Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  ‘In the pause,’ the columnist Ezequiel Fernández Moores wrote in La Nacion, quoting a phrase common in the blues tradition of Argentina, ‘there is no music, but the pause helps to make the music.’ He went on to recount an anecdote about Charles Mingus walking into a bar to see an impetuous young drummer attempting a frenetic solo. ‘No,’ the great jazz musician said, ‘it’s not like that. You have to go slowly. You have to say hello to people, introduce yourself. You never enter a room shouting. The same is true of music.’

  But is it true of football? Nostalgists and romantics would like to believe so but, Moores argued that Riquelme would have to change, that he would have to learn, like Messi, a directness. Can the game today cope with a player who does not charge and hustle and chase, but exists apart from the hurly-burly; the still point of an ever-turning world, guiding and coaxing through imagination rather than physique? ‘Riquelme’s brains,’ Jorge Valdano said, ‘save the memory of football for all time… he is a player of the time when life was slow and we took the chairs out on the streets to play with the neighbours.’ Perhaps his melancholic demeanour reflects his knowledge that he was born out of his time. Then again, perhaps his lack of pace would have found him out whichever era he played in: he is, after all, not a paradigm for theoretical debate but an individual with many very great gifts and one very obvious weakness.

  In Argentina, Riquelme is adored and despised in equal measure, the depth of feeling he provokes indicative of how central the playmaker is to Argentinian notions of football. The enganche, Asch wrote in a column in Perfil in 2007, is ‘a very Argentinian invention, almost a necessity’. The playmaker, he went on ‘is an artist, almost by definition a difficult, misunderstood soul. It would, after all, hardly seem right if our geniuses were level-headed’; it is as though they must pay a price for their gifts, must wrestle constantly to control and to channel them. Certainly there is that sense with Riquelme, who eventually frustrated the Villarreal coach Manuel Pellegrino to the extent that he exiled him from the club.

  ‘We are not,’ Asch wrote, ‘talking necessarily about a leader. Leaders were Rattín, Ruggeri, Passarella or Perfumo, intimidating people. No. Our man is a romantic hero, a poet, a misunderstood genius with the destiny of a myth… Riquelme, the last specimen of the breed, shares with Bochini the melancholy and the certainty that he only works under shelter, with a court in his thrall and an environment that protects him from the evils of this world.’ Perhaps, Asch said, he should never have left Boca.

  Well, perhaps, but it is not that Riquelme cannot prosper away from the club he clearly adores. He struggled with Barcelona, but he was the major reason Villarreal reached a Champions League semi-final 2005-06, and his intelligence was central to Argentina’s sublime progress to the quarter-final of the World Cup later that summer. And yet he took blame for his sides’ exits from both competitions. He missed a penalty against Arsenal in the Champions League, and was withdrawn after seventy-two anonymous minutes against Germany. Some cited Riquelme’s supposed tendency to go missing in big games; but what is striking is that the coach, José Pekerman, replaced him not with a similar fantasista, despite having Messi and Saviola available, but with the far more defensive Estaban Cambiasso, as he switched to a straight 4-4-2. He either decided that Torsten Frings, the more defensive of the two German central midfielders in their 4-4-2, would get the better of any playmaker he put on, or, as many argued, he lost his nerve completely and lost faith in the formation because of Riquelme’s ineffectiveness. Little wonder that Riqelme has commented - as a matter of fact, rather than from bitterness - that when his side loses, it is always his responsibility.

  And this, really, is the problem with a designated playmaker: he becomes too central. If a side has only one creative outlet, it is very easy to stifle - particularly when modern systems allow two holding midfielders without significant loss of attacking threat. That is true of the 4-3-1-2, its close cousin the diamond, and the 3-4-1-2. All three can also be vulnerable to a lack of width. Significantly, under Bielsa, not that Riquelme got much of a look in, Argentina played at times with a radically attacking 3-3-1-3, a formation almost unique at that level. Bielsa had already experimented with a 3-3-2-2, using Juan Sebastian Verón and Ariel Ortega behind Gabriel Batistuta and Claudio López, with Javier Zanetti and Juan Pablo Sorín as wing-backs and Diego Simeone as the holding midfielder in front of three central defenders. That was essentially a variant of the 3-4-1-2, with one of the central midfielders becoming an additional trequartista, but it was just as prone to the lack of width as the more orthodox version. Shifting one of the centre-forwards and one of the trequartistas wide and converting them into wingers, though, alleviated that. The playmaker was provided with a wealth of passing options and the formation was so unusual it was difficult to counter.

  ‘In the defensive phase,’ the Argentinian coach Cristian Lovrincevich wrote in Efdeportes, ‘the collective pressing method was adopted, with all lines pushing forwards to recover the ball as close as possible to the opposition goal. In essence it was very similar to the Total Football of the Dutch. In the offensive phase, once the ball had been recovered, the team tried to play with depth, avoiding unnecessary delays and the lateralisation of the game. In attack, five or six players were involved; only four positions were mainly defensive - the three defenders and the central midfielder.’

  The problem with both variants, though, is that once possession is lost, regaining it can be difficult and the team is necessarily vulnerable to the counter. Argentina employed the 3-3-2-2 at the 2002 World Cup and, after the group stage, they had had more possession, created more chances and won more corners than any other side. Unfortunately they were also on their way home, having managed just two goals and four points from their three games, raising questions both about defensive weaknesses and about the quality of the chances created. When attacks are funnelled down the centre, the defending side can simply sit deep, watch the opponents pass the ball around in deep areas, and restrict them to long-range efforts. In the 4-3-1-2 or the 3-4-1-2, width can be provided by good movement from the forwards, or by the carrileros, the shuttling midfielders, pulling wide, or by attacking full-backs, but when the system goes wrong, the problem tends to be either lack of attacking width, or the holes left defensively by trying to provide it.

  Yugoslavia 2 Finland 0, Euro 2004 qualifier, Marakana, Belgrade, 16 October, 2002

  Second Half

  Shakhtar Donetsk 2007-08

  That is not to say that both formations are necessarily doomed, merely that they are restricted in their application. In October 2002, for instance, in a Euro 2004 qualifier in Naples, Yugoslavia fielded a flattened diamond to try to frustrate Italy. Goran Trobok sat in front of the back four, with Siniša Mihajlović to his left, Nikola Lazetić to his right, and Dejan Stanković as a deepish trequartista, with Predrag Mijatović dropping off Mateja KeŽman. Playing defensively, the plan worked as Alessandro Del Piero found his space restricted, and Yugoslavia arguably had the better of a 1-1 draw. At home in Belgrade against Finland four days later, though, Yugoslavia adopted a similar system and struggled. With the onus on them to create, rather than relying on breaks, they lacked attacking width, while they struggled defensively as their full-backs were repeatedly isolated against Mika Nurmela and Joonas Kolkka, the two wide players in Finland’s 4-4-2. At half-time it was 0-0, at which Yugoslavia switched to a 3-4-1-2, with Mihajlović stepping out from the back three to become an additional midfielder. Nurmela and Kolkka suddenly found themselves having to deal with wing-backs, which both gave them a defensive responsibility and diminished the space in which they had to accelerate before meeting a defender; Yugoslavia, with a spare man both in the middle at the back and in the middle of midfield, began to dominate possession, and ended up winning by a comfortable 2-0.

  That, perhaps, is the major reason the diamond is slipping out of fashion. Of the thirty-two sides who reached the Champions League group stage in 2007-08, only Mircea Lucescu’s Shakh
tar Donetsk deployed it in its classic form, and they ran into the classic problems. Particularly in their opening game, at home to Celtic, but also in their second, away to Benfica, they were superb, Razvan Rat and Darijo Šrna flying forward from full-back with the holding midfielder Mariusz Lewandowski dropping back to protect them (the diamond becoming effectively a 3-4-1-2), and the slight Brazilian Jádson operating as a playmaker behind a front two. In their next two games against AC Milan, though, their weakness high up the pitch in wide areas was exposed. They were well beaten in both and, as confidence waned, ended up failing to qualify even for the Uefa Cup.

  Shifting to a 3-4-1-2 worked for Yugoslavia against Finland largely because it negated the impact of the opposing wingers, but it is just as liable to render a side one-dimensional, as Croatia found at the 2006 World Cup as they persisted with three at the back long after the rest of Europe had abandoned it. When they finished third at the World Cup in 1998, Ciro Blazević managed at times to squeeze three playmakers into their line-up. Fielding Zvonimir Boban, Robert Prosinečki and Aljosa Asanović together in central midfield defied logic - it was, as Slaven Bilić said, ‘the most creative midfield ever’ - and yet somehow it worked. That, though, was a one-off, aided by the fact that their back three included, in Bilić and Igor Štimac, two stoppers who were also comfortable on the ball plus either Dario Šimić or Zvonimir Soldo, both of them equally capable of playing in midfield, who would step out to become a midfielder when necessary. It is notable too that the 3-0 quarter-final victory over Germany, their best performance of the tournament, came when Prosinečki was absent, leaving Soldo to operate as a holding midfielder in what was effectively a 3-3-2-2 - another of those simple shifts of balance the 3-5-2 permits.

  By the time of the 2006 World Cup, their coach Zlatko Kranjčar had gone down the route of Italy in the late nineties and decided that to play with an out-and-out playmaker in his son, Niko Kranjčar, it was necessary to bolster the midfield with two holding players - a formation not dissimilar to that adopted by West Germany in the latter stages of the 1986 tournament. However aggressive Šrna and Marko Babić were as wing-backs, it couldn’t disguise the fact that with Igor Tudor, often a centre-back with Juventus, and Niko Kovač, a more complete midfielder, but somebody who has become decreasingly creative as his career has gone on, at the back of the midfield, they were effectively playing with seven defenders.

  That was enough to earn a battling 1-0 defeat to Brazil, but when Croatia had to take the initiative, as they did against Japan and Australia in their other two group games, they were tiresomely predictable, reliant for creativity either on the forward surges of the wing-backs, or on an out-of-sorts Kranjčar. They played stodgy, tedious football, and as their frustration got the better of them, they became over-physical and boorish. The only silver lining for Croatia was that Serbia-Montenegro had an even worse tournament, but their impressive qualifying performances, having switched away from the traditional Balkan three at the back, did not go unnoticed. In ten qualifying games they conceded only one goal, with their quartet of defenders - Goran Gavrančić, Mladen Krstajić, Nemanja Vidić and Ivica Dragutinović - attracting the nickname ‘the Fantastic Four’. Serbia-Montenegro could blame injuries and disintegrating team morale for their embarrassment in Germany; Croatia’s problems seemed to be rooted rather in the very way they played the game: Serbia had at least begun their process of evolution.

  The debate about the merits of 3-5-2, or 3-4-1-2, had dogged Croatian football for years. Bilić ended it at a stroke when he replaced Zlatko Kranjčar as coach after the tournament. His side, he announced, would play four at the back, preferably, but not necessarily, in a Dutch-style 4-3-3. The fear among traditionalists was that that would mean the end of the playmaker, but Bilić found a way of accommodating not just one, but two. It might not have been quite the heady days of Blazević’s 3-3-2-2, but it was far better than anyone had hoped, far better than it had been during Kranjčar’s reign.

  Bilić supplemented his back four with Niko Kovač as a deep-lying midfielder, and found room for not merely two forwards, but also Kranjčar on the left, with Luka Modrić in the middle, and Šrna on the right. With his slight, almost fragile build, Modrić resembles the traditional playmaker, but there is more to his game than that. ‘My role in the national team is very different to the one I perform with Dinamo,’ he said. ‘Here I have a freer role, but I also have more defensive responsibilities.’ Significantly, Zlatko Kranjčar had praised his ‘organisational’ qualities when he first called him into the national squad ahead of the World Cup.

  1998 (3-0 v Germany, World Cup quarter-final, Stade Gerland, Lyon, 4 July 1998)

  2006 (2-2 v Australia, World Cup Group Phase, Gottlieb-Daimler Stadium, Stuttgart, 22 June, 2006)

  2007 (2-0 v Estonia, Euro 2008 qualifier, Maksimir, Zagreb, 8 September 2007)

  Modrić and Niko Kranjčar represent the new style of playmakers - fantasistas with a certain robustness, and also a sense of tactical discipline. ‘Nobody wants playmakers, nobody buys them,’ Asch wrote. ‘Why? Do they hate poetry, do they hate colour?’ It comes back, it would seem, to Tomas Peterson’s point about a second order of complexity. Once the systems are understood, once football has lost its naivety, it is no longer enough simply to be beautiful; it must be beautiful within the system. ‘It happens that nobody in the world plays with a playmaker anymore,’ Asch went on. ‘Midfielders are multi-function and forwards are a blend of tanks and Formula One cars.’ Maybe so, and the playmaker will be missed, but just as the traditional winger was superseded and phased out by evolution, so too will be the traditional playmaker. Riquelme is a wonderful player. He may prosper at Boca, to whom he returned at the beginning of 2008. He may even prosper for Argentina, for international defences are not so well drilled as those at club level, but he is the last of a dying breed, a glorious anachronism.

  The Nigerian cult of Kanu, which slightly mystifyingly sees him not as a second striker, as he has been used throughout his career in Europe, but as a trequartista, regularly forces him into the playmaking role for his country, but that has served only to highlight its redundancy. At Portsmouth, Kanu worked because he had in Benjani Mwaruwari a partner who charged about with an intensity that rather cloaked the intelligence of his movement. Benjani did the running while Kanu strolled around in the space between midfield and attack: one was energy, one was imagination, an almost absolute division of attributes that, at Portsmouth’s level at least, worked.

  At the African Cup of Nations in 2006, Kanu was used to great effect as a substitute. Once the pace of the game had dropped, he would come on, find space and shape the game. Eventually, the pressure from the Nigerian press grew until their coach, Augustin Eguavoen, felt compelled to start him against Côte d’Ivoire in the semi-final. Kanu barely got a kick, shut out by the pace, power and nous of Côte d’Ivoire’s two holding midfielders, Yaya Touré and Didier Zokora. Two years later, in Nigeria’s opening game in Sekondi, their new coach, Berti Vogts, threw him into exactly the same trap. Against one anchor-man, perhaps Kanu could have imposed his will and thrived; against two, it was impossible. To say it is to do with his age is to miss the point. The playmaker belongs to an era of individual battles: if he could overcome his marker, he could make the play. Against a system that allows two men to be deployed against him, he can’t. Yes, by deploying two men against the playmaker the defensive side is potentially creating space for another, but zonal marking is designed to counter precisely that sort of imbalance. There exactly is the deficiency of the 4-3-1-2: stop the designated playmaker and the flow of creativity is almost entirely staunched.

  So how then can a playmaker be used in the modern game? Early versions of Bilić’s system - such as that played by Croatia when they beat England 2-0 in Zagreb in October 2006 - included Milan Rapaić, a forward-cum-winger on the right; Šrna, as a wing-back who is also a fine crosser of the ball, gives them rather more balance. Still, Bilić’s Croatia employ five attacking playe
rs, something almost unique in the modern game, which may explain why they conceded three away to Israel and two at Wembley in qualifying for Euro 2008.

  Using a single creator raises the danger of becoming one-dimensional, but there are other reasons why three at the back is declining in popularity in every major football country apart from Brazil. José Alberto Cortes, head of the coaching course at the University of São Paulo, believes the issue is physical. ‘With the pace of the modern game,’ he said, ‘it is impossible for wing-backs to function in the same way because they have to be quicker and fitter than the rest of the players on the pitch.’

  Most others, though, seem to see the turn against three at the back as being the result of the effort to incorporate skilful players by bolstering the midfield. There is, of course, an enormous irony here, in that Bilardo’s formation in 1986 both popularised three at the back and included a playmaker as a second striker, the very innovation that has led ultimately to the decline of three at the back. Bilardo’s scheme had two markers picking up the opposing centre-forwards, with a spare man sweeping behind. If there is only one centre-forward to mark, though, that leaves two spare men - one provides cover; a second is redundant - which in turn means a shortfall elsewhere on the pitch. ‘There’s no point having three defenders covering one centre-forward,’ explained Miroslav Djukić, the former Valencia defender who became Partizan Belgrade coach in 2007.