Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  Ramsey was, at heart, a realist. That was apparent as soon as he took charge of Ipswich in August 1955. He may have approved of Rowe’s methods with Spurs, but he soon realised that push-and-run had no place at a Third Division South team of whom little was expected. He began with the simple things, and although his first game in charge was lost 2-0 to Torquay United, the reporter for the East Anglian Daily Times admitted himself impressed by the range of corners on display.

  Results soon picked up, but it wasn’t until December that Ramsey made the switch that would set in motion a decade of evolution that ended in the World Cup. Jimmy Leadbetter was an inside-forward, a skilful, intelligent player whose major failing was his lack of pace. He had been signed in the summer by Ramsey’s predecessor Scott Duncan and, having played just once in Ramsey’s first four months in charge, was concerned for his future. Then, just before New Year, Ramsey asked Leadbetter to play on the left-wing. Leadbetter was worried he wasn’t fast enough, but Ramsey’s concern was more his use of the ball.

  ‘I was supposed to be the left-winger, but I wasn’t playing that game,’ Leadbetter said. ‘I was pulled back, collecting balls from defence - the other full-backs wouldn’t come that far out of defence to mark me, so I had space to move in. As I went further forward, I could draw the full-back out of position. He wouldn’t stay in the middle of the field marking nobody; he felt he had to come with me. That left a big gap on the left-hand side of the field. That was where [the centre-forward] Ted Phillips played. He needed space, but if you could give him that and the ball, it was in the back of the net.’

  Promotion was won in 1957, and as the centre-forward Ray Crawford was signed from Portsmouth and the orthodox right-winger Roy Stephenson from Leicester City, Ramsey’s plan took shape. This was 4-2-4, but like the formation with which Brazil won the World Cup, it was 4-2-4 with a twist. Where Brazil had Mario Zagallo shuttling deep from a high position, Ipswich had Leadbetter, whose lack of pace meant he sat deep naturally. If anything, it resembled in shape more the skewed 4-3-3 Brazil would adopt in 1962 than the 4-2-4 of 1958, although the style was very different.

  ‘We believe in striking quickly from defence,’ Ramsey said. ‘A team is most vulnerable when it has just failed in attack. If I had to suggest an ideal number of passes, I would say three.’ Three, perhaps not coincidentally, was also Reep’s magic number, although there is no suggestion that the two ever met.

  ‘Alf’s idea was the less number of passes you take, the less chance there is of making a bad pass,’ Leadbetter said. ‘It’s better to make three, good, simple ones, because if you try to make ten, as sure as anything you’ll make a mess of one of them. You should be in a position to shoot with the third one. You could do that then because of the way teams played.’

  The great weakness of the W-M was the pivot necessitated by the fact that there were only three defenders. If an attack came down the attacking side’s left, the right-back would move to close the winger down, with the centre-half picking up the centre-forward, and the left-back tucking behind him to cover - and, if playing against a 4-2-4 or another system with two central strikers, picking up the other centre-forward. ‘That was the only cover you got, so if you beat your full-back, your forwards had a good chance,’ Leadbetter explained.

  Ipswich went up again in 1961 and, to the bewilderment of many, went on to win the title the following year, despite having spent only £30,000 assembling their squad, less than a third of what Tottenham paid to bring Jimmy Greaves back from Italy. Ipswich, The Times said ‘defy explanation - they do the simple things accurately and quickly; there are no frills about their play and no posing. They are not exciting; they do not make the pulses race… Maybe, after all, there is a virtue in the honest labourer.’

  With little or no television coverage to expose the tactic, even the best defenders found it difficult to cope. ‘Leadbetter laid so deep, I didn’t know who the hell I was supposed to be marking,’ said the Fulham and England full-back George Cohen. ‘He pulled me out of position and started pumping the ball over me to Crawford and Phillips and they had two goals before we knew where we were… Substitute Phillips and Crawford for Hurst and Hunt and you have the England set-up.’

  The next season, though, teams knew what to expect. Ipswich lost the Charity Shield 5-1 to Spurs as Bill Nicholson had his full-backs come inside to pick up the two centre-forwards, leaving the half-backs to deal with Leadbetter and Stephenson. Other teams did similarly and, by the end of October when Ramsey was appointed England manager, Ipswich had won just two of fifteen games.

  Ramsey’s predecessor in the national job, Walter Winterbottom, had been hamstrung by having his team selected by a committee of which he was only part; Ramsey demanded absolute control. Without that, tactical experimentation was impossible: if a group of men was simply voting for the best player to fill each position, the positions had to be laid out in advance, without much regard for balance or the interaction between players, and in the past that had meant unthinking faith in the merits of the W-M. ‘People say Matthews, Finney, Carter and so on, they never needed a plan,’ Ramsey protested. ‘Well, I played with many of these players and I would say England’s team was good then, but it would have been many times better if we had also had a rigid plan.’

  Outright control, though, was only granted from the following May, so Ramsey faced two games in which he worked with the committee. In the first, they selected a W-M, and England lost 5-2 to France in Paris. That persuaded the committee to follow Ramsey’s wishes and switch to a 4-2-4 and, although that brought a 2-1 home defeat to Scotland, he stuck with the formation for most of his early reign.

  It was May 1964 and a post-season tour of South America that was to prove key to Ramsey’s tactical development. England had hammered the USA 10-0 in New York - some revenge for Ramsey, having played in the side beaten 1-0 by the USA in Belo Horizonte in 1950 - but, exhausted by the effects of travel and scheduled to play Brazil just three days later, they were thrashed 5-1 by Brazil in their first game of a four-team tournament. A draw against Portugal followed, but it was the third game, against Argentina, that was crucial. Argentina knew a draw would be enough for them to win the competition, and so, the days of la nuestra a distant memory, sat men behind the ball, content to spoil, hold possession and see out time. England, like ‘a bunch of yokels trying to puzzle their way out of a maze’, as Desmond Hackett put it in the Daily Express, were nonplussed. They dominated the play, but never looked like scoring and, caught on the break, lost 1-0. ‘We played 4-2-4 with Roberto Telch coming back, like Zagallo in 1962,’ said the Argentina captain José Ramos Delgado. ‘England had a great team with Moore, Charlton and Thompson, but we played intelligently. It’s true that England had much more possession, but only because we gave up a midfielder so he could defend against certain players.’

  As far as some players were concerned, Hackett went on, ‘the triple lion badge of England could be three old tabby cats’. His reaction was typical: England may have been outwitted by disciplined opponents sticking to an intelligent plan, but the assumption was - as it so often had been, and would continue to be - that they hadn’t tried hard enough, that they hadn’t shown enough pride in the shirt. Brian James in the Daily Mail, while no less angry, came rather closer to a realistic assessment. ‘If you do not give a damn about the game, and are prepared to leave entertainment to music halls you can win anything,’ he wrote. ‘Argentina have simply taken logic and pushed it to the limit. Their policy lays down that, “if they do not score, we do not lose”… Only in their wildest moments of heady recklessness were they prepared to open out.’ Ramsey, of course, would rather have admitted to a love of Tchaikovsky than to having been influenced by Argentina, but he did acknowledge the ‘tremendous gap’ between the two South American giants and England. Significantly, the FA’s report on the triumph of 1966 made a point of noting how important the experience gained on that tour had been.

  Over that summer, Ramsey rethought his strateg
y: system, he seems to have decided, was more important than personnel. Ramsey’s taciturn nature makes it hard to be sure, but it is not implausible to suggest that the two years that followed represent a carefully controlled evolution towards winning the World Cup.

  The players he had been playing wide in a 4-2-4, Bobby Charlton and Peter Thompson, weren’t the kind to track back, and neither could Jimmy Greaves nor Johnny Byrne, the two centre-forwards, realistically have been asked to drop in. George Eastham, who commonly played as one of the central midfielders, was a converted inside-forward, and his partner Gordon Milne was no spoiler either. Ramsey realised that although 4-2-4 was a fine formation for beating lesser sides, it was unsuitable for playing stronger opponents, and could leave even a markedly better team vulnerable if it had an off day. In short, the problem came down to the fact that while 4-2-4 was potent when you had possession, it didn’t help you get the ball in the first place.

  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, bu
t 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.