Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (22 page)

It is unclear when Ramsey’s thoughts first turned to Nobby Stiles, the combative Manchester United anchor, but what was apparent as soon as he selected him was that Stiles could not play in a 4-2-4. Do that, and it placed an undue creative burden, the entire task of manoeuvring the ball from back to front, on one man. The victim of that realisation was Thompson, even though he had probably been England’s best player in Brazil, being dubbed ‘he ‘White Pelé’ by the local press. To Ramsey’s new way of thinking, the Liverpool winger was too much of an entertainer and, as he turned to the likes of John Connelly, Ian Callaghan and Terry Paine, Thompson slowly drifted out of the set-up.

England’s first game of the new season was a Home International away to Northern Ireland the following October. Ramsey again picked a 4-2-4, but with Bobby Charlton moving back into Eastham’s role in midfield and Paine selected on the right and encouraged to drop deep in the manner of Zagallo or Leadbetter. England were 4-0 up by half-time, but ended up winning only 4-3. The
Mail
, speaking of ‘ninety minutes of shambles’, called for Ramsey’s head but, while he was furious at his side’s sloppiness, he was not a man to allow adverse media reaction to divert him from his plan.

An unconvincing 2-2 draw against Belgium followed, but the real breakthrough came in a get-together the following February. Six players, including Gordon Banks, Bobby Charlton and Peter Thompson, withdrew because of FA Cup commitments, but Ramsey persisted in his programme, sending out a senior side for a practice game against the Under-23s in a 4-3-3 formation. He was delighted by the result. ‘I played what amounted to a rather cruel trick on the younger players, in that I gave them no advance warning of the tactics the seniors were about to employ,’ he said. ‘The seniors, with three recognised outstanding footballers in midfield - Bryan Douglas on the right, Johnny Byrne in the middle and George Eastham on the left - ran riot with the young lads.’ The ‘Wingless Wonders’ had been born. ‘To have two players stuck out wide on the flanks,’ Ramsey said, ‘is a luxury which can virtually leave a side with nine men when the game is going against them.’

For Dave Bowen, the Wales manager between 1964 and 1974, Ramsey’s genius had been to recognise earlier than anyone else in Britain that if sides played four at the back, the traditional winger was dead. ‘With three defenders it was different,’ he explained. ‘The back on the far side was covering behind the centre-half so the winger always had space from the cross-field pass. With four defenders the backs can play tight on the winger and he’s lost his acceleration space. Without that, the winger’s finished.’

The formation clear, Ramsey then set about finding the best players to deploy within it. In April, Stiles and Jack Charlton made their debuts in a 2-2 draw against Scotland, and the following month Alan Ball came in for a 1-1 draw against Yugoslavia. It was only later than month, though, in a friendly against West Germany in Nuremberg, that Ramsey unveiled his 4-3-3 in public. Ron Flowers of Wolves replaced Stiles, with Ball in midfield, Leeds United’s Mick Jones and Eastham up front and Paine and Everton’s Derek Temple, in his only appearance for his country, alternating between the wing and offering support to the midfield. England won the game 1-0, then beat Sweden 2-1, with Stiles back in the side, leaving Ramsey convinced the switch to 4-3-3 was right. The key to the system was probably Ball, whose tremendous energy meant he could operate both as a winger and as an auxiliary midfielder - just as Zagallo had for Brazil in 1962.

Early performances in 1965-66 were less impressive, but in December, England, with Stiles, Ball and Charlton in midfield and Roger Hunt, Eastham and Joe Baker up front, beat Spain 2-0 in a performance of overwhelming quality. Ramsey, realising just how potent his system was, immediately decided to place it under wraps. ‘I think it would be quite wrong to let the rest of the world, our rivals, see what we are doing,’ he told Brian James of the
Mail
. ‘I think it is my duty to protect certain players until the time we need them most. This was a step and a very big one in our education as a football party. My job will be to produce the right team at the right time and that does not always mean pressing ahead with a particular combination just because it has been successful.’

Ramsey went back to a 4-2-4 for a friendly draw against Poland and a 1-0 win over West Germany. Geoff Hurst made his debut that day, and immediately struck up an understanding with Hunt. A subsequent 4-3 victory over Scotland pleased the fans and the media, but it confirmed in Ramsey’s mind what he already knew: that defensively the 4-2-4 was inadequate. And then, in a 2-0 win over Yugoslavia at Wembley in May 1966, Ramsey introduced the final piece of the jigsaw: the undemonstrative West Ham midfielder Martin Peters. Although Ramsey’s designation of him as being ‘ten years ahead of his time’ would become a burden, Peters was, like Ball and Hurst, a modern multifunctional footballer, capable both of creativity and of doing his share of defensive leg-work.

In a friendly away to Finland, Ramsey played 4-3-3, with Ball, Peters and Charlton in midfield, and Callaghan as the sole winger. England won that game 3-0, and three days later they beat Norway 6-1 in Oslo, this time with two wingers: Connelly in orthodox mode and Paine dropping deeper in the Leadbetter role. Peters was still not considered a first choice - or not by the media anyway - but he was recalled for England’s final warm-up game, against Poland in Katowice. This, at last, was the formation to which Ramsey had been building, a fact acknowledged as he read out the line-up to the press, pausing with an uncharacteristic sense of drama before revealing that he had given the No. 11 shirt to Peters. This was a side with no wingers, orthodox or otherwise. Although it continued to be referred to as 4-3-3, it was really, as Nobby Stiles pointed out in his autobiography, a 4-1-3-2, with him as the anchor and Peters, Charlton and Ball ahead of him, all given licence to break forward and support the front two of Hunt and, it seemed probable at the time, Greaves. England won 1-0, through a Hunt goal and, according to Ray Wilson, it was then that he began to accept that Ramsey might have been right when, three years earlier, he had insisted England would win the World Cup.

Yet against Uruguay in the first game in the World Cup, Ramsey opted for Connelly ahead of Peters and went back to the lopsided 4-3-3. Perhaps he was still playing his cards close to his chest, perhaps he felt a winger still had a role to play in overcoming a weaker side that was sure to pack its defence. Either way, it didn’t really work, and as the midfield struggled to get forward to support the front three, Uruguay held out for a 0-0 draw.

Peters came in for the injured Ball in the second game, against Mexico, with Paine replacing Connelly. That reversed the skew, so the winger was on the right rather than the left, but the essentials were the same, Ramsey again using a winger against opposition he expected to beat. They did so, not exhilaratingly but well enough, winning 2-0. Callaghan was selected against France in the third group game, and England again won 2-0, although the match was more notable for a dreadful tackle by Stiles on Jacky Simon. Fifa warned him as to his future conduct, at which Ramsey received a message from the FA asking whether it were really necessary to carry on fielding Stiles. Ramsey, maybe partly on principle, but surely mainly because he knew how vital his midfielder spoiler was, threatened to resign.

At last, against Argentina in the quarter-final, he turned again to 4-1-3-2. Perhaps the tactical switch would have been enough, but Ramsey was aided by an injury to Greaves. That allowed him to include Hurst - a less spectacular forward, but one capable of winning the ball in the air and holding it - without fear of the reaction if he dropped the darling of the press. The game was grim and violent - ‘not so much a football match as an international incident’ as Hugh McIlvanney put it - but England were resolute and, after Antonio Rattín, the Argentina captain, had been sent off, a headed goal from Hurst gave them a 1-0 win. It had been no exhibition, but as far as Ramsey was concerned, the lessons of England’s defeat in the Maracana two years earlier had been learned. Stiles, unusually, had been asked to man-mark Ermindo Onega, and had done so with discipline, while Ball, playing high on the right, was superb, not merely troubling Argentina offensively, but preventing their full-back, Silvio Marzolini, from advancing.

England 4 West Germany 2, World Cup Final, Wembley, London, 30 July 1966

Stiles’s role was crucial again against Portugal in the semi-final, as he neutralised Eusebio in a 2-1 win. Bobby Charlton scored both that day, and the efficacy of the system in allowing the three attacking midfielders to break was seen again in the final, as Peters got England’s first, and then as Ball, tireless on the right, sent in the cross from which Hurst - controversially - made it 3-2 in extra-time. The decisive fourth, belted in by Hurst in the dying seconds after a long pass from Bobby Moore, was, as Leadbetter later noted, just the kind of goal Ramsey had delighted in at Ipswich: no fuss, just a simple ball and an emphatic finish. Perhaps that was fitting, but it was also a touch misleading, for England, as they would show even more conclusively in Mexico four years later, were perfectly capable of holding possession.

Nonetheless, as time went by, Ramsey’s pragmatism became increasingly wearing. McIlvanney spoke for many when he noted caustically, after the 3-1 defeat at home to West Germany in 1972, that ‘cautious, joyless football was scarcely bearable even while it was bringing victories. When it brings defeat there can only be one reaction.’ As England, thanks to Jan Tomaszewski’s heroics for Poland at Wembley, failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup, Ramsey was sacked.

For all the terseness of his dealings with the media, the antipathy to Ramsey was rooted in a re-casting of the old tension between aesthetics and results. There was no question on which side Ramsey lay. He despised Argentina’s approach, and his sides were certainly not guilty of the excesses of
anti-fútbol
, but he would have agreed with Osvaldo Zubeldía’s thoughts on the role of a manager. ‘I’m employed to win football matches,’ Ramsey said. ‘That’s all.’

Chapter Nine

The Birth of the New

∆∇ Perhaps all football pundits are condemned to reiterate the fears of their forbears. Take the following two examples: ‘Speed was made a fetish. Quick was equal to good - no, better’; ‘hurried clearances… the panicky power game… the terror of failure, the inability to keep the ball and stay calm, the howling from without that freezes the blood and saps all creativity’. The first is Willy Meisl writing in 1957, the second Martin Samuel in
The Times
two days after the 3-2 defeat to Croatia in 2007 that confirmed England would not qualify for Euro 2008. Both, of course, are right in highlighting the principle failing of the English game: if something goes wrong for England it tends to be rooted in a mistrust of technique, and that was as true a century ago as it is today and at all points in between.

And yet complaints about speed are relative. If the English game in the mid-fifties was too quick for Meisl’s tastes, what on earth would he have made of the Premiership in the early years of the third millennium? To look at videos from the years immediately following the Second World War is to see a game played almost in slow motion by the standards of the modern game - and it is getting quicker. Watch the Hungarians of the fifties or the Brazilians of the sixties and what is noticeable to the modern eye is how long players have on the ball - and not just because their technical ability gave them instant control. It is simply that nobody closes them down. A player receiving the ball had time to assess his options. The dribbling technique of Garrincha or Stanley Matthews doesn’t exist in today’s game, not because the skills have been lost, but because no side would ever give them the three or four yards of acceleration room they needed before their feints became effective. Would they have been great players in today’s game? Probably, but not by dribbling like that.

It is that diminution of space, that compression of the game - pressing, in other words - that marks out modern football from old. It is such a simple idea that once one side had started doing it, and had had success by doing so, it is baffling that everybody did not follow them, and yet the spread of pressing is curiously patchy. It arrived in Germany only in the nineties. When Arrigo Saachi imposed it on AC Milan in the late eighties, it was hailed as ground-breaking, yet Rinus Michels’s Ajax and Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv - even Graham Taylor’s Watford - had been using it for years. It was central, too, to the success of the Argentinian side Estudiantes de la Plata under Osvaldo Zubeldía in the late sixties. It was invented, though, by a Russian working in Ukraine, by a coach virtually unknown today outside the former Soviet bloc. The game’s evolution, of course, is not linear, and there are others who have had significant roles to play, but if there is a single man who can claim to be the father of modern football, it is Viktor Maslov.

He was an unlikely revolutionary, noted at the time less for his vision or any kind of explosive leadership than for his warmth. ‘It always intrigued me that he was known as Grandad,’ said Mykhaylo Koman, probably Dynamo’s best forward of the fifties. ‘The players who played under him could have been his sons, but he was far too young for them to have been his grandsons. It seems the nickname had stuck before he arrived in Kyiv, and that it had nothing to do with his age. Maybe the way he looked contributed to his grandfatherly image: he was of plump constitution, had a bald head, and thick, bushy eyebrows. Still, the main reason for the name was his colossal wisdom, humanity and kindness.’

Born in Moscow in 1910, Maslov had been one of the leading players of the early years of the Soviet league, a robust and authoritative half capable of a wide range of passing. He was in the Torpedo side that finished second in the Moscow championship in 1934 and 1935, and then captained the club between 1936 and 1939, leading them to victory in an international tournament in France in 1938. After ending his playing career in 1942, he took over as coach of Torpedo, and had four spells in charge of them before leaving for Rostov-na-Donu in 1962. The last of those, beginning in 1957, was by far the most successful, as Maslov led Torpedo twice to second place in the Soviet league and, in 1960, to their first championship. It was after arriving at Dynamo Kyiv in 1964, though, that he really began to give free rein to his ideas, as he wrenched the centre of Soviet football from Moscow to the Ukrainian capital.

Avuncular he may have been, but a feat like that was not achieved without a certain toughness and an ability to play the political game. He, for instance, made the most of the love Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, who ran the Ukrainian Communist Party central committee’s ideological department, had for football (Lobanovskyi maintained the strong relations after Shcherbytskyi had become head of the party in Ukraine). Dynamo had always been able to recruit from across the republic - Dynamo’s side in the fifties, for instance, included several players from Zakarpattya - but under Maslov almost all the best Ukrainian players gravitated to Dynamo, attracted by apartments in Kyiv and other benefits that could be conferred by the Party leadership.

At the same time, though, he was strong enough to maintain his independence. On one occasion, Kyiv legend has it, the assistant of a senior party official came to berate the team at half-time of a game in which they were playing badly. ‘Tomorrow I have a free day,’ Maslov is supposed to have said as he shepherded him to the door. ‘I’ll come and see your boss then and answer all his questions. As for today … could you close the door on your way out?’ The tale may be apocryphal - there is no agreement as to the game at which the incident happened or which functionary was involved - but the fact that it is widely repeated suggests a basic truth behind it.

‘We appreciated Grandad first for his human qualities and only second as a coach,’ said Andriy Biba, Dynamo’s captain between 1964 and 1967. ‘And for his part, he looked at us first of all as people with all our positives and negatives, and only after that as footballers. He managed his relations with the players in such a manner, and was so sincere with us that it was impossible to have any bad feelings against him. He trusted us and we responded in the same way.’

Perhaps that was true for those who were members of the inner circle, but Eduard Streltsov, the great star of Maslov’s Torpedo side before his imprisonment in 1958 on a - possibly trumped-up - charge of rape, remembers a different side to him. ‘If Maslov disliked any of his players,’ he said, ‘he could never hide his antipathy.’

Either way, there is no doubting that, to those with whom he did get on, Maslov was an inspirational figure. ‘His pre-match instructions lasted no more than five minutes,’ Biba went on. ‘He could never remember things properly, and he distorted the names of opposing players hopelessly, but he was always precise in telling us how to counteract their strengths. He would always finish with an aphorism to touch our hearts: “Today you must be strong like lions, fast like stags, agile like panthers!” And we would always do our best…’

Certainly there was in him none of the authoritarianism that would later characterise Lobanovskyi, his greatest disciple. Rather, he was willing to discuss and compromise, and on occasions even seemingly to be over-ruled by his players, as Arkady Galinsky, one of the most popular football journalists of the sixties and seventies, recalled. ‘At one of Torpedo’s league matches I was sitting close to the pitch and the reserve bench,’ he wrote. ‘The team wasn’t doing well and the coach decided to substitute one of his players… The substitute took off his coat and tracksuit and after a short warm-up, he went to the half-way line, waiting to replace one of his team-mates the next time the referee stopped the game.

‘It was just as usually happens in football. But what happened next I found extremely interesting. The Torpedo captain, the well-known forward [Valentin] Ivanov, came running over to this player after the referee had whistled and told him the team needed no substitute. After spending some time in confusion, the reserve player returned to the bench. I glanced at the coach: how would he react? But he simply shrugged his shoulders, looking indifferent to what had happened.

‘I supposed this to be an attempt to motivate the player who was to be substituted, pre-conceived by the coach and the captain, but it appeared after the match that the team had simply rejected the substitution proposed by the coach. I have never seen anything like this in football before. A few years later I witnessed the same episode once again. The match was played at the same stadium - the Central Lenin Stadium [now the Luzhniki] in Moscow - the coach was the same, only the team was different: Dynamo Kyiv. Once again Maslov expressed no emotion.’

During his time as the Kyiv correspondent of
Sovetsky Sport
, Galinsky became noted for his pro-Moscow sympathies. He was critical of Dynamo’s use of a zonal marking system, and seems to have had various personal spats with Maslov, who, however Biba saw it, had a tendency to be at times rather more ‘sincere’ than tactful. Galinksy’s conclusion, though, was that the two incidents were indicative not of any weakness on Maslov’s part, but rather of his strength. ‘He understood that the players rejected the substitution not to undermine his authority,’ he wrote, ‘but for the benefit of the affair. Dynamo players - like the Torpedo ones formerly - were telling their coach: don’t worry, everything is OK, we’ll soon turn the game in our favour. And that was what happened in both cases.’

Consultation was a key part of the Maslov method. The evening before games he would gather together his squad - or the senior players at least - to talk through the next day’s match, canvassing their thoughts before drawing up his final game plan. It was that level of trust and mutual understanding that allowed Maslov to implement his more radical tactical innovations. And they were radical, almost incomprehensibly so in the context of the times.

In the early sixties, the USSR, like most of the world, had begun to turn to the 4-2-4, a process pioneered by the national coach Gavriil Kachalin. He had led the USSR to victory at the 1956 Olympics and to success in the inaugural European Championship with a W-M, but he had seen in Brazil’s performances in the 1958 World Cup the way football was headed. Several club coaches followed his lead and, for once, the habitually conservative Soviet establishment supported his experiments. The change, or at least the pace with which it had been imposed, was widely blamed for the USSR’s disjointed showing at the 1962 World Cup, when they beat Yugoslavia and Uruguay but went out in the quarter-final against Chile, but the Brazilian method was so in vogue that Konstantin Beskov, Kachalin’s successor, continued to insist he was using a 4-2-4 when he had actually reverted to a W-M for his eighteen months in the job.

Maslov was rather more astute than Beskov. Like Sir Alf Ramsey, he recognised how important Zagallo had been to Brazil’s success, tracking back to become a third midfielder. Maslov went one further, and pulled back his right-winger as well. Ramsey is regularly given the credit (or the blame) for abolishing the winger and, given the lack of communication between the USSR and the West in those days, there is no suggestion he did not come up with the idea independently, but the 4-4-2 was first invented by Maslov.

Like Ramsey, though, and unlike so many who followed, Maslov withdrew his wingers in such a way that it did not impinge upon his side’s creative capacity. The likes of Andriy Biba, Viktor Serebryanykov and Josef Szabo all began their careers as forwards before being converted into midfielders by Maslov, and they and more orthodox halves such as Volodymyr Muntyan and Fedir Medvid retained a creative brief, functioning almost as a second line of attack. There were, though, casualties. Maslov may have coached by consensus, but he could be ruthless when he saw a player who did not fit his system. Former stars such as Viktor Kanevskyi and Oleh Bazylevych were swiftly dispensed with, and so too, most controversially, was Lobanovskyi.

Quite why Maslov and Lobanovskyi fell out - if indeed they did - remains unclear. Their conceptions of football were very different but, if Galinsky is to be believed, there was also a personal antagonism. Then again, it should be borne in mind that Galinsky was one of the prime movers in attempting to lure Lobanovskyi away from Ukraine to Moscow, so his evidence may not be entirely objective. According to his version of events, the problems flared after a training camp on the Caucasian Black Sea coast ahead of the 1964 season.

‘Everything seemed to be going well,’ Galinsky wrote. ‘The players seemed to be fond of their new coach, the team had worked well, and Maslov seemed pleased with Lobanovskyi.’ On the flight home, though, bad weather forced Dynamo’s aeroplane to land at Symferopol. Their departure was repeatedly postponed, until eventually Maslov ordered lunch. To the amazement of the players, he also ordered them each a glass of
horilka
- Ukrainian vodka.

‘They couldn’t believe their eyes,’ Galinsky. ‘Nothing like this had been seen before at Dynamo. Maslov proposed a toast to good luck in the coming season. Everybody drank to it, apart from Lobanovskyi, who didn’t even touch his glass. Seeing this, Maslov asked him to drink to the team’s success. When Lobanovskyi again refused to do so, Maslov cursed him. Lobanovskyi swore back at him.’ From then on, Galinsky claimed, there was bad blood between them.