Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  Perhaps nobody had compiled such lists before, but their content, even if the emphasis on possession was extreme, was far from revolutionary. Far more radical was the list of twenty items concerning what Lobanovskyi and Zelentsov called ‘coalition actions’. These concerned both defensive applications, such as the setting of an offside trap, and attacking, such as the creation of overlaps. ‘To attack,’ Lobanovskyi said, ‘it is necessary to deprive the opponent of the ball. When is it easier to do that - with five players or with all eleven? The most important thing in football is what a player is doing on a pitch when he’s not in possession of the ball, not vice-versa. So when we say that we have an excellent player that comes from the following principle: one percent talent and 99 percent hard work.’

  Lobanovskyi’s goal was what he termed ‘universality’. He wanted his forwards to defend and his backs to attack, and saw no contradiction in the instruction because, to him, attacking and defending were related not to position on the pitch, but possession. ‘No other coach ever demanded that I should chase opponents even back into my own penalty box,’ said the former Russia forward Serhiy Yuran, who began his career at Dynamo under Lobanovskyi. ‘For example, Oleg Romantsev, both with the national team and Spartak Moscow, told me to work hard, but only in the opponents’ half. He told me to do everything in my area, but not to intervene where others should be playing.’

  Set moves were practised, to be used, Zelentsov said, not robotically, but like a chess player adapting set gambits according to circumstance. These were the key to their conception of football, and it was through their models of training to develop among players a better understanding of the structures of the game that they carried football forwards. The classic example of such principles in action, perhaps, came in the Cup-Winners’ Cup final of 1986, with Dynamo’s second goal in their 3-0 win over Atlético Madrid. Vasyl Rats advanced down the left, drew two men, and played the ball inside to Ihor Belanov. He then took two touches, and, as the centre-back moved across to close him down, he, without so much as a glance, laid the ball right for Vadym Yevtushenko. He took one pace forward, forcing the opposing left-back inside to close him down, then instinctively flicked the ball right for the overlapping Oleh Blokhin, who ran onto his pass and lifted his finish over the goalkeeper. It was a move so quick and instinctive as to be virtually unstoppable, resembling less football than a rugby team working the ball along a line of backs until the overlap is created.

  Lobanovskyi’s three great teams 3-0 v Ferencváros, Cup-Winners’ Cup Final, St Jakob Stadium, Basle, 14 May 1975

  3-0 v Atlético Madrid, Cup-Winners’ Cup final, Stade Gerland, Lyon, 2 May 1986

  3-3 v Bayern Munich, Champions League semi-final, first leg, Olympyskyi, Kyiv, 7 April 1999

  Critics often suggest that Lobanovskyi stifled individuality, but the truth is rather that he made his players aware that they were not individuals, that individual skill was only of use within the context of the system. ‘The tactics are not chosen to suit the best players,’ Lobanovskyi explained. ‘They must fit our play. Everybody must fulfil the coach’s demands first, and only then perform his individual mastery.’

  In Methodological Basis, Lobanovskyi and Zelentsov give as an example of their preparation for a specific game the European Cup semi-final against Bayern Munich in 1977. ‘The play,’ they wrote, ‘was constructed on attacking actions, with the obligatory neutralisation of the opponent’s players, the intention being to deprive him playing space and to defend against the attacks from wide at which Bayern were so strong. The objective was a draw, but we ended up losing 1-0. In the match in Kyiv, we chose a playing model based on squeezing the play and fighting for the ball in our opponents’ half of the pitch, trying to create a numerical advantage in various areas. Eventually we won 2-0.’

  Their other great advance was to work out a method of recording and analysing games far more sophisticated than the shorthand of Charles Reep. Each element of the game was broken down and targets set according to the style Lobanovskyi had adopted. (see table on page 244)

  The day after matches, the statistical breakdown of the game would be posted on the notice-boards at the training ground, an innovation that gave Lobanovskyi great power. ‘When I was a player,’ he said, ‘it was difficult to evaluate players. The coach could say that a player wasn’t in the right place at the right moment, and the player could simply disagree. There were no videos, no real methods of analysis, but today the players cannot object. They know that the morning after the game the sheet of paper will be pinned up showing all the figures characterising his play. If a midfielder has fulfilled sixty technical and tactical actions in the course of the match, then he has not pulled his weight. He is obliged to do a hundred or more.’

  The attitude, inevitably, led to conflict and, while most players seem to have respected Lobanovskyi - most notably Andriy Shevchenko, who insisted ‘he made me as a player’ - he inspired little warmth. ‘My relationship with Lobanovskyi wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t friendly either,’ said Belanov. ‘It was simply professional. But he did a lot for me. He invited me to Dynamo and persuaded me to play his way. We had quarrels, but we were aware that we were doing a great thing.’ As if to prove there were no hard feelings, Belanov named his son Valeriy.

  Oleksandr Khapsalys, who played for Dynamo in the late seventies and early eighties, recalled how Lobanovskyi would simply shout down any perceived criticism. ‘It was better not to joke with Lobanovskyi,’ he said. ‘If he gave an instruction, and the player said: “But I think...” Lobanovskyi would look at him and scream: “Don’t think! I do the thinking for you. Play!”’

  With Dynamo, he was hugely successful, winning eight Soviet titles, six Soviet Cups, five Ukrainian titles, three Ukrainian Cups and two European Cup-Winners’ Cups, and defining Ukrainian football. In his various stints with the USSR, though, Lobanovskyi was less successful. Twice in 1975 - against Turkey and the Republic of Ireland - his demand for ‘a star-team’ rather than ‘a team of stars’ led him to field a national team made up entirely of Dynamo players, and the squad he took to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal was similarly Dynamo dominated.

  They had won successive league titles, and were undoubtedly one of the best teams in Europe, but Lobanovskyi still wasn’t satisfied, and increased their training schedule yet further. The players were appalled, and many complained that they were too exhausted to perform to the full extent of their abilities. Matters came to a head in the semi-final as the Soviets produced a sluggish display in losing to East Germany. The players blamed Lobanovskyi, and went on strike. The incident was hushed up, and agreement eventually reached as Lobanovskyi stood down from the national job. ‘The problem was that we were applying scientific methods to players who were semi-amateurs, and that led to conflict,’ explained Zelentsov.

  The dispute made Lobanovskyi aware that more training did not necessarily produce fitter players, and that was where Zelentsov made his great breakthrough as he constructed a training programme that managed to balance the twin but conflicting needs for speed and stamina; Zelentsov claims that Italy borrowed the model when they won the 1982 World Cup. Increasingly, he used computers in analysing games, and it was in through that development that they were able to revolutionise the game.

  ‘In my laboratory, we evaluate the functional readiness of players and how their potential can best be realised,’ Zelentsov explained. ‘And we influence players in a natural way - we form them following scientific recommendations. With the help of modelling we assemble the bricks and create the skeleton of the team. It is true that not every player will fit the Dynamo system, but we don’t just give a coach advice, we justify it with numbers. We recommend how to compose the training programmes, how to evaluate them, how to understand the actions of players on the field - all from a scientific point of view, no emotions.’

  Lobanovksyi’s conception became the default Soviet style, partly because it was successful, partly because of Lobanovskyi’s domineering
personality and partly because it felt ideologically right. For all that players of the time protest against the stereotype, the philosophy was rooted in the team: perhaps there is no such thing as the ‘socialist football’ to which Gusztav Sebes glibly referred, but the style of Lobanovskyi’s teams was nonetheless a development of the ‘collective play’ of which Mikhail Yakushin had spoken during Dinamo Moscow’s tour of Britain in 1945. Yet there was an internal opposition, and for a few years in the early eighties, Soviet football was torn between two radically different philosophies of how the game should be played.

  Where Lobanovskyi was taciturn and analytical, his outbursts rooted in his desire to make his players conform to his system, Eduard Malofeev was loquacious and ebullient, frighteningly so. ‘There is no one in Belarus with his energy or optimism,’ said Gennadiy Abramovich, who played with Malofeev at Dinamo Minsk and then worked alongside him as an assistant coach. In the late nineties, Malofeev appeared on what Abramovich described dismissively as ‘a women’s programme’ on television. Asked what he did each morning, he replied that first he thanked God he was alive, then he got out of bed and jumped up and down to celebrate the fact. His football, in conception at least, was similarly joyous.

  Malofeev became a respected forward in twelve seasons with Dinamo Minsk, winning forty caps for the USSR and playing in the 1966 World Cup, and topping the scoring charts in the Soviet League in 1971. A cartilage injury brought his career to a close and, after a brief spell working in youth football, he graduated as a coach in 1975, being appointed manager of Dinamo Minsk in 1978. He led them to promotion in his first season, and they were sixth in his second. Even more remarkable, it was all achieved playing what Malofeev termed ‘sincere football’. ‘It was honest football,’ explained Abramovich. ‘No causing injuries, no bumping, no barging: just kicking the ball. No paying money to referees outside the ground. And attacking, pure football. Football of the heart, not of the head.’

  Malofeev’s other great strength was his ability to handle players and get the best out of them. It is an over-simplification to say Lobanovskyi saw his payers as tools to be deployed, but not much of one; Malofeev, though, was concerned with individuality and self-expression. ‘The main thing about Malofeev was his psychology,’ explained Mikhail Vergeenko, Dinamo Minsk’s goalkeeper in the early eighties. ‘We would have a team-talk three hours before each game. He would gather everyone together and read out the team. He looked into the players’ eyes, at each one, eye to eye. He was always looking, searching to discover something. He was like a doctor. He analysed players and he knew straightaway their strong points and their weak points. He was a person who could get to your heart, your soul. He knew how to talk to people.’ Malofeev’s failure at Hearts in 2006 - statistically, he is their worst ever manager, taking two points from his four games in charge - Vergeenko puts down to the absence of a good translator.

  It didn’t take long for comparisons to be made with what was going on 270 miles to the south-east. ‘The rivalry between Minsk and Kyiv was the rivalry between two minds,’ Vergeenko explained. ‘Lobanovskyi was a coach by mathematics; Malofeev was more romantic. The main thing he wanted from the players was that they should express themselves on the pitch. If you give your all, he said, the fans will love you.’

  The player the fans loved most was a man whose lifestyle would have disbarred him from getting anywhere near a Lobanovksyi side: Alexander Prokopenko. He was a heartbreak of a midfielder, a genius whose talent was as unbridled as his capacity for alcohol. A painfully shy man, he was so tormented by a speech impediment that he refused ever to be interviewed. It didn’t matter: Dinamo fans knew what he thought because he drank with them. More than that, he was one of them, just another worker from Minsk who happened to be a superb instinctive footballer, and an industrious one at that. ‘The tribune knew he would go for ninety minutes,’ the journalist Vasily Sarychev wrote in The Moment and the Destiny, his book celebrating Belarus’s top sportsmen. ‘He would sooner die than cease his motion on the pitch through tiredness or laziness.’

  His drinking after the USSR team of which he had been a part finished third in the 1980 Olympics led him to miss the end of the season, but he returned in glory and scored the iconic goal of the 1982 campaign, a backheel against Dynamo Kyiv. As Dinamo’s form slid in the mid-eighties, his alcoholism got worse, and he was forced to spend time at LTP, a state-sponsored rehab clinic. The club, acting under the instructions of the local Communist Party, refused to take him back, but Abramovich, whom he came to refer to as a second father, persuaded the second division side Dnepr Mogilev to take him on. After a season there he moved to Azerbaijan with Neftchi Baku, playing against Dinamo Minsk and scoring against Spartak.

  It was only a brief respite, though, and he began drinking heavily again. He was readmitted to the LTP in 1989, but died two months later, aged just thirty-five. ‘He was followed by the smell of grass and of skin, by the joy of his goals and by empty cans,’ Sarychev wrote. ‘When the need for football went, the urge died in him, the urge he was born to fulfil.’

  Brilliant but unpredictable, his demons masked by the charm of his play, Prokopenko was the model of a Malofeev footballer. Lobanovskyi, predictably, was scathing of Malofeev’s idealism. As he pointed out, for all Dinamo Minsk fans raved about the Prokopenko backheel, the match had ended in a draw and a valuable away point for Dynamo. ‘When somebody mentioned it,’ Abramovich recalled, ‘he slapped his hand to his head and said, “In my life I have seen many things, but never sincere football.”’

  Nonetheless, at least for one glorious season, it worked. ‘What happened with Dinamo in 1982 was about the harmony of youth and experience,’ the midfielder Sergei Aleinikov wrote in his autobiography. ‘Everybody, whether they were veterans or novices, played every game like it was the last of his career. But the main thing was that Malofeev was the head of the team, the unique and only one. That was his victory, the triumph of his principles and his understanding of football.’

  That year, every ploy Malofeev initiated paid off. Vergeenko remembers in particular the game away to Pakhtakor Tashkent, who went on to finish sixth that season. ‘It was forty degrees plus in the shade,’ he said. ‘The game was at 6 p.m., but at noon, Malofeev said, “OK, let’s go and train.” Everybody was stunned. Even in the hotel it was over thirty-five at night, no air-conditioning. Imagine: we were just thinking how to escape the heat; then Malofeev says we’re training at noon. “But afterwards,” he said, “you will see - just thirty minutes, you will sweat, but you will be OK.” We had thirty minutes training. The workers in the ground were shocked. They were sitting there out of the heat drinking water, and Malofeev brings his team for training. But that evening, we knew we could deal with the heat and we won 3-0, and they were a good team at that time.’

  Dinamo Minsk 1982

  Malofeev’s team talks were equally eccentric. Dinamo went into their final league game away to Spartak Moscow needing a win to clinch the title. Twenty-nine years earlier, it was widely believed in Belarus, Spartak had cheated Dinamo Minsk out of second place in the league with a bout of late-season match-fixing, and the fear was they would do something similar to hand the title to Dynamo. Malofeev knew he had to break down his side’s cynicism, to persuade them that defeat was not inevitable, and so came up with something that sounds like the rejected draft of a Just So story.

  ‘“Imagine there is a troop of monkeys crossing a field,”’ Vergeenko remembers him telling a hushed dressing room. ‘“On the other side of the field is a group of lions. Many different things could happen. Maybe the lions will tear the monkeys to pieces. Or maybe one of the monkeys will go first, and will distract the lions, and will sacrifice himself so the other monkeys will live. Today, as monkeys, we must sacrifice ourselves for the victory.”

  ‘I thought: I am the goalkeeper, maybe I will be injured, but the main thing is that the team will win.’ And they did, by the typically Malofeevan score of 4-3. ‘When the team got back from
Moscow to Minsk, it was amazing,’ Vergeenko went on. ‘There were people with flowers and kisses and love: nothing organised, just love.’

  Malofeev promptly left for Moscow to take charge of the USSR Olympic side, leaving him ideally placed to step in when Lobanovskyi’s second spell in charge of the main national team came to an end. All had seemed to be progressing well for him, particularly after a 5-0 demolition of Portugal in Moscow in qualifying for Euro 84. Away in Lisbon, though, Lobanovskyi - as he always did in tough away games - set out for the draw, only to be undone by a penalty awarded for a foul that clearly took place outside the box. Portugal won 1-0, the USSR failed to qualify, and Lobanovskyi, blamed for his pragmatism, was dismissed.

  Lobanovskyi’s star had never been lower, and only the personal intervention of Scherbytskyi saw him reinstated at Dynamo. Even that looked an error when Dynamo finished that 1984 season tenth. Lobanovskyi, though, stuck to his guns. ‘A path always remains a path,’ he said. ‘It’s a path during the day, it’s a path during the night and it’s a path during the dawn.’ The next season, Dynamo did the double, before adding the Cup-Winners’ Cup.

  Malofeev, meanwhile, was faltering. The USSR won just one of their opening five qualifiers for the Mexico World Cup, but salvaged a place in the finals by winning their last three games. ‘Malofeev became very nervous, and there was no clear pattern to our football, but Mexico was waiting,’ Aleinikov wrote in his autobiography. ‘The media was attacking both the players and the coaches. The final straw was the grey 0-0 draw against Finland [in a friendly] at the Luzhniki Stadium. It was rumoured that Malofeev might be replaced, and Lobanovskyi had just won the Cup-Winners’ Cup, but I didn’t believe it would come to reality before the start of the World Cup.’