Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (45 page)

Sacchi, as expected, left to take charge of the national side, but his career, after an astonishing rise, had already reached its peak. Like Lobanovskyi, he found the rhythm of coaching a national team difficult, for he could not spend every minute of every day schooling his players, working on their understanding. ‘It’s impossible, ’ he said. Added to which, his insistence that good footballers did not necessarily make good players meant an uneasy relationship with some of Italy’s more vaunted players, most notably Roberto Baggio.

The two issues came together in Italy’s second game in the 1994 World Cup. After losing their opener 1-0 to the Republic of Ireland, Sacchi made three changes to the side, the most significant of which turned out to be the replacement of Tassotti with Antonio Benarrivo. ‘Baresi and Costacurta attacked the Norwegian centre-forward, ’ Sacchi explained. ‘Benarrivo, who was not used to playing with us, did not follow them. So he played an opponent onside, [the goalkeeper Gianluca] Pagliuca had to come out and commit a foul outside the box, getting himself sent off.’

Sacchi had to sacrifice a player to bring on his substitute goalkeeper, Luca Marchegiani, and, to general amazement, chose to take off Baggio. Baggio himself was shown on television looking aghast as Sacchi signalled him off, clearly asking, ‘Has he gone mad?’ A scrappy 1-0 win did little to resolve the argument either way, but it make clear Sacchi’s attitude to marque players, something that remained constant through his career. ‘When I was director of football at Real Madrid I had to evaluate the players coming through the youth ranks,’ he said. ‘We had some who were very good footballers. They had technique, they had athleticism, they had drive, they were hungry. But they lacked what I call knowing-how-to-play-football. They lacked decision-making. They lacked positioning. They didn’t have that subtle sensitivity of football: how a player should move within the collective. And, for many, I wasn’t sure they were going to learn. You see, strength, passion, technique, athleticism, all of these are very important. But they are a means to an end, not an end in itself. They help you reach your goal, which is putting your talent at the service of the team, and, by doing this, making both you and the team greater. So, in situations like that, I just have to say, he’s a great footballer, but perhaps not a great player.’

Italy reached the final of that tournament, losing on penalties to Brazil, but that was not enough to stem the criticism, and when they were bundled out of Euro 96 in the group stage, Sacchi’s fate was sealed. He returned to Milan, but could not replicate his earlier success and lasted only a season. He had a similarly brief spell with Atlético Madrid, where he struggled against interference from the club’s president, the notorious Jesús Gil. A subsequent spell with Parma lasted only twenty-three days encompassing three games before he quit citing stress. ‘The difference between Milan and elsewhere was that at Milan I had quality players, at other clubs they obviously weren’t as good,’ he said. ‘And you can only do it of you have a great club behind you. If Berlusconi hadn’t backed me, not just in public, but with the players as well, I don’t think I could have succeeded. I don’t know that the players would have listened to me. When you try to do something new, when you try to do things differently, you need a tremendous amount of support.’

It is just as easy to believe, though, that having achieved his apotheosis so quickly, Sacchi, like Viktor Maslov, found it impossible to summon the emotional energy to impose his vision again. Perhaps too, towards the end of his first spell at Milan, there was an element of Béla Guttmann’s three-year rule kicking in: the exhausting, repetitive training session could be endured only for so long.

AC Milan 4 Barcelona 0, Champions League Final, Spiros Louis Stadium, Athens 18 May 1994

Certainly Milan soon proved not as moribund as Sacchi had believed them to be when he left. ‘I thought they were a great side near to their sunset boulevard, reaching the end of an unrepeatable cycle of success,’ he said. ‘Obviously, I was wrong. Managed by Capello, Milan won the Champions League and four league championships in five years, one of which passed without any defeats.’

Sacchi, of course, must take some of the credit for laying the groundwork, but Milan were substantially different under Capello. Although the 4-4-2 principle remained the same and although they continued to press, Capello’s Milan were far less fluid, far more defensive, often featuring an out-and-out holder like Marcel Desailly at the back of the midfield, something that was anathema to Sacchi’s doctrine of universality. That trend reached its peak when Milan completed a hat-trick of
scudetti
in 1994, despite scoring only thirty-six goals in thirty-four games; the strength was that same back four of Tassotti, Baresi, Costacurta and Maldini, which conceded just fifteen.

Yet that season they also produced one of the indelible European performances, arguably the greatest in a final since Real Madrid’s 7-3 victory over Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960, as they hammered Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona 4-0 in Athens. It was a game wholly incongruous with the rest of the season. For one thing, Dejan Savićević, whose individualistic brilliance was out of keeping both with Saachi’s team-centred ideals and with Capello’s pragmatism, played; and for another, Baresi and Costacurta, both suspended, did not.

The game was billed as another allegory: the attacking of Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona, with their total footballing heritage and their maverick strike force of Romario and Hristo Stoichkov, against the defence of Milan. Barcelona had won a fourth straight Spanish title that year, but they were hopelessly outclassed. Milan were already well on top when they took a twenty-second-minute lead, Savićević gliding by Miguel Ángel Nadal before hooking the ball across goal for Daniele Massaro to knock in. Their second was a sumptuous team goal, Savićević, Boban and Cristian Panucci working the ball to Donadoni, whose cut-back from the byline was whipped into the far corner by Massaro. Savićević then added a wonderful lob, and hit the post in the move that led to Desailly curling a glorious fourth. ‘They were just perfect,’ said the Barcelona goalkeeper, Andoni Zubizarreta.

‘The press, especially the foreign media, had given us no hope,’ said Maldini. ‘Barcelona were certainly a good side, but we knew they had weaknesses and how to exploit them and we went for it, ruthlessly. We played an almost perfect game. We completely stifled difficult opponents and gave them almost nothing.’

Sacchi, though, was never convinced, and Maldini acknowledged that the 1989 side was the best he ever played for. ‘Football is born in the brain, not in the body,’ Sacchi said. ‘Michelangelo said he painted with his mind, not with his hands. So, obviously, I need intelligent players. That was our philosophy at Milan. I didn’t want solo artists; I wanted an orchestra. The greatest compliment I received was when people said my football was like music.’

Chapter Seventeen

The Turning World

∆∇ The classical winger was all but dead, butchered in the sixties by Viktor Maslov, Alf Ramsey and Osvaldo Zulbeldía. By the mid-nineties, it seemed that all
fantasistas
might go the same way, sacrificed before that great bugbear of Willy Meisl, the fetishisation of speed. Arrigo Sacchi may have found a beauty in system, but more generally the effect of pressing was to stifle creativity. As had happened throughout history, after Herbert Chapman, after Helenio Herrera, after Alf Ramsey, the defensive elements of the innovation took root far more readily than the attacking. Blanket five-man midfields became commonplace, muscularity seemed to matter more than finesse; the aesthetic fell before the pragmatic. West Germany’s less than inspiring success in the 1990 World Cup was followed by victory for an overwhelmingly functional Denmark in Euro 92. Brazil won the 1994 World Cup by that least Brazilian of methods - a penalty shoot-out following a goalless draw - and with a team that featured two midfield destroyers in Dunga and Mauro Silva. The future seemed negative. And yet, come the turn of the millennium, football was as attacking as it had been for two decades.

Euro 2000 was arguably the best tournament of the modern era. Germany, torpid, physical and outdated, went home without winning a game; England, despite squeezing Steve McManaman, Paul Scholes and David Beckham into their midfield, were made to look almost as sluggish and failed to progress from the group stage; and, although Italy proved defensive soundness will never go out of fashion, battling with their modified 3-4-1-2 to reach the final almost despite themselves, there was much that was joyous.

France, the champions, fielded not merely Thierry Henry as a graceful and unorthodox centre-forward, but also Youri Djorkaeff, Zinédine Zidane and Christophe Dugarry. The two losing semi-finalists were almost as blessed. Holland fitted Boudewijn Zenden, Dennis Bergkamp and Marc Overmars behind Patrick Kluivert, while Portugal found room for three of Luís Figo, Manuel Rui Costa, Sergio Conceicão and João Pinto behind Nuño Gomes. There were even swansongs for two of the great creative players of the previous decade, Gheorghe Hagi and Dragan Stojković, although both were slower and played deeper than they had in their heyday. Compare that to the Germany side that won the tournament in 1996 with a back five protected by Dieter Eilts, and the contrast is astonishing. It wasn’t just that playmakers had been preserved; over the span of four years, wingers had been resurrected as well.

In a sense, the very defensiveness of the football led to the call for players capable of unpicking opposing defences, who were often themselves given very little defensive responsibility. This was particularly true in Italy - hence their 3-4-1-2 formation in the Euro 2000 finals - where what was known as the ‘broken team’ developed. There would be an attacking three (occasionally joined by a wing-back or a midfielder) and a defensive seven. Alberto Zaccheroni’s
scudetto
-winning AC Milan of 1997-98, for instance, played a 3-4-3 that featured a front two of George Weah and Oliver Bierhoff, with Leonardo just behind. Occasionally Thomas Helveg or Christian Ziege would get forward from wing-back to support, but the two central midfielders, Demetrio Albertini and Massimo Ambrosini, were largely defensive. Fabio Capello’s Roma had Francecso Totti playing behind Paulo Sergio and Marco Delvecchio, with a midfield that included three holders in Luigi Di Biagio, Damiano Tommasi and Eusebio Di Francesco; at Juventus, Zinédine Zidane, Alessandro Del Piero and Filippo Inzaghi were backed up by the industry of Edgar Davids, Didier Deschamps, Angelo Di Livio and Antonio Conte. The role of the playmaker became increasingly necessary, increasingly exalted and increasingly impossible; and by 2000 Italian football was heading down a cul-de-sac from which they arguably didn’t escape until Carlo Ancelotti, at Milan, deployed Andrea Pirlo, a modern
regista
, deep in midfield.

Other countries, though, reacted to the negativity with greater adventure, fielding as many as three
fantasistas
. Fifa, rightly, accepted the credit for the rule changes that followed the 1990 World Cup - abolishing the backpass and outlawing the tackle from behind - but it wasn’t quite as simple as that, for these artists were not the same as the artists of old. As Adolfo Pedernera had pointed out at the beginning of the era of pressing and of the dominance of system, in such an age there can be no place for bohemians. Yet there is, clearly, a place for artistry; it can’t all be about physical effort and defensive positioning. ‘There’s a right-wing football and a left-wing football,’ said César Luis Menotti. ‘Right-wing football wants to suggest that life is struggle. It demands sacrifices. We have to become of steel and win by any method … obey and function, that’s what those with power want from the players. That’s how they create retards, useful idiots that go with the system.’

Germany 1996 (2-1 (AET - Golden Goal) v Czech Republic, Euro 96 final, Wembley, London)

France 2000 (2-1 (AET - Golden Goal) v Italy, Euro 2000 final, De Kuip, Rotterdam)

Menotti has a particular ideological drum to beat, and his sides were always rather more systematised than he cared to admit, but here, surely, there is a truth (although the left-wing/right-wing dichotomy is unhelpful: for one thing, the Soviets played highly systematised football - ‘right-wing’ by Menotti’s definition; and for another, if political terms are to be ascribed to footballing styles, is there not a reflection of social democracy in the egalitarian 4-4-2s of Scandinavia?). Gianni Brera, in his quest for perfect goalless draws, may have appreciated the idea of a team without such fallible flamboyances as artistry, but few others would: even Zubeldía had Juan Ramón Verón, even Helenio Herrera had Sandro Mazzola, even Carlos Bilardo had Diego Maradona. A compromise between the two is necessary. As Marcelo Bielsa, Argentina’s coach from 1998 to 2004 and an inveterate romantic, put it, ‘Totally mechanised teams are useless, because they get lost when they lose their script. But I don’t like either ones that live only on the inspiration of their soloists, because when God doesn’t turn them on, they are left totally at the mercy of their opponents.’

The question then becomes how that artistry is to be incorporated into a system, without becoming systematised to the point of predictability. It is in Argentina, presumably because the eternal conflict between the
Bilardistas
and the
Menottistas
brings the issues to the surface, that the debate has been most fierce. There, the playmaker, the number ten, is revered as it is nowhere outside the Balkans. Italians divide playmakers into
trequartistas
(three-quarters), who play in the hole behind the attack (Totti, for instance), and
registas
, who are deeper lying (Pirlo). In Argentina, though, the playmaker is the
enganche
- literally ‘the hook’ - who always operates between midfield and attack.

Juan Carlos Lorenzo popularised the position in the 4-3-1-2 he instituted with the national team at the 1966 World Cup, with Ermindo Onega in the role. There is a certain irony in that, given his reputation as a pragmatist, which is indicative of how significant the changes that followed the switch to four at the back were. Lorenzo saw artistry had a place, incorporated it within his system and was seen as opposing romance; today romantics in Argentina demand his formation be preserved.

Others followed Lorenzo’s lead and, even two decades on from Bilardo’s success with a 3-5-2, 4-3-1-2 remained the most common formation in domestic Argentinian football. Miguel Russo was part of Bilardo’s Estudiantes side of the seventies and is temperamentally inclined to his way of doing things, but in his time as coach of Boca, which ended in December 2007, he felt unable to do away with the
enganche
. ‘Boca has a tradition of its own, its own structure, and you don’t change things when they’ve won so much,’ he said. ‘Even if I want to change it I have to do it slowly.’

Onega may have been the first to be deployed in the hole behind two strikers - a development, essentially, on the
ponta da lança
position, itself a development of the inside-forward - but he was certainly not the first playmaker, not even in Argentina. Arguably River Plate in the days of
la Máquina
had five, despite selling Alfredo di Stéfano. Independiente became famous for them. There were Miguel Giachello, Norberto Outes and José Percudani, the heart of the side that won the Intercontinental in 1984; before them there was Ricardo Bochini, described by the journalist Hugo Asch as ‘a midget, ungainly, imperturbable, without a powerful shot, nor header, nor charisma’, and yet still a wonderfully imaginative player; elsewhere, most spectacularly, there was Diego Maradona, and after him, a host of new Maradonas: Ariel Ortega, Pablo Aimar, Javier Saviola, Andres d’Alessandro, Juan Roman Riquelme, Carlos Tevez and Leo Messi.

Are such players relevant to the modern game? Of course they are. Or rather, of course Tevez and Messi are. But then neither are really playmakers in the traditional sense. Tevez is a support forward - and even he found himself briefly consigned to the wing at West Ham - while Messi tends to be used on the flank at Barcelona, cutting inside in a 4-3-3. It is Riquelme, mournful of demeanour, graceful of movement and deft of touch, who best embodies the old-style
enganche
. When Eduardo Galeano drew the comparison between footballing artists and the devotees of
milonga
clubs, it was to players like Riquelme he was referring, and it is upon him that the debate about the future of such players has focused. Riquelme has become less a player than a cipher for an ideology.

‘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.