Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  The system’s main shortcoming was that it placed huge demands on the centre-half. Although on paper the formation - with four defenders, a centre-half playing behind two withdrawn inside-forwards, and a string of three across the front - looks similar to the modern 4-3-3 as practised by, say, Chelsea in José Mourinho’s first two seasons at the club, the big difference is how advanced the wingers were. They operated as pure forwards, staying high up the pitch at all times rather than dropping back to help the midfield when possession was lost. That meant that when the verrou faced a W-M, the front three matched up in the usual way against the defensive three and inside-forwards took the opposition’s wing-halves, leaving the centre-half to deal with two inside-forwards. This was the problem sides playing a libero always faced: by creating a spare man in one part of the pitch, it necessarily meant a shortfall elsewhere.

  Rappan’s Verrou, 1938

  Against a 2-3-5, the situation was even worse. The side playing the verrou had a man over at both ends of the pitch, but that meant the centre-half was trying to cope not only with the opposing inside-forwards, but also the other centre-half. That was all but impossible, so Rappan’s team tended to drop deep, cede the midfield to their opponents and, by tight marking, present a solid front to frustrate them so they ended up passing the ball fruitlessly sideways. As the system developed, the burden was taken off the centre-half as an inside-forward gradually fell back to play alongside him, but the more striking change was that made to the defensive line as one of the two full-backs (that is, the de facto centre-backs) dropped behind the other as an orthodox sweeper.

  Rappan won two league titles with Servette and five more with Grasshoppers, whom he joined in 1935, but it was his successes with the Switzerland national side that really demonstrated the efficacy of his system. Rappan became national coach in 1937, with a brief to lead Switzerland into the 1938 World Cup. At the time, Switzerland were regarded as the weakest of the central European nations, and their record in the Dr Gerö Cup was correspondingly poor: played 32, won 4, drawn 3, lost 25. Using the verrou, though, they beat England 2-1 in a pre-World Cup friendly, and then beat Germany - by then encompassing Austria - in the first round of the tournament itself, before going down 2-0 to Hungary. That was an honourable exit - far more than Switzerland had achieved previously, but the verrou was considered little more than a curiosity; perhaps a means for lesser teams to frustrate their betters, but no more.

  Perhaps not surprisingly given the rethink of defensive tactics necessitated by Boris Arkadiev’s organised disorder, a similar system sprang up, seemingly independently, a few years later in Russia. Krylya Sovetov Kuibyshev (now Samara), a team backed by the Soviet Air Force, were founded in 1943, winning promotion to the Supreme League in 1945. They soon became noted for their defensive approach, specifically a tactic known as the Volzhskaya Zashchepka - the ‘Volga Clip’. It may not have been so flexible as the verrou, and it was a development of the W-M rather than the 2-3-5, but the basic principle was the same, with one of the half-backs dropping deep, allowing the defensive centre-half to sweep behind his full-backs.

  Its architect was Krylya’s coach, Alexander Kuzmich Abramov. ‘Some people were amazed because he wasn’t a football professional in the usual sense of the term,’ the former Krylya captain Viktor Karpov said. ‘He came from the world of gymnastics, so maybe because of that he wasn’t directed by dogma, but had his own opinions on everything. He paid a lot of attention to gymnastic exercises, using training sessions to improve our coordination. An hour could go by and you wouldn’t touch the ball, yet somehow it helped us to be more skilful. Kuzmich made us think on the pitch. Before each game he would gather the team together and we would discuss the plan for the match. As far as I’m aware, other coaches didn’t do this.

  ‘How we played depended on our opponents. If we were playing Dinamo, for instance, and their forward line was Trofimov, Kartsev, Beskov, Soloviov, Ilyin, then of course you had to take measures to counter such a star quintet. At that time most teams played with three defenders, but our half-backs would help them out more. Usually that meant me and [the left-half] Nikolai Pozdyanakov.

  ‘We didn’t man-mark as such. We tried to play flexibly, and the system meant that the range of action of each player became broader. Sometimes a reserve player would come in and he would try to chase his opponent all over the pitch - his man would go and have a drink and our novice would follow him. We would laugh at players like that, because we regulars had been taught that we should act according to the circumstances.’

  As when Nikolai Starostin first had his brother operate as a third back, there were those who protested at Abramov’s innovation, seeing it as a betrayal of the ideals of Russian football, but gradually the system became accepted, as Lev Filatov puts it in About Everything in an Orderly Manner, as ‘the right of the weak’. The forward Viktor Voroshilov, who also captained the side under Abramov, was scathing of the system’s critics. ‘Let’s say we were playing against CDKA,’ he said. ‘In attack they had Grinin, Nikolaev, Fedotov, Bobrov and Doymin. So we’re supposed to venture upfield? That’s why we played closer to our own goal. Once against Dinamo Moscow we opened up, [their coach] Mikhey Yakushin outwitted us and we lost 5-0.’

  The Volga clip’s success as a spoiling tactic could hardly be faulted. After winning just three of twenty-two games in 1946, and finishing tenth of the twelve top-flight sides, Krylya climbed to seventh of thirteen in 1947, recording a famous win over Dinamo Moscow. They beat them again in 1948 and, in 1949, they won 1-0 both home and away against CDKA. ‘Their famous opponents tried to make it a game,’ Filatov wrote. ‘They combined in passing moves, won corners and free-kicks, but every time they were denied and the ball flew into the sky or on to the running track that ran round the pitch. Eventually their spirits dropped, because they realised they were banging their heads against a wall.’

  Essentially, though, the clip was seen as a small team’s tactic, a means of countering superior sides rather than a pro-active strategy in its own right. Krylya finished fourth in 1951 and got to the Soviet Cup final two years later, and Karpov recalls man-marking the giant Hungarian forward Gyula Szilágyi as the USSR employed the clip to win a B-international 3-0 in Budapest in 1954, but it largely remained confined to Krylya. The bolt had to move to Italy before it became mainstream.

  The fishing fleet lies dark against the sun-washed sea. Along the Tyrrhenian waterfront, a stressed football manager, unable to sleep, takes an early-morning walk. Oblivious to the shrieking of the gulls and the haggling of the dockside mongers, he strides on, asking himself again and again how he can get the best out of his side, ponders how he can strengthen a defence that, for all his best efforts, remains damagingly porous. As he paces the harbour, churning the problem over and over in his head, a boat catches his eye. The fishermen haul in one net, swollen with fish, and then behind it, another: the reserve net. This is his eureka moment. Some fish inevitably slip the first net, but they are caught by the second; he realises that what his side needs is a reserve defender operating behind the main defence to catch those forwards who slip through. That manager was Gipo Viani, his team was Salernitana, and his invention was catenaccio.

  That, at least, is the story Viani told - and with its vaguely biblical overtones it is an attractive one - but it is, at the very least, over-romanticised. Nonetheless, among the many theories of how catenaccio developed in Italy, Viani’s claim to be the originator seems strongest. Perhaps others did use it before him, but he was the first to employ the system on a regular basis and with a level of success. Again, it seems to have grown up independently of Rappan, although the historical influence of Switzerland on Italian football is significant. Vittorio Pozzo, for instance, spent two years playing for the reserve team of the Zurich club Grasshoppers, while Franz Cali, the first captain of Italy, was educated in Lausanne. Between the wars, it would have been unusual to find a leading northern Italian side without at least one Swiss ex-pat, their presence b
eing felt particularly strongly at Genoa, Torino and Internazionale.

  Whether it was inspired by a dawn walk by the sea or not, it seems that Viani, recognising the limited resources at his disposal, decided the most fruitful policy was to try to stop the opposition playing - to exercise ‘the right of the weak’. One of the notional half-backs, Alberto Piccinini, who went on to win two scudetti with Juventus, dropped in to mark the opposing centre-forward, with the central of the three defenders in the W-M, which had come by then to supplant Pozzo’s metodo as the default formation in Italy, falling back as the sweeper. Viani then had his team sit deep, drawing out the opposition, leading them to commit extra men to the attack and so rendering them vulnerable to the counter. The shape may have been different, but the thinking behind his innovation was no different to Herbert Chapman’s at Northampton in 1907.

  Salernitana’s use of what became known as the vianema, though, was not catenaccio’s breakthrough. They were a small side, and although the system helped them to promotion in 1947, when they had the best defensive record of any team in the three parallel second divisions, they failed to win an away game in their one season in Serie A, and were immediately relegated.

  Viani’s relative success at Salernitana made catenaccio fashionable, and it began to spring up in varying guises across the country. ‘Smaller teams began realising that they stood no chance if they turned the game into a series of individual battles,’ explained Lodovico Maradei, the former chief football writer of the Gazzetta della Sport. ‘And so, while maintaining the W-M, many made small adjustments so they could have a spare man at the back. Usually this was done by pushing one of the wingers back and letting the full-back slide across behind the defence. Still, this was not something that was done systematically, but was rather extemporaneous. Many would disagree, but the reason I say this is that, because it was smaller teams doing this, most of the time they were pegged back anyway and, therefore, even if the full-back wanted to slide across, often you wouldn’t even notice it, since the whole side was further back defending.’

  The most striking exponent of the new style was Nereo Rocco, who rapidly transformed Triestina. He would go on to lead AC Milan to two European Cups, but it was his unfashionable home-town club that formed him and his way of thinking about the game. He had worked in his grandfather’s butcher’s shop before Triestina offered him a contract and, after pursuing a modest playing career that took him to Padova and Napoli - and, crucially, earned him the international cap necessary at the time in Italy to become a manager - he returned home to the city he loved. Aside from television appearances, when he affected something more neutral, he spoke always with a strong Trieste accent and became a Christian Democrat councillor there in 1948. It was his achievements with the local football club, though, that cemented his place in local folklore.

  When Rocco was appointed in 1947, Triestina were in a mess. They had just finished bottom of Serie A, avoiding relegation only through an exemption granted because, with British and American troops still occupying the city, they were unable to play any matches at home. Few saw much reason to believe things would have been much better had they not always been forced to travel. In Rocco’s first season, though, they remained unbeaten at home, and finished joint second. That was as good as it got, but successive eighth-placed finishes in the following two seasons were still respectable for a club of Triestina’s limited means, and when Rocco then left following a disagreement with the club’s board, to be replaced by Béla Guttmann, they slumped immediately to fifteenth.

  Still, catenaccio was seen as ‘the right of the weak’, and it was only when Internazionale adopted it under Alfredo Foni that it began to be seen as a system with which big clubs could win trophies. He had Gino Armano, the right-winger, drop back to mark the opposing left-winger, allowing Ivano Blason, the right-back, to shift across as a sweeper. Armano was the first of what are known in Italy as tornanti - ‘returners’ - wingers who track back and help with the defence.

  Blason, meanwhile, became lionised as the first great libero. When he had joined the club from Triestina in 1950, he had been a clumsy full-back, but in his new role became noted for his long clearances and his uncompromising nature. Legend has it that before kick-off he would scratch a line on the pitch and tell opposing forwards they were not allowed beyond it, hacking them down if they tried. ‘Blason was not the elegant libero some may imagine,’ Maradei said. ‘He was basically a hacker who just belted the ball into touch whenever he could. That’s why the libero was originally known as battitore libero - “free hitter” - because more often than not he would simply hit the ball into touch.’

  In 1952-53, Inter scored just forty-six goals in thirty-four games, twenty-seven fewer than Juventus, yet still pipped them to the scudetto by virtue of having conceded only twenty-four (to put that in context, Juventus had won the league the previous season scoring ninety-eight and conceding thirty-four). Describing their style, Gianni Brera said Inter would defend, then ‘suddenly, Blason fired off a mortar shot: seventy metres away there were not many players around and a lot of empty space that Inter’s individual players could exploit.’ Eight times that season they won 1-0, four times drew 0-0. ‘They were harshly criticised by the press at the time because their football was generally very defensive and lacklustre, despite a stellar frontline which included Benito Lorenzi, Nacka Skoglund and István Nyers,’ Maradei said. ‘It was quite revolutionary: you have to remember that, at the time, the scudetto winners regularly scored around a hundred goals.’

  Variations on the theme sprung up. Fiorentina, for instance, won the title in 1956 under Fulvio Bernardini, the centre-half discarded by Pozzo, using a variant of catenaccio in which the left-half, Armando Segato, played as the libero. Maurilio Prini, the left-winger, retreated as a tornante, with the added twist that the inside-left, Miguel Angel Montuori, would push on into the position vacated by Prini, effectively becoming a spare centre-forward. Unpopular it may have been, but the template for Italian football had been set.

  Inter may have become the most noted practitioners, but it was the red half of Milan that first showed the rest of Europe how potent catenaccio could be, thanks to the genius of Rocco. Square-faced and plump, with short legs, he cut a vaguely comical figure, but he dominated his players almost absolutely, even having them watched after they’d left the training ground so he could be sure their private lives would not interfere with their football. So controlling was he that at Torino in the mid-sixties, the forward Gigi Meroni went through a spell of pretending his girlfriend was his sister to deflect Rocco’s attentions. He was ebullient and charismatic, quick-tempered and charming, an enthusiastic drinker who would use a local restaurant as his office. Once, in a fury, he kicked out at what he thought was a bag full of spare shirts lying on the dressing-room floor, discovering too late that it was actually a tool-kit. Players who were there remember staring desperately at the ground, terrified to laugh until he was out of earshot.

  At Torino, Rocco would often drop into the bar at the training ground, have a couple of drinks, and then sleep them off on top of the lockers in the dressing room. He liked nothing better than sitting up late into the night downing bottle after bottle of wine with Brera, another northern Italian who shared his views on the how the game should be played. ‘The perfect game,’ Brera once wrote, ‘would finish 0-0.’ Rocco perhaps did not go quite that far, but he did have a fanatical aversion to the ball being lost in midfield with meaningless sideways passes, and insisted that all his players should track back, even the forwards. The idea was not always well received. The Brazilian forward José Altafini (or Mazzola, as he was known during his early career in Brazil), for instance, although he had a fruitful time at Milan, struggled to accept it, while it was one of the major sources of Jimmy Greaves’s dissatisfaction with life in Italy. It is often forgotten that Greaves, who returned home after just five months in Serie A in 1961-62, scored nine goals in the ten games he played for Milan, but for Rocco that was
not enough. ‘Those two,’ he said, ‘need to understand that during a football match you get kicked, not just well paid.’

  After a brief spell with Treviso, Rocco returned to Triestina, but it was only when he moved to Padova in 1953 that the success of his methods became apparent again. They were far from being giants, but between 1956-57 and 1959-60, they finished third, seventh, fifth and sixth, by some distance the best run in the club’s history. And then came Rocco’s big chance, as he was called upon to take over at AC Milan after Viani, who had won the scudetto in 1959, suffered a heart attack. Viani stayed on as sporting director, and later claimed it was then that he persuaded Rocco of the merits of the sweeper. Perhaps there were some discussions over the finer details of the system, but Rocco had, without question, been using a form of catenaccio since he first took over at Triestina.

  His form of it, though, was far removed from the negative stereotype. In winning the scudetto in 1961-62, for instance, Milan scored eighty-three goals in thirty-four games, twenty-two more than Roma, the next most prolific side. Although Cesare Maldini, who was also born in Trieste and began his career with Triestina, was as resolute a defender as there has been, he was not the bogeyman the sweeper became in the popular imagination. Rather when he left for Torino in 1966 after twelve years of service, he left behind, in the words of the club’s official history, ‘the memory of a gentleman footballer, a player with a clean game, with a sense of style, who nevertheless always observed his defensive duties.’