Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (40 page)

It was after Elton John appointed him as manager of Watford in 1977, though, that the real breakthrough came. Taylor was offered a five-year contract, but before agreeing to it, he asked his chairman what he was expected to achieve in that time. ‘Watford were in the Fourth Division,’ Taylor said, ‘and they’d only spent three years in their history in the second flight, so I thought he’d say maybe he wanted Second Division football. He said he wanted us playing in Europe. Here was a singer at the top of his career offering me a five-year contract and asking me to get Watford into Europe - and five years later we were.’

Even by the volatile standards of the seventies, Watford’s rise was extraordinary. They were promoted in 1978, again in 1979 and then again in 1982. The following season they finished second in the First Division, and the year after that, lost in the FA Cup final. Taylor admits the way his side played had its limitations, but makes no apology for it. ‘Our style was based on pressing the ball wherever it was,’ he explained. ‘So even if the opposition right-back had the ball deep in his own half, we still pressed him. We played high-tempo football, which meant we had to be extremely fit. When the score’s 0-0 and there are three or four minutes to go, what do players do? They get the ball forwards. My view is that players then are going looking for the ball. But if they can do that in the last few minutes, why can’t they do that from the start? With the very fit side we had, that’s what we tried to do. We were always attacking; I knew we couldn’t defend our way into Europe.’

High-scoring games became the norm: in successive seasons Watford drew 4-4 at home to Everton and beat them 5-4. They twice won 5-3 against Notts County, and beat Sunderland 8-0. In that 1982-83 season they lost 6-1 at Norwich and went down 7-3 in the League Cup to Nottingham Forest. In the last three games of 1984-85, they beat Tottenham and Manchester United 5-1, then lost 4-3 at Liverpool. It was mad, harum-scarum stuff but, broadly speaking, it worked. Between 1982-83 and 1986-87, after which Taylor left for Aston Villa, Watford never finished lower than twelfth, a remarkable achievement for a club of their stature.

The shape mattered less than the method. Although 4-4-2 was the default, with full-backs such as Wilf Rostron and David Bardsley pushing on, and with
bone fide
wingers like Nigel Callaghan and John Barnes playing high up the pitch, the formation could come to resemble the 4-2-4 of the 1958 Brazilians, and there were times in the 1982-83 season when they played a 3-4-3. ‘Because we kept going forwards, the opposition kept going back,’ Taylor said. ‘The wide midfielders either had to follow them and get pinned back, or leave them. We kept on posing questions. As you go higher, you keep expecting teams to work out how to cope, but often they didn’t.’

Aesthetes were appalled, but Taylor insists much of the outrage was down to ignorance and snobbery. ‘A lot of people who complained about long balls just looked at the club and the player,’ he said. ‘If Glenn Hoddle played one it was a long pass, but if Ian Bolton did it, it was a long ball because he played for Watford and was a centre-back who sometimes played in midfield who nobody had heard of. Hoddle was a much better player, but for accuracy in his long passing I’d take Bolton every time.’

For the purist, things got even worse. Wimbledon’s apologists speak of their rise as a fairytale, but it was one noticeably lacking in magic. Their story, Stephen Crabtree wrote in
The Dons - The Amazing Journey
‘would seem far-fetched if it appeared in the pages of
Roy of the Rovers
… achieved despite little financial backing, pathetic support, a non-league standard ground and unknown players…’ Perhaps at first it was, as they were elected to the league in 1977, and then, under Dario Gradi, who would become renowned for the passing football of his Crewe sides, won promotion to the Third Division. They were promptly relegated, Gradi left for Crystal Palace in February 1981, and then, under their new manager Dave Bassett, they were promoted again. And immediately relegated. That next season in the Fourth Division, though, proved a watershed. They started promisingly, but as results fell away in the November, Bassett changed his approach. ‘We began the season using a sweeper at the back which worked well,’ Bassett said that February, ‘but now we’ve changed to get the ball up to the front very fast. It suits the team.’

Everton 2 Watford 0, FA Cup final, Wembley, London, 19 May 1984

Of claims that it was awful to watch, Bassett was dismissive. ‘It depends on what you mean by attractive,’ he said. ‘There is more goalmouth incident for our supporters to enjoy in our games than lots of other teams I’ve seen this season. Call it what you like. We’re here to win games and win promotion.’

‘Goalmouth incident’, it turns out, is the last resort of coaches seeking to excuse mechanically unappealing football. If it had just been about uncomplicated forward passing, Wimbledon would have been forgiven, but right from the start, there was an ugly element to their play. The week after a 3-1 away win at Stockport County, the Stockport programme was moved to ask ‘why they had to resort to some untidy tackling and time-wasting tactics… There seems to be little chance that anyone will stop them from achieving their objective, which appears to be promotion at all costs.’

Successful as they were, though, the crowds stayed away. ‘We have tried everything by serving up good football, but the apathy of Wimbledon and the surrounding area is incredible,’ said Bassett. But of course they hadn’t served up good football; they’d served up winning football, and the two are not necessarily the same thing. Perhaps his despair was self-justificatory: if fans weren’t going to turn up anyway, then why not play grim, flairless anti-football? There may have been goals, but this was emotionally empty football stripped of beauty.

It was awful to watch, but Wimbledon soared through the divisions, brushing aside bemused opponents as they did so. ‘It’s like schoolboys all chasing after the ball all at the same time,’ said the Grimsby Town goalkeeper Nigel Batch after a 1-1 draw at Plough Lane in 1984. It was just like Watford all over again, only worse, as John Vinicombe of the
Brighton Evening Argus
made clear, describing them ‘a poor man’s Watford when four front men adopt a cavalry charge formation in pursuit of high passes slung from behind.’

They finished sixth in the First Division in 1987, and then, after Bobby Gould had replaced Dave Bassett, won the FA Cup the following year. ‘Wimbledon don’t play,’ moaned the Coventry City manager George Curtis. ‘As soon as they get it they just hit it.’ That is perhaps a touch unfair, for they were at least hitting balls towards John Fashanu, a brash and ungainly but effective target man, while Dennis Wise, for all his faults, had talent, but they won few admirers. They revelled in their unfashionability, making much of their initiation rites - which consisted largely of destroying suits - and delighting in the brute physicality of their play. A key element in the victory over Liverpool at Wembley in 1988, most of their players claimed, was Vinnie Jones’s crunching foul on Steve McMahon in the first minute: after that, Liverpool were intimidated.

Like all bristling outsiders, Wimbledon’s apologists put their unpopularity down to the ‘snootiness’ - Crabtree uses the word repeatedly - of the establishment, but the attendance figures told their own story. This was football nobody wanted to watch. Budget perhaps dictated their style, but did not excuse the thuggery that lay just below the surface. This wasn’t just pragmatic; it was nihilistic.

Taylor, by contrast, was simply being practical. He accepted his system had its limitations, and admits that at every stage he expected his side to be found out. When he got to Aston Villa, and had a viable budget, although his style remained direct, there was a refinement to it. Tony Daley may have got into the Wimbledon side of the time, but it is hard to imagine a player as cultured as Gordon Cowans would have done.

It wasn’t until his first season of European competition with Watford that Taylor began to find opponents coming up with the sort of solutions to his direct style that he had expected to encounter far earlier. ‘We were playing sides who were prepared to sit deep, play short passes, hold the ball and pick us off, who had fans who weren’t demanding they thump the ball forward,’ he explained. They overturned a 3-1 first-leg deficit with a 3-0 second-leg victory over Kaiserslautern at Vicarage Road in the first round of the Uefa Cup, and edged by Levski Sofia in the second round, but were comprehensively outplayed by Sparta Prague in the third round, losing 7-2 on aggregate. ‘It was men against boys,’ Taylor said. ‘When you gave the ball away, they didn’t give it back to you.’

And there, precisely, is the problem with a direct style based on pressing. It’s all very well until you come up against a team good enough technically to be able to keep possession even when under pressure. And, as Taylor points out, when climatic conditions make it impossible to maintain a high tempo and render constant pressing impossible, its deficiencies become even more evident. That, of course, goes some way to explaining England’s persistent underachievement in major tournaments, which are almost invariably staged in conditions far hotter than English players are used to at home.

Taylor, in his quest to broaden his knowledge, had spoken at length to both Stan Cullis and his captain in the Wolves side of the fifties, Billy Wright. Their influence on his thinking is clear and undisputed, but Taylor also came - inaccurately - to be associated with Charles Hughes. He rejects any notion that he was influenced by Hughes, and suggests that if anything the influence, stemming from his brief time as England Under-18 coach while Hughes was director of youth coaching, was the other way round. And this is where the interconnections between Taylor, Hughes and Charles Reep get complicated.

Hughes’s first two books,
Football: Tactics and Teamwork
, published 1973, and
Soccer Tactics and Skills
, published 1980, are both practical manuals, giving guidance, for instance, on how to deal with near-post corners or how close a player should get to an opponent he is closing down. They are general works with similar content, although the second is slightly more targeted at the individual. Neither evangelises a particular philosophy of play: they are perhaps a touch over-pragmatic, but they are largely unobjectionable.

And then, in 1981 - or possibly 1982 - Taylor set up a meeting between Hughes and Reep at his house because, if a letter Reep wrote to the Norwegian coach Egil Olsen in 1993 is to be believed, Hughes wanted his secretary Mandy Primus trained in his shorthand techniques. Reep was initially happy to help, but he became suspicious when Hughes published an article in which he hinted that he and Reep worked together. Worse, Reep claimed in that letter - although it is hard to be sure of the veracity of this claim - that Hughes also set out some of the secrets of Watford’s style of play, which neither Reep nor Watford wanted making public.

There does appear to be evidence of Reep’s influence in a series of lectures Hughes gave in 1984. In one of them, Hughes stated that, ‘Over the past two years, the Football Association has been striving to bring the Coaching Scheme into better, more objective and hopefully, more successful lines. To achieve these aims and objectives, the FA has been quite heavily involved in a study of match performance analysis.’

That last phrase - ‘match performance analysis’ - was a term Reep had used since the fifties, and one that does not appear in either of Hughes’s first two books. It is an oddly fussy term - characteristic of Reep - using three words where two would have done, and it seems unlikely Hughes would have happened upon it without having heard of or read Reep. Reep was certainly angered; Hughes turned to the more obvious phrase he could have adopted in the first place, and dropped the word ‘performance’.

Reep’s feathers were ruffled further when Richard Bate, chief coach at Notts County, presented what was essentially a review of Reep’s theories at the Science and Football forum in Liverpool in 1987, but credited Hughes for his help.

In his introduction to
The Winning Formula
, Hughes is keen to stress that he has come to his conclusions independently. ‘My experience of match analysis,’ he wrote, ‘began in January 1964 when I joined the staff of the Football Association… At the FA headquarters at Lancaster Gate was a library of 16mm films of FA Cup finals and international matches. Between 1964 and 1967 I watched all these matches and extracted all the goals. These goals were then analysed more closely to establish what were the key factors in scoring goals and winning matches.

‘The results of this analysis were used in the playing method of all the international teams I managed between 1964 and 1974 - seventy-seven matches in all. The essence of this work was published in 1973 in a book entitled
Tactics and Teamwork
and a series of eleven films under the same title.’

Well, maybe the results were, but the work is light on statistics and preaches no unified philosophy. It is hard to be sure either way, but it is easy to see why Reep was suspicious. As the Norwegian academic Øyvind Larson points out, ‘The style of play recommended immediately changed from being general in nature to being penetration-based in particular.’ Hughes had been an ordinary pragmatic coach; he became, to use the term applied by Howard Wilkinson, his successor as FA technical director, ‘a zealot’. There were differences in terminology and weighting (Hughes specified five passes or fewer rather than three), but Reep claimed in his letter to Olsen that that was because Hughes was unaware of some of the calculations he was performing.