| Too Many Tactics |
The following is a response by William Lander, the editor of the web site Journal of Football History (www.jofh.co.uk), to the new book “Inverting the Pyramid.” “Inverting the Pyramid” will be reviewed by Soccer Journal in the near future, and can be found at Amazon.com or major bookstores.
The rising sophistication of the average football fan is best demonstrated by looking at tactics – or rather fans’ concern for them. In the pre-Premiership era, very few fans would argue for or against their team’s system or approach. But now, tactics have moved center stage, because of the rising playing standard in the top flight as well as the decline of terracing and all the other things that made supporting a team more tribal than sporting.
Given the money and players in the game, fans expect managers to be innovative or at least successfully retrograde in their choice of tactics and often blame systems over players for poor performance. While Alex Ferguson tinkered with the lone-striker formation, vociferous fans-cum-analysts would chant “4-4-2” on European nights. Similarly the fans of Bolton Wanderers convinced themselves that Sammy Lee’s “Total Football” wouldn’t work at the Reebok and got him booted out after 11 games.
If the average football fan is now a member of the Church of Tactical Awareness, Jonathan Wilson is its high priest. A journalist for the Guardian and the Financial Times, Wilson demonstrates an expertise for understanding and explaining the evolution of certain tactical systems,which he has now collected in his deservedly lauded second book “Inverting the Pyramid.”
The pyramid, or rather the upside-down pyramid, is the 2-3-5 formation that took root as the first footballing system in the late 19th century. The narrative arc from this striker-laden approach to contemporary teams like Manchester United, who often buzz around without any genuine center forward, is wonderfully realized and particularly strong on the lesser-known tactical iconoclasts of Eastern European football. Wilson’s lucid style and his nerdy obsession make these systems dance on the page, but if anything the book is too successful. The pyramid is so fascinatingly inverted that you can begin to ignore the unpredictability and the skill of football as you read the book. There is such a compelling case made for the success of those managers that get their tactics right that football can appear robotic. By the end of the book, you almost want Wilson to tell you it was all a bad dream.
Perhaps you could argue that Wilson, his systems and his book are all products of an age in which we give far too much respect to the perspective of a manager. Of course today’s coaches need to be tactically aware, but are we in danger of getting drawn into their idiosyncratic view of a football as a chess match? Jose Mourinho contended that when he went to Inter Milan, it was a philanthropic decision to lift the Italian game back to the European pantheon, yet three months in, he was telling journalists after a turgid 1-0 victory over Udinese how much he loved Serie A precisely because its slow tactical game made it a battle for space between him and his opposing coach.
Why should Inter fans or any fan want football to please the coaches? Conversely, coaches who supposedly possess superior tactical nous are forgiven signings that would see other coaches questioned. There is a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes with coaches like Rafa Benitez, whose transfer policy often is explained away as part of his esoteric approach to a football season. Perhaps the case should be made that a good man-manager or even a good judge of a player might have done a better job in the last four years.
Benitez’s most famous predecessor was one such character. Bill Shankly’s name does not feature heavily in Wilson’s book, but he brought more style and glory to the game than most tactical innovators. Shankly combined the nascent ideas of team-togetherness, also being preached contemporaneously in Milan by Hellenio Herrera, with a good eye for a player and a deal to create Britain’s greatest post-war footballing dynasty. His tactical innovation was fairly simple – keep the ball by passing and then moving into space – but by fostering the right spirit and signing the right players it didn’t need complication.
Shankly’s fellow Scot, Matt Busby, played a similar role at Manchester United, using avuncular charm to get the best out of players, who would then perform with freedom rather than trapping them in a tactical straitjacket. In his autobiography, he calls Manchester United’s quick counter-attacking style “the System” based on pace, accurate passing and self-confidence, but his attempts to codify his principles are counter-productive. “The System” Busby describes was little more than the idea of aesthetically pleasing football played by confident young footballers, but that in itself holds more enduring truth than the other great system of his age, catenaccio, which has long been abandoned.
Indeed it could be argued that the laissez-faire aesthetes such as Busby and Shankly have had a more enduring effect on the game than the false gods of tactical innovation. Football historians, like all historians, aim to study those who invented new ideas, but perhaps those who let the simplest ones come to pass are ignored in the process. One such figure is Mario Zagallo, arguably the most successful figure ever to be considered a failure in the history of football. Zagallo had been a promising if not outstanding forward at Flamengo in the early 1950s before noticing Brazil’s surfeit in that position and switching to outside-left, where he secured a berth in the national side and won two World Cups.
To many in Brazil this use of cunning to over-achieve epitomized Zagallo as player, coach and man. Although his football never was scintillating, he offered reliability to the great Brazilian sides of ’58 and ’62 that depended on the majesty of Pelé and Garrincha to elevate them above everyone else. Zagallo became a friend of Brazilian football and more important, a safe pair of hands, attributes that would stand him in good stead in 1969 when the firebrand and intellectual Joao Saldanha left the position of national team coach.
Saldanha’s dogmatic approach to certain players and tactics contrasted with the nit-picking nature of Brazil’s effective ruler General Medici, and things came to head a year before Mexico ’70 – a tournament over which nothing could be left to chance. The story of Saldanha and Medici became, like many episodes in Latin American football, a political discourse, with the gaunt raffish coach representing the left and the General the new boisterous conservatism of 1960s Brazil. The struggle affected Saldanha’s team, and in March 1969 the Brazilian Federation sacked its coach, the final straw being his questioning of Pelé’s eyesight after a defeat to Argentina.
Zagallo, already a managerial success at Botafogo, was again in the right place at the right time and took up the appointment that would come to define his career as a coach and divide Brazilian public opinion. Out went Saldanha’s tactical didacticism, honed over 15 years as a football journalist and in came player power. Zagallo allowed Pelé, Carlos Alberto, Tostao and other senior players a level of freedom that Brazilian football had lost over the last two years and at Mexico ’70, in glorious Technicolor, they paid him back in spades.
However, Zagallo has rarely been credited with playing even a contributing role in the greatest World Cup finals display of all time. The roots of this lie mainly in the complicated figure of Saldanha and what he represented. Saldanha’s fellow journalists wasted no time in portraying Zagallo as an opportunist sycophant whose role resembled more of a glorified physio than tactical mastermind. To many Brazilian people, Saldanha’s obstinacy in the face of influence from the generals was a source of great pride, and so his successor was looked upon with suspicion.
Saldanha biographer Joao Maximo surmised the prevailing attitude as one of knee-jerk disdain – “We hated Zagallo; he wasn’t clever, he didn’t understand football, he was the wrong man.” Yet Maximo himself acknowledged that this wasn’t based on results but the “political position of the press… in fact, Zagallo was a pretty good coach too.” Zagallo was “pretty good” because he possessed a humility that Saldanha’s pontificating on the game would never let him have. Zagallo saw in the 1970 squad a capacity for innovative football without innovative tactics, and his debt to “tactics” has never truly been recognized because of the uniquely difficult circumstances of his appointment.
To his discredit, Zagallo also did produce a monumentally negative Brazilian side at the 1974 World Cup finals, but this was borne out of necessity after several international retirements and the atrophy of the Brazilian league. Wilson talks about Zagallo as the last “pre-systemic” tactician, and in truth, Zagallo was a tactical innovator by offering a system that allowed his players to express themselves better than they ever had done. He would repeat the trick of Mexico ’70 when manager of the Seleção for a second time at the 1998 World Cup, but here Ronaldo’s genius couldn’t be counted on in the final, and Brazil failed at the last.
This formula was less revolutionary than others, but his success doesn’t deserve any less recognition. Outside of the complexities of Brazilian politics, Zagallo was a tactician who saw purity as the path to perfection. The fact that his players took that path on their own is perhaps less important. If football history teaches us anything, it is that players can often work out new ideas themselves.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the March-April 2009 issue of Soccer Journal.
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