Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  Rocco was also able to accommodate such a languid creative presence as Gianni Rivera, compared by Richard Williams in The Perfect 10 to ‘Camus’s existential stranger, palely loitering on the fringe of life’. On the subject of Rivera, Brera could never agree, calling the issue the ‘Stalingrad’ in his relationship with Rocco. A fundamentalist for what he liked to term ‘defensivist’ football, Brera saw Rivera as a luxury, dismissing him as l’abatino - ‘the monk’ - a term that hinted at a lack of courage. Yet Rivera’s importance to Rocco’s side can be seen from their two European Cup final successes. Twice in the space of eight second-half minutes he laid on goals for Altafini as Milan came from behind to beat Benfica in 1963, and he set up another two in Milan’s 4-1 victory over Ajax in the 1969 final.

  Rocco’s catenaccio may not have been so defensive as some suggested, but it was still a very different game to that practised by Guttmann’s Benfica. They shared a cantankerous disposition, but Guttmann’s notion of football remained essentially romantic; Rocco simply wanted to win. Ahead of an Intercontinental Cup game against the notorious Argentinian side Estudiantes de la Plata in 1969, Rocco is supposed to have issued the instruction, ‘kick anything that moves; if it’s the ball, so much the better’. The story may be apocryphal, but it was not uncharacteristic.

  When Ipswich Town were beaten by Milan in the second round of the European Cup in 1962-63, their captain Andy Nelson was left complaining that Rocco’s side ‘were up to all the cynical stuff - pulling your hair, spitting, treading on your toes’. In the final, the winger Paolo Barison, despite having scored freely throughout the tournament, was dropped and, with Bruno Mora switching from the right to the left flank, was replaced by Gino Pivatelli, who was given a specific brief to nullify Benfica’s majestic inside-forward, Mario Coluna. Perhaps it was bad luck or mistiming, but when Coluna was left hobbling following a heavy challenge by Pivatelli a minute after Altafini had equalised, nobody was too surprised.

  Whatever the excesses of Rocco’s team, they were nothing compared to those perpetrated by their city rivals. La grande Inter, the side created by Helenio Herrera, was hugely gifted, undeniably successful and thoroughly ruthless. They were the supreme exponents of catenaccio and came, in the popular imagination, to embody all that was seen as wrong with football. It was hard to deny them respect, but equally it would be hard to deny that that respect - in Britain most particularly - was grudging.

  Herrera claimed to have invented the sweeper independently of Rappan during a game in France in ‘around 1945’. He was playing at left-back in a W-M, and his side led 1-0 with quarter of an hour remaining. Realising they were coming under increasing pressure, Herrera instructed the left-half to drop back into his position, while he moved in-field to cover behind the defensive centre-half. ‘Already when I was a player, I thought like that,’ he said. ‘And we won, and when I became manager I remembered that.’ That may or may not be true - and Herrera was certainly not averse to polishing his own myth - but what is beyond dispute is that he became the godfather of the system, and it brought him two European Cups. Rocco, with his rotund stature and his love of wine, always seemed at odds with the ethos of his system; Herrera, erect, cadaverous and rigorously disciplined, was its personification, even if his hair always ‘seemed a bit too black’ as the journalist Camilla Cederna put it.

  Herrera was born in Buenos Aires, although exactly when remains unclear. It is said that his father, a Spanish migrant, falsified his date of birth so as to avoid a fine for late registration of his son’s arrival in the world, while Herrera, at least according to his wife, later altered the date on his birth certificate, changing 1910 to read 1916. His father was a carpenter - ‘like Jesus’, he said in his autobiography - and an anarchist trades unionist, while his mother, whom he described as ‘illiterate but with extraordinary intelligence’, worked as a cleaner.

  At the age of four, perhaps fleeing the authorities, the family moved to Morocco where Herrera only just survived a bout of diphtheria. Later, shortly before becoming manager of Barcelona, he narrowly avoided death in a plane crash. The escapes seem to have convinced him of his own specialness, his status as a chosen one, a leader with a mission. That manifested itself in the asceticism of his life: the only adornment in his room at Inter’s training camp was a crucifix. Having recovered from diphtheria, he gained in strength sufficiently that by his teens he was recognised as a physically imposing full-back. ‘From fourteen or fifteen years old, I played with the Arabs, Jews, with the French, with Spaniards,’ he told Simon Kuper in an interview given five years before death finally caught up with him in 1997. ‘That is the school of life.’

  He began his formal playing career with Racing Casablanca, but, discovered by ‘scouts looking under the rocks in poor countries’, as he put it in his autobiography, soon moved to Paris. There he played for Red Star 93 and Racing Club, and won two caps for France at full-back. His career had never threatened to be much more than average, but it was brought to an end anyway at the age of twenty-five after he suffered a serious knee injury. Typically, given his acute sense of his own destiny, Herrera later in life drew a positive from the setback. ‘As a player I was a very sad thing,’ he said. ‘My advantage is that big-star players are monuments of presumptuousness when they become managers. They do not know how to teach someone what they naturally did with so much grace. Not in my case.’

  As the war came to an end, Herrera was appointed coach of the amateur side Puteaux and, after impressing there, he moved to Stade Français while working part-time with the national team as an assistant to Gaston Barreau. It was there that he first acquired the nickname ‘Le Sorcier’ (‘The Wizard’ - it was later translated to become ‘Il Mago’ in Italy). Herrera hated the title, believing it detracted from his achievements. ‘The word wizard doesn’t belong to football,’ he said. ‘“Passion” and “strength” are football words. The greatest compliment I’ve ever had was someone saying I worked thirty hours a day.’ He was similarly dismissive of the concept of luck in football. ‘I hate it when they ask about being fortunate,’ he said towards the end of his career, with sixteen major titles to his name. ‘I don’t believe in good luck. When someone has won so much in twenty years, can it be fortune? Modestly, I’ve won more than any other manager in the world. My case is unprecedented.’ For him, everything was controllable, everything could be made better. In that regard he was the first modern manager. Guttmann might have followed Chapman in establishing the cult of the manager, but it was Herrera who defined his role, he who showed just what an effect a manager could have. ‘When I started, managers carried the teams’ bags,’ he said. ‘I put them in the place they deserved to be, earning what they should earn.’

  Herrera was not just a fine tactician; he was a perfectionist, involving himself in all aspects of team affairs. He would control his players’ diets, developed the system of the ritiro, whereby players would be confined to the team’s training base the evening before games, and was a pioneer of sports psychology. Every morning he would rise before seven to practise yoga, reciting to himself the phrase, ‘I am strong, I am calm, I fear nothing, I am beautiful.’ He would pin motivational notices to the dressing-room walls: ‘Fighting or playing? Fighting and playing,’ read one; another insisted: ‘He who plays for himself plays for the opposition. He who plays for the team, plays for himself.’ He encouraged his players to sleep twelve hours a day, and rarely stayed up later than nine o’clock himself. He was, Brera said, ‘a clown and a genius, vulgar and ascetic, voracious and a good father, sultan and believer … boorish and competent, megalomaniac and health freak.’

  As Stade Français’s president sold the club’s franchise in 1949, Herrera moved to Spain, becoming manager of Atlético Madrid after a brief spell with Real Valladolid. He won two championships there, and continued through Málaga, Deportivo la Coruña, Sevilla and the Portuguese side Belenenses before arriving at Barcelona, where he enjoyed his first European success. It was his predecessor, Domènec
Balmanya, who took them to the final of the Fairs Cup, even overseeing the first leg, a 2-2 draw at Stamford Bridge against a London XI, but he was sacked as Barcelona’s league form faltered, allowing Herrera to arrive, inspire a 6-0 win in the second leg, and take the glory.

  Herrera acknowledged he had inherited an ‘extraordinary group of players’. ‘All one could do was win every competition in which the team participated,’ he said. ‘Until now the triumphs achieved by Real Madrid at home and abroad have intimidated the team.’ And so he set about bolstering their self-belief, not only with motivational slogans, but with a series of rituals that played on his exotic heritage. ‘Too many managers,’ he said, ‘limit their role to little taps on the players’ shoulders as they are about to go on to the pitch, or making the occasional patriotic speech, which, while maybe warming up the hearts of some players, only serves to cool the muscles of the whole team.’

  Players were given herbal tea before kick-off, supposedly a magic potion of South American or Arab origin. Herrera would gather his team in a circle before they went on the field and throw them each the ball in turn, staring into their eyes and asking: ‘How are we going to play? Why are we going to win?’ When he had been round every player, they would link arms over each others’ shoulders and affirm, ‘We are going to win! We are going to do this together!’ The forward Luis Suárez had a belief that if wine was spilled during a meal, he would score in his next game; Herrera made a point before key games of knocking over his glass during the team meal, at which Suárez would damp his finger on the wine-soaked tablecloth, before touching it to his forehead and his foot.

  By the time he got to Inter, the rituals had become even more complex, as he sought to improve what he saw as the cold atmosphere surrounding the club. There, before the game, Herrera would hold a ball in the centre of the circle, and the players would reach towards it, calling out: ‘I must have it! I must have it!’ ‘It is important to touch the ball before the match,’ he explained. ‘The players are nervous. It is a big match, a big crowd, but the ball: that is their life. Then I made the players hug each other. Not kiss, just hug! And I told them, “We are all in the same boat!”… Then they would get changed and I would say, “Speak to each other! Defence, speak among yourselves!” Une équipe, une famille.’

  Herrera’s style at Barcelona spoke of his great self-confidence, as he deployed inside-forwards in the wing-half positions, giving them creativity throughout the midfield square. They scored ninety-six goals in thirty games in winning the league by four points in 1958-59, and eighty-six goals in 1959-60 as they edged out Real Madrid on goal difference. Herrera, though, was sacked before the end of that season after a 6-2 aggregate defeat to Real Madrid in the European Cup semi-final. He departed, as he had arrived, between the two legs of a Fairs Cup final in which Barca overcame English opposition. Fans had attacked him at his hotel after the European Cup defeat, but after his sacking they carried him on their shoulders down the Ramblas. By then, only Guttmann could challenge him as the most wanted coach in Europe.

  After receiving a number of offers, Herrera opted for the most lucrative, and moved to Milan with Inter. Their president, Angelo Moratti, had sacked twelve coaches in the previous five years. Herrera promised he would provide the success Moratti so desperately sought, but demanded a then-record annual salary of £35,000. ‘Sometimes an expensive choice can be a cheap one, a cheap one very expensive,’ he said, and was vindicated as gate receipts went up fivefold in his first season at the club.

  A few weeks after his arrival he met the players’ wives and explained to them the importance of nutrition and the routines he wanted his players to follow. Herrera wanted his control to be all-encompassing, even if his implementation of the ritiro, confining players to their Appiano Gentile headquarters before games, was far from popular. ‘The idea was that we would focus on the upcoming match and nothing else,’ said the defender Tarcisio Burgnich. ‘During the retreat, you couldn’t leave; you would just train, eat and sleep. When we did get a free moment, there was nothing to do beyond playing cards. So you ended up doing nothing but thinking about the next game. The problem with such retreats is that they’re OK once in a while, but if you do them too often it’s really tough on the players.’

  Everything, from sleep to training to diet to the courses of oxygen players were given the night before each game, was strictly regulated. The English forward Gerry Hitchens described leaving Herrera’s Inter as being ‘like coming out of the bloody army’, and told the story of how he, Suárez and Mario Corso were once left behind at the training ground by the team bus after lagging on a cross-country run and had to make the six-mile journey back into town themselves. Even Sandro Mazzola, the great star of the side, admitted there were times when Herrera’s obsession with preparation became too much. ‘After beating Vasas in the European Cup [in 1966-67],’ he said, ‘we were in the showers chatting about the chance of a couple of days off because we literally lived in our camp. Unfortunately he was listening. He said to me: “No matter how successful you think you are, you always have to keep you feet on the ground.” Nobody said a thing and we all returned to the Appiano Gentile.’

  Discipline was absolute, and any challenge to his authority was pitilessly suppressed. At Barcelona, Herrera described the Hungarian forward Ladislao Kubala as ‘the greatest player I have ever known’, but ostracised him because, he said, his bouts of heavy drinking were undermining his form and destabilising the team. Kubala’s apologists suggest Herrera was rather trying to break the cult of kubalismo that had given him disproportionate influence at the club. Similarly, when he arrived at Inter, Herrera jettisoned the Argentinian forward Antonio Angelillo, who had scored thirty-three goals in thirty-three games in the 1958-59 season, because of his turbulent social life. Even Armando Picchi, the renowned libero, wasn’t safe, being sold on to Varese in 1967 after questioning Herrera’s judgement. ‘I’ve been accused of being tyrannical and completely ruthless with my players,’ Herrera said, ‘but I merely implemented things that were later copied by every single club: hard work, perfectionism, physical training, diets and three days of concentration before every game.’

  That preparation extended to dossiers on the opposition. Players came to know their opponents so well that it was said they could recognise them from Herrera’s descriptions without recourse to photographs. Suárez, who became the world’s most expensive player when he joined Inter from Barca in 1961, regarded Herrera’s approach as unprecedented. ‘His emphasis on fitness and psychology had never been seen before. Until then, the manager was unimportant. He virtually slapped the best players, making them believe they weren’t good enough, and praised the others. They were all fired up - to prove him right or wrong.’

  Inter hammered Atalanta 5-1 in Bergamo in Herrera’s first game in charge, won their next away game 6-0 at Udinese, then put five past Vicenza. They ended up third in the table, but scored seventy-three goals in thirty-four games - more than anybody but the champions Juventus. They were second the following year, but that was not enough for Moratti. That summer, the president even invited Edmondo Fabbri to the Appiano Gentile to offer him Herrera’s job, only to have second thoughts at the last minute and send him home, telling Herrera he had one more season to deliver the success he had promised. It was then that Herrera decided he had to change. ‘I took out a midfielder and put him sweeping behind the main defenders, liberating the left-back to attack,’ he said. ‘In attack, all the players knew what I wanted: vertical football at great speed, with no more than three passes to get to the opponents’ box. If you lose the ball playing vertically, it’s not a problem - but lose it laterally and you pay with a goal.’

  Picchi, who scored just once in his Serie A career, proved a diligent sweeper, described by Brera as ‘a defensive director … his passes were never random, his vision was superb’. Aristide Guarneri operated as a stopper central-back, with Burgnich, the right-back, sitting alongside him. ‘By this point,’ said Maradei, ‘many t
eams were employing a tornante, usually the right-winger, which meant that effectively the left-winger was the more attacking, often cutting inside to shoot on goal. Many great Italian forwards - most notably Gigi Riva and Pierino Prati - started like that.’

  La Grande Inter

  That gave the left-back, Giacinto Facchetti, who had arrived at the club as a forward, greater licence to push forwards, because the man he was marking tended to sit deeper. ‘Jair was in front of Burgnich,’ Maradei went on. ‘He was not a great defender, but dropped deep because he was the kind of player who liked to run at people and needed space in front of him. On the left, in front of Facchetti, you had Corso, a very creative player, not the quickest or the most attacking, but a man capable of unlocking opposing defences. He was the link man with the front guys. Carlo Tagnin and, later, Gianfranco Bedin, sat in front of the defence and did most of the running and defending. Alongside him was Suárez who had great vision and the ability to hit very accurate long passes. That was the typical way Inter restarted after winning possession. They would either get the ball to Jair, who would run into space, or leave it for Suárez, who would hit it from deep over the midfield for Mazzola or the centre-forward - Beniamino Di Giacomo or Aurelio Milani, neither of whom was particularly gifted - or Jair cutting in from the right to run on to.’

  Facchetti was the key, and it was he who gave Herrera his best defence against the accusations of negativity. ‘I invented catenaccio,’ Herrera said. ‘The problem is that most of the ones who copied me copied me wrongly. They forgot to include the attacking principles that my catenaccio included. I had Picchi as sweeper, yes, but I also had Facchetti, the first full-back to score as many goals as a forward.’ That is a slight exaggeration - Faccchetti only once got into double figures in the league - but his thrusts down the left give the lie to those who suggest Herrera habitually set up his team with a libero and four defensive markers.