Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (5 page)

Hogan’s first training session did not go well. The Austrian players found him difficult to understand, and felt he was focusing rather too much on basics. Meisl, though, was impressed, and he and Hogan talked long into the night about their vision of football. Tactically, neither saw anything wrong with the 2-3-5 - which had, after all, formed the basis of all football for over thirty years - but they believed that movement was necessary, that too many teams were too rigid and so predictable. Both believed that it was necessary to make the ball do the work, that swift combinations of passes were preferable to dribbling, and that individual technique was crucial, not for the slaloming individual runs that would become such a feature of the game in South America, but for the instant control of an incoming pass to allow a swift release. Hogan was also keen to stress the value of the long pass to unsettle opposing defences, provided it were well-directed and not an aimless upfield punt. Meisl was a romantic, but what is fascinating about Hogan is that his beliefs were, essentially, pragmatic. He was not an evangelist for the passing game through any quixotic notion of what was right; he simply believed that the best way to win matches was to retain possession.

Austria hammered Germany 5-1 in Stockholm, but went down 4- 3 to Holland in the quarter-finals. Still, Meisl was convinced, and when the German football federation asked him to give Hogan a reference, he instead offered Hogan a job, putting him in charge of Austria’s preparations for the 1916 Olympics. ‘To leave my dark, gloomy, industrial Lancashire for gay Vienna was just like stepping into paradise,’ Hogan said. He worked with the Olympic side twice a week, and spent the rest of the time coaching the city’s top club sides, finding himself so much in demand that he was forced to begin his sessions with Wiener FC at 5.30 in the morning.

Austria warmed to Hogan, and Hogan warmed to Austria. Their football, he said, was like a waltz, ‘light and easy’, and Meisl was optimistic of success in 1916. War, though, destroyed that dream. Realising the probability of conflict, Hogan approached the British consul and asked whether it would be advisable to return swiftly with his family to Britain. He was told there was no imminent danger, but within forty-eight hours, war had been declared. A day later, Hogan was arrested as a foreign national.

The American consul managed to get Hogan’s wife and children back to Britain in March 1915, while Hogan was released the day before he was due to be sent to an internment camp in Germany after the Blythe brothers, who owned a department store in Vienna, agreed to act as guarantors for him. For almost eighteen months he worked for them, teaching their children how to play tennis, but, 130 miles to the east, moves were afoot to bring him back into football. Baron Dirstay, the Cambridge-educated vice-president of the Budapest club MTK, had heard of Hogan’s plight and, after pulling various diplomatic strings, secured him a position coaching his side, provided he agreed to report regularly to the local police.

Hogan readily accepted. With most of the first team away at the front, his first task was to assemble a squad. He turned, naturally, to youth, picking up two of the club’s most popular players, György Orth and Jozsef ‘Csibi’ Braun, after spotting them in a kickabout as he strolled through Angol Park. ‘I pounced on them and said “they are mine, my very own”,’ he explained. ‘They were both intelligent lads attending high school in Budapest. Every day after school I had them on the field, instructing them in the art of the game.’ Clever and keen to learn, Orth and Braun were typical both of the sort of player central Europe produced and of the sort of player with whom Hogan loved to work; which is, of course, why he felt so at home in both Vienna and Budapest. ‘The great advantage which continental football has over British soccer,’ Hogan said, ‘is that boys are coached in the art of the game at a very tender age.’

His methods brought spectacular success. MTK won the title in 1916-17, the first official championship after a brief hiatus for the war, and held on to it for nine years. As the war came to an end, a combined Budapest side gave notice of the growing strength of the continental game by hammering Bolton 4-1. Hogan, though, presided over just two of MTK’s triumphs. As soon as he could when the war was over, he left for Britain. ‘The time I spent in Hungary was almost as happy as my stay in Austria. Budapest is a lovely city - in my opinion, the most beautiful in Europe,’ he said, but he had seen neither his wife nor his son in almost four years. Hogan was succeeded by one of his senior players, Dori Kürschner, who, twenty years later, would be crucial to the development of the game in Brazil.

Hogan returned to Lancashire and found a job in Liverpool, working as a dispatch foreman for Walker’s Tobacco. Money, though, remained tight, and he was advised to ask for a hand-out from the Football Association, which had established a fund to support professionals financially disadvantaged by the war years. It proved a watershed in his career. Hogan believed he was due £200, and borrowed £5 to cover his travelling expenses to London. The FA secretary Frederick Wall, though, treated him with disdain. The fund, Wall said, was for those who had fought. Hogan pointed out that he had been interned for four years and so had had no chance to sign up. Wall’s response was to give him three pairs of khaki socks, sneering that ‘the boys at the front were very glad of those’. Hogan was furious, never forgave the FA and his talent - not that his ideas would have been well-received in conservative England anyway - was lost to English football.

In Vienna, Meisl retained Hogan’s template, although his faith was tested by a 5-0 defeat Austria suffered to Southern Germany shortly after the end of the war. On a frozen, rutted pitch in Nuremberg, their close-passing game proved impractical, and a despondent Meisl spent the return journey discussing with his players whether they should abandon their approach for something more direct and physical. Absolutely not, came their response, and so were set in stone the principles from which grew the
Wunderteam
of the early thirties, the first of the great unfulfilled national sides. Under Meisl, Brian Glanville wrote, ‘soccer became almost an exhibition, a sort of competitive ballet, in which scoring goals was no more than the excuse for the weaving of a hundred intricate patterns.’

The pyramid remained as the basic shape, but the style of the game as a radicalised extension of the Scottish passing game was so different from that found in England that it became recognised as a separate model: ‘the Danubian School’. Technique was prized over physicality, but was harnessed into a team structure. In South America, the game came to diverge even more sharply from the original model. Again technique was prized, but in Uruguay and, particularly, Argentina, it was individuality and self-expression that were celebrated.

The Football Association’s Laws of the Game arrived in Argentina in 1867, where they were published by an English-language newspaper,
The Standard
. Later that year the Buenos Aires Football Club was founded as an offshoot of the Cricket Club, but the seeds fell on stony ground, and six years later it switched to rugby. Only in the 1880s did football really take off, thanks largely to Alexander Watson Hutton, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, who came to Argentina to teach at St Andrew’s Scotch School. He resigned when the school refused to extend its playing fields, and established the English High School in 1884, where he employed a specialist games master to teach football. When the Argentinian Association Football League was reformed in 1893, Hutton was a central figure. Alumni, a team made up of old boys from the English High School, took their place in the first division and came to dominate it in the early part of the twentieth century, while the school team itself played lower down the league pyramid. They were far from the only school to take football seriously, and six of the first seven titles were won by teams based on the prestigious Lomas de Zamora boarding school.

It was a similar story across the River Plate in Uruguay, where young British professionals founded cricket and rowing clubs that developed football sections, and British schools pushed the game. William Leslie Poole, a teacher at the English High School in Montevideo, was the equivalent of Hutton, forming the Albion Cricket Club in May 1891, the football section of which was soon playing football against teams from Buenos Aires.

In those early days, as a quick glance at the team-sheets demonstrates, the players were largely British or Anglo-Argentinian, and so was the ethos. In his history of amateur football in Argentina, Jorge Iwanczuk speaks of the goal being ‘to play well without passion’ and of the importance of ‘fair play’. In a game against Estudiantes, Alumni even refused to take a penalty because they believed it had been incorrectly awarded. It was all about doing things the ‘right way’, a belief that extended into tactics: 2-3-5 was universal. The
Buenos Aires Herald
’s extensive coverage of Southampton’s 3-0 victory over Alumni in 1904 - the first game played on Argentinian soil by a British touring side - makes clear how public school values prevailed. Britain’s pre-eminence, an editorial claimed, was the result of ‘an inherent love of all things manly’.

Gradually, though, the British dominance waned. The Argentinian Football Association (AFA) adopted Spanish as its language of business in 1903 and the Uruguayan FA did likewise two years later. Alumni were wound up in 1911, and the following year AFA became the Asociación del Football Argentina, although it would take until 1934 before ‘football’ became ‘
fútbol
’. Uruguayans and Argentinians, uninfected by British ideals of muscular Christianity, had no similar sense of physicality as a virtue in its own right, no similar distrust of cunning. The shape may have been the same, but the style was as different as it was possible to be. The anthropologist Eduardo Archetti has insisted that, as the influence of Spanish and Italian immigrants began to be felt, power and discipline were rejected in favour of skill and sensuousness - a trend that was felt across a range of disciplines. ‘Like the tango,’ wrote the Uruguayan poet and journalist Eduardo Galeano, ‘football blossomed in the slums.’

Different conditions necessitate a different style. Just as the game of the cloisters differed from the game of the playing fields in English public schools, so, in the tight, uneven, restricted spaces of the poorer areas of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, other skills developed and a new style was born: ‘a home-grown way of playing football,’ as Galeano put it, ‘like the home-grown way of dancing which was being invented in the
milonga
clubs. Dancers drew filigrees on a single floor tile, and football players created their own language in that tiny space where they chose to retain and possess the ball rather than kick it, as if their feet were hands braiding the leather. On the feet of the first Creole virtuosos,
el toque
, the touch, was born: the ball was strummed as if it were a guitar, a source of music.’

Prioritising different virtues, the two styles could not comfortably coexist, and so, inevitably, when old and new met, there was conflict. That was apparent as early as 1905, when the physicality of Nottingham Forest against a representative XI - made up largely of Anglo-Argentinians - in the sixth game of their tour led to considerable ill-feeling. The
Herald
, pro-British as ever, even felt moved to issue a magnificently grand rebuke to those who had dared to criticise Forest’s approach: ‘a game especially intended to improve the stamina and try the strength of young men in the prime of life is not necessarily a parlour game.’ Acrimony became a feature of subsequent tours, caused largely by a fundamental disagreement on the part the shoulder-charge had to play in the game.

Swindon Town’s tour of 1912 was one of the few that could be judged a success, and from that came a realisation that the British might perhaps have something to learn. Samuel Allen, the Swindon manager, was generally approving, saying he had seen no better football between amateur sides, but even he expressed a concern that local players ‘look on individual exploits as the main thing, and every time there was a chance to show clever work single-handed, it was taken’. Even traditionalists within Argentina were sceptical about the creolisation of the game. Jorge Brown, a former Alumni player of British origin, protested in the early 1920s that the new style of football ‘was weakened by an excess of passing close to the goal. It is a game that is more fine, perhaps more artistic, even apparently more intelligent, but it has lost its primitive enthusiasm.’ It was a criticism that would become increasingly familiar; until Hungary in 1953 settled the debate decisively at Wembley, Britain laboured under the delusion that the rest of the world suffered from a lack of directness in front of goal.

Nobody who watched Uruguay in the 1924 Olympics could have been so misguided. Argentina chose to stay at home, but Uruguay went to Paris and wrote one of the great stories of early football. Galeano has a tendency to over-romanticise, but his evident glee in his country’s gold medal is hard to begrudge. This was, first and foremost, a team of workers, including, among other professions, a meat-packer, a marble-cutter, a grocer and an ice-salesman. They travelled to Europe in steerage, and played to pay for their board, winning nine friendlies in Spain before they even reached France. Uruguay were the first Latin American side to tour Europe, but they attracted little attention - at least initially - only around 2,000 turning up to watch them eviscerate Yugoslavia 7-0 in their opening game in the Olympics.