs, it seems to have become almost a parody of Englishness, all hats and moustaches, hurrahs and manliness. Miller, equally, was an old-school advocate of dribbling, and there is no reason to believe the game among the ex-pat community was any different in style to the game in Britain at the time.

Among the Anglo-Brazilian clubs, as elsewhere, dribbling soon began to give way to passing. Jock Hamilton, one of the many Scottish coaches employed by Harry Bradshaw at Fulham - a first, albeit tenuous, link between Jimmy Hogan and Brazil - was appointed at CA Paulistano, and pronounced himself ‘surprised to find the game so advanced… their combination is really clever’. It got cleverer thanks to the influence of the Scottish Wanderers, a team of Scottish ex-pats formed in São Paulo in 1912. They practised the pattern-weaving approach, which, confusingly, became known as the ‘
systema ingleza’
- ‘the English system’.

Wanderers’ most noted player was Archie McLean, a left-winger who had spent two seasons with Ayr United in the Scottish Second Division. He ‘was an artist, a worthy exponent of the Scottish school,’ wrote Tomás Mazzoni in his 1950 history of football in Brazil. ‘His scientific football became more prominent when he formed a partnership on the left wing with another of his compatriots Hopkins.’ The pair later moved to São Bento, where their trick of rapidly exchanging short passes became known as the ‘
tabelinha
’ (literally, ‘little chart’).

As Aidan Hamilton details in
An Entirely Different Game
, the British influence remained strong in Brazil far longer than it had in Uruguay or Argentina. Mazzoni speaks of Harry Welfare, a centre-forward who had played for Liverpool before accepting the offer of a teaching role in Rio de Janeiro, ‘adapting’ to ‘our style of play’ after joining Fluminense, but he also disseminated his own ideas. Max Valentim, in
On Football and its Technique
, says that Welfare taught the inside-forwards at the club how to play the through-ball, and describes two of his dribbling techniques: ‘This break or feint of the body which the English call “swerving” and the jump to one side while running with the ball.’

The real divergence from the old model, though, began when locals got involved. Barred from Fluminense, they watched the Anglo-Brazilians from nearby rooftops, and saw a sport that was both far easier to comprehend and far easier to replicate than cricket. In the informal kickabouts in the streets, often using balls made of rags, a wholly different conception of the game developed. It was based on the unorthodox and individual skills required to thrive in such conditions and - crucially - was uninhibited by any proscriptions against showing off. McLean was not impressed. ‘There were great players there,’ he said of football in São Paulo, ‘but they were terribly undisciplined. Their antics would not have been tolerated in Scotland.’

Various parallels have been drawn between Brazilian football and samba - Brazilian fans at the 1958 World Cup chanted ‘Samba, samba’ as they celebrated their country’s first win in the tournament - while Simon Kuper in
Football against the Enemy
compares Pelé to a
capoerista
, an exponent of a martial art invented by Angolan slaves that was disguised as a dance to fool their masters.

The anthropologist Robert DaMatta came up with the theory of ‘
jeitinho
’ - literally, ‘the small way’ - to explain the creativity on which Brazilians so pride themselves, positing that because the laws and codes of behaviour in Brazil, even after the abolition of slavery in 1888, were designed to protect the rich and powerful, individuals had to find imaginative ways of getting round them.
Jeitinho
, he wrote in
What makes Brazil, Brazil
, ‘is a personal mediation between the law, the situation in which it should apply and the persons involved in such a way that nothing really changes, apart from a considerable demoralisation of the law itself… In the USA, France and England, for example, the rules are either obeyed or do not exist. In these societies, it is well known that there is no desire to establish new laws that are not in line with the common good or with the other laws of society, so creating room for bureaucratic corruption and diminishing the trust in the public institutions… So … the Americans, the French and the British stop in front of a “Stop” sign, which seems to us a logical and social absurdity…’

Brazilians, by contrast, find a way around such restrictions; they come to rely on themselves rather than on external structures. It is not hard to see the imaginativeness that has historically characterised Brazilian football as a particular expression of that trait. Individuals find their own way to master situations, and that means both high levels of creativity, and a distrust of teamwork.

Much of DaMatta’s work develops the thinking of Gilberto Freyre, a sociologist who began writing in the late thirties. Freyre was among the first to promote Brazil’s racial diversity as a positive, celebrating the Carioca figure of the
malandro
, typically a mixed-race trickster or con man, who used his wits to best those who in theory had authority over him. ‘Our style of playing football,’ Freyre wrote in 1938, ‘contrasts with the Europeans because of a combination of the qualities of surprise, malice, astuteness and agility, and at the same time brilliance and individual spontaneity… Our passes … our dummies, our flourishes with the ball, the touch of dance and subversiveness that marks the Brazilian style … seem to show psychologists and sociologists in a very interesting way the roguery and flamboyance of the mulatto that today is every true affirmation of what is Brazilian.’

For writers of the time, the
malandro
spirit found its personification in two of the greatest Brazilian players of the thirties, the centre-forward Leônidas and the defender Domingos da Guia, both of whom were black. Domingos openly acknowledged that his creative abilities, the technical skills that allowed him to carry the ball out from the back, were rooted initially in the need for self-preservation. ‘When I was still a kid I was scared to play football,’ he said, ‘because I often saw black players … get whacked on the pitch, just because they made a foul or sometimes for less than that… My elder brother used to tell me: the cat always falls on his feet… Aren’t you good at dancing? I was and this helped my football… I swung my hips a lot… That short dribble I invented imitating the
miudinho
, that type of samba.’

However it came about, by 1919 there was a discernibly Brazilian style of play, as was outlined that November in an article headed ‘Brazilian Innovation’ in the first issue of the São Paulo magazine
Sports.
‘As opposed to the British school, which dictates that the ball be taken by the forwards right up to the opposition’s goal and put in from the closest possible range, the Brazilian school states that shots be taken from any distance, the precision of the shot being worth more than the fact that it is made close to the target. And it further states that the collective advance of the whole forward line is not necessary; it’s enough for two or three players to break away with the ball, which, by its devastating speed, completely unexpected, disorientates the entire rival defence.’

The perception that British football was insufficiently direct in front of goal rings strangely given how critical British commentators would become of the over-elaboration of central European sides. Perhaps it is simply that all things are relative, perhaps the Scottish ex-pats who made up the Wanderers did over-pass and that coloured the judgement, or perhaps the British game at the time, six years before the change in the offside law, was more intricate than it became. Whatever the truth, it is clear that the Brazilian game was focused more on self-expression than on team-play.

Football in Brazil, though, was nowhere near as developed at that stage as it was on the River Plate. Their first ten internationals - all against Argentina, Uruguay or Chile - brought just three victories, and in the 1917 Copa América they conceded four against both Argentina and Uruguay. In 1919, though, they fared rather better, winning the tournament thanks largely to the ploy of having one of the full-backs retain a purely defensive role, while the other was given licence to join the attack. It was far from sophisticated, but it was the first time the Brazil national team acknowledged the need for some sort of structure of defence.

That success, though, was far from the start of any continental domination. Brazil won just six of the twenty matches they played against Argentina before 1940, and five of thirteen against Uruguay. They won the Copa again in 1922, but it would be 1949 before they won it for a third time (astonishingly, it wasn’t until 1997 and their fifth success that Brazil won the competition on foreign soil).

Internal disputes within the federation meant that Brazil were represented only by Carioca players at the 1930 World Cup. They lost their opening game 2-1 against Yugoslavia - ‘Brazil were individually cleverer, collectively inferior,’ Glanville wrote - and were eliminated despite a subsequent 4-0 victory over Bolivia.

Professionalism was formally sanctioned in 1933, which at least helped persuade Brazilian players on tours of Europe with their clubs to return home, but it would take time before it had an impact either on the results of the national side or on their style.

Having been knocked out of the 1934 World Cup after one game, beaten 3-1 by Spain, Brazil travelled on to Belgrade for a friendly against Yugoslavia, who had failed to qualify for the World Cup, and were hammered 8-4. This was a side featuring such talents as Domingos, Leônidas and Waldemar de Brito, but tactically they were humiliatingly exposed, even more so than they had been in Montevideo four years earlier. ‘There was a lot of space between the lines,’ the football historian Ivan Soter explained. ‘The Yugoslavs were able to exploit that, showing up the faults of the old-fashioned system.’ Something, evidently, had to change.

The first attempt to import the W-M to Brazil was made by Gentil Cardoso, but he was beset by two major difficulties: he had next to no background as a player, and he was black. He had been a bootblack, a waiter, a tram driver and a baker, and had then joined the merchant navy. That entailed frequent voyages to Europe, and while there he seems to have spent most of his free time watching football. He became a particular fan of the English game, and later claimed to have watched first-hand Herbert Chapman’s development of the W-M formation at Arsenal. ‘He was a larger than life character,’ said Soter, ‘somebody who loved telling tales of his travels.’ Often they were embellished, but what is undeniable is his capacity for tactical analysis. He saw the W-M, recognised its possibilities, and realised that this, vastly different as it was to Brazilian football, was the future.