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100 years of tactical
developments in football-II
Compiled by Mehedi Hassan
Foni’s variation was to withdraw right-winger Gino Armani into midfield alongside the two wing-halves. With the opposition thus stifled in midfield, Inter jabbed their way to championship success at a time when the likes of Milan and Juventus boasted the more talented individuals.
In due course, the Moroccan-born, Argentine-educated, French and Spanish-polished Helenio Herrera created at Inter the most effective catenaccio team of all. They won the World Club Cup and the European Cup twice in the mid1960s with a team that combined the most ruthless man-marking defensive discipline with footballing genius.
Goalkeeper Giuliano Sarti, attacking left-back Giacinto Facchetti, Spanish schemer Luis Suarez and attack director Sandro Mazzola count among the greatest players of the modern era.
Not until Arrigo Sacchi's arrival at Milan in the mid-1980s did Italian football begin seriously to address the need for an 'all-pitch' tactic, rather than a safety-first philosophy.
Other ideas interacted along the way - such as the rigid, zonal offside ploy operated by Belgium and Anderlecht in the early 1960s and the 'Total football' of Ajax and Holland a decade later.
But Total football presented the world a new brand of football, predicted by Willy Meisl in his magnificent book Soccer Revolution - was applicable only by highly-intelligent and versatile players. And was more a style than a tactic. Not that this should in any way reduce the revolutionary performances of Ajax and Holland in the early I 970s when a team of highly-skilled football intellectuals , typified by Johan Cruyff sent opponents dizzy with their instinctive, inter-changing action.
The development of the third-back game in continental Europe in the 1950s had produced some other fascinating side-effects. Eastern European pragmatists even developed the change numerically:
They numbered the centre-back '3' so the left-back became '4' and the right-half '5'.
The legendary Hungarians of the early 1950s added a twist to their use of WM: No 5 was an attacking half-back whose main link with the forwards was the withdrawn centre-forward, No 9 Nandor Hidegkuti. Their partnership allowed the inside forwards, Sandor Kocsis and Ferenc Puskas, until then the heart of the attacking engine-room, to push forward in attack behind the opposing wing-halves who were supposed to be marking them. It was simple logic, which proved devastating against England, both in 1953 at Wembley (where Hungary-scored six) and in 1954 in Budapest (where they scored seven).
Such a numbers game also went hand-in-hand with the tactical developments to be found in South America through the central years of the soccer century.
Up until the early 1950s everyone still played 2-3-5 and the old attacking centre-half remained supreme. Indeed, the tradition of the big, powerful, No 5 remains inherent in Argentine football to this day, no matter the tactical changes that have gone on around him: from Monti in the 1930s to Nestor Rossi in the 1940s and 1950s, Antonio Rattin in the 1960s, Americo Gallego in the1970s, Daniel Batista in the 1980s and, even now, Fernando Redondo and Matias Almeyda.
Flamengo, under Paraguayan coach Fleitas Solich, are credited with being the first Brazilian side to move from 2-3-S to 4-2-4. Solich took the WM, moved the left-back in alongside the centre-back and withdrew the left-half to left-hack. To cover the gap in midfield he pulled the inside-right hack across the centre of midfield.
The numerical order of a typical Brazilian team in the late 1950s and throughout the 1 960s looked something like this: 1 -2, 5, 3, 6 -4, 8-7, 9, 10, 11. That was how it worked with Brazil at the 1958 World Cup when the rest of the world suddenly saw 4-2-4 for the first time.
Overnight, the shape was copied slavishly throughout Europe (West Ham were among its first exponents in England), but with mixed success:
Brazil were brilliantly successful not so much because of their tactics but because of the great talents of such players as Pele, Garrincha, Didi, Vava, etc.
Uruguay and Argentina both developed their own versions of 4-2-4 but took almost a decade longer. Their independent paths were marked by the way their own numerical systems varied.
Uruguay followed the traditional 2-3-S in that the original full-backs ('2' and '3') became the centre-backs, while the original wing-halves became the 'new' full-backs. Uruguay, at the back, thus numbered: 4, 2, 3, 6.
Different again in Argentina, where the right-back (opposite to Brazil) stepped across into the centre of defence and the right-half dropped to right-back (thus 4, 2, 6, 3).
Both Uruguay and Argentina thus retained the notional old attacking centre-half (No 5) in midfield where Brazil did not.
Historians may consider this a not insignificant factor in the difference in attitude between the technically entertaining Brazilian game and the skilfully pragmatic approach developed on either side of the River Plate in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
The Brazilian 4-2-4 was the first universal tactical shift since Herbert Chapman's switch to WM and the stopper centre-half at the start of the 1930s. Like Chapman's WM it was subject to variations and the Brazilians themselves were among the initial deviants.
At the 1962 World Cup, coach Aimore Moreira felt that an ageing team needed a change of balance.
Thus he withdrew left-winger Mario Zagallo into midfield (in much the same way that Alfredo Foni had pulled back Gino Armani at Inter a decade earlier). Brazil duly won the World Cup again and saw 4-3-3 copied as slavishly as 4-2-4 four years earlier.
The different needs of European conditions and football led England to produce the 4-4-2 with which Alf Ramsey's men captured the World Cup in 1966 and which became a model for much of top-level professional football for the rest of the century. It provided plenty of cover for defence and it ensured plenty of possession in midfield as well as plenty of support players behind the two strikers.
It was to be almost 20 years before 4-4-2 was overtaken. France hinted at the next step in their 1984 European Championship-winning side but it took Diego Maradona's Argentina to prove that playing three at the back was not the route to suicide that many coaches had forecast.
The 1986 World Cup in Mexico provided an ideal stage for 3-5-2 to come of age. Midday kick-offs with all the additional problems of heat and altitude guaranteed a more technical style of football against the more physical European game. Such conditions created an ideal testing ground for the 3-5-2 system produced by Argentina coach Carlos Bilardo.
He recognised that teams would attack with only two strikers. Therefore, it needed only two markers and a sweeper to 'look after' them. That released an extra defender from the traditional four-man back line, creating a five-man midfield. Argentina thus remained secure at the back while dominating the opposition numerically in midfield. This in turn provided an ideal springboard from which the likes of Diego Maradona and Jorge Valdano could attack opposing defences and with even more men than usual in support. Thus did Argentina, with more than a helping hand from Maradona, destroyed England in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final.
Little has changed since then. In the last FIFA world Cup Brazil used the formation of 3-5-2 and d won the Cup. That shows us that Scolari failed to create a new formula of the beautiful game, which has given us every kind of joy a man or a woman can get. Shapes vary. An interested spectator can travel from Spain to France to Germany to Italy over a long weekend and see a variety of shapes. Some coaches preferring a lone striker with three men in support, some prefers two up front with one man in support.
It has been a long and winding road from Herbert Chapman's -stopper centre-half. And yet, nearly 75 years after he introduced the three-man defence, the tactical football has rolled full circle.
Finally, my opinion of the men who created these formulas of football is - All of them should be given Nobel Prize.
(Concluded)
The twentieth century fairy tale-VII
Excerpts from Ali: The Greatest of All Time
Bartlett Giamatti once wrote: ‘It is Ali who brought to the surface the actor in every athlete more successfully and obsessively than anyone else.’ That remains true to this day. But, as noted earlier, Ali’s humour worked - and he still makes us smile - because of his inherent decency.
The magic remains. Not long ago, Ali was at a party, surrounded by the usual chaos that accompanies his presence. Men who would rarely think of hugging another man fell into his embrace. Women were asking to be kissed. There were requests for autographs and photographs. Then, amid it all, a mother brought her four-year-old daughter over to Ali.
‘Do you know who this is?’ she asked the child.
The four-year-old nodded reverentially and told her mother: ‘It’s the Easter Bunny.’
Buy Ali online
Not surprisingly, Ali memorabilia is big business. In 1997, Christies auctioned 3,000 Ali artefacts; the robe he wore before the George Foreman fight in Zaire, in 1974, was sold for $156,500.
Ali-mania isn’t restricted to America. In 2001, a Briton paid £37,600 for the gloves Ali was wearing when floored by Henry Cooper in 1963. You don’t have to break the bank, however, to buy a piece of the Ali legend.
The following memorabilia are all available on ebay:
Signed glove
Current highest bid - $180
The Everlast glove is mounted within a perspex case.
Ali vs Tooth decay album
Current highest bid - $1.99
The LP in which Ali ‘whoops up on tooth decay’ also features Frank Sinatra.
Signed Weaties box
Current highest bid - $0.50
The unopened breakfast cereal box has been signed in gold pen.
Struggle for his soul
Torn between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, between his white friends and militant Islam, Ali was the most misunderstood figure of his age. But while others anguished over what his life meant, Ali had no such trouble: he knew who he was and exactly what he wanted
By the time Muhammad Ali won the heavyweight title for the third time, in a fight against Leon Spinks in 1978, his biography, his politics, his religion, his rhetoric - so help me, even his boxing - had been limned and processed by a veritable editorial board of the mid-century. LeRoi Jones, Murray Kempton, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Irwin Shaw, George Plimpton, Gordon Parks: each, in his own way, made something of Norman Mailer’s remark that Ali ‘is the very spirit of the twentieth century’.
Ishmael Reed, covering the second Leon Spinks fight, wrote that, even as the years slipped by, Ali ‘would still remind us of the turbulent decade of Muslims, Malcolm X, Rap Brown, the Great Society, LBJ, Vietnam, General Hershey, dashikis, afros, Black Power, Martin Luther King Jr, Robert Kennedy and so on. Ali represented the New Black of the 1960s, who was the successor to the New Negro of the 1920s: glamorous, sophisticated, intelligent, international and militant.’
Ali was far from the first champion to come into the ring wearing the gaudy robe of literary approval and historical meaning. Boxing, despite its increasingly marginal place in the American interest, bears more of this freight, this heavy meaning, than any other sport. Only Jackie Robinson in baseball comes close. (Who are the Alis of professional football? Of basketball? Michael Jordan’s most determined decision off the court was to refuse politics, the better to preserve the historical scope of his earning power.)
Ali himself was well aware of the historical origins of his sport. Boxing’s subtext is America’s subtext: race. ‘We’re just like two slaves in that ring,’ Ali said at the height of his glamour and fame. ‘The masters get two of us big old black slaves and let us fight it out while they bet, “My slave can whup your slave.” That’s what I see when I see two black people fighting.’
The first American champion was a slave named Tom Molineaux. Owned by Virginia farmers, Molineaux fought for his masters the way a thoroughbred racehorse runs for his. After many years of this, Molineaux went north to New York as a freeman and to England, where he beat the white champion of the British Empire, Tom Cribb.
With the rise of modern heavyweight champions, race was at the centre of nearly every important heavyweight drama. First came John L. Sullivan, who refused to cross the colour line and face a black challenger. Then came Jim Jeffries, who swore he would retire ‘when there are no white men left to fight’. When he came out of retirement to fight the great Jack Johnson, Jeffries declared: ‘I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.’ Jeffries seemed to have the support of all of white America, including the press, led by Jack London, who wrote that ‘Jeffries would surely win’ because the white man ‘has 30 centuries of traditions behind him - all the supreme efforts, the inventions and the conquests, and, whether he knows it or not, Bunker Hill and Thermopylae and Hastings and Agincourt’.
Johnson’s victory on 4 July 1910, his complete domination of Jeffries, came as such a shock and humiliation to the white public that it triggered massive riots from Missouri to the eastern seaboard. There were shootings in Georgia, knifings in Houston, furious white crowds in their thousands in Manhattan, walking up and down Eighth Avenue threatening to beat the first black man they saw. No racial incident on that scale of violence and geography would occur in the United States until the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, in 1968.
There was something about the spectacle, two men naked to the waist, in brutal conflict, that seemed stripped of all metaphor and capable of inciting the national passions.
Johnson was a defiant and proud figure, dating white women as he pleased, speaking as he pleased, spending as he pleased. When, many years later, Ali came to know Johnson’s history, he took it as a template. ‘I grew to love the Jack Johnson image,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be rough, tough, arrogant, the nigger white folks didn’t like.’
Johnson finally went into exile as world champion. In 1915, he was defeated by Jess Willard. Jack Dempsey and other white champions dominated the boxing scene until the 1930s. In fact, the white heavyweights of that era succeeded for so long because they avoided fighting such black contenders as Sam Langford and Harry Wills. That interregnum of racial avoidance came to an end when Joe Louis thrashed Jim Braddock for the title in 1937.
And with Louis - or in spite of Louis - came another racial archetype, one that seemed, to many white columnists, more acceptable than that of Johnson. In the Southern press, Louis won plaudits as ‘the good nigger’ and, in the more sophisticated north, he was dubbed ‘the Dusky David from Detroit’, ‘the Shufflin’ Shadow’, ‘the Tan Tarzan of Thump’.
Yet, unknown to the white public, many blacks saw Louis as their surrogate, a dignified and powerful confederate who refused shame or defeat. As the African-American historian Franklin Frazier wrote in 1940, Louis allowed blacks ‘to inflict vicariously the aggression which they would like to carry out against whites for the discriminations and insults which they have suffered’.
Louis himself may have been quiet and unlettered, but his significance was undeniable. Martin Luther King Jr used to tell a story about a young black man sentenced to death in the gas chamber: ‘As the pellet dropped into the container and gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: “Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis.”’
(To be continued)
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