Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

Dancers drew filigrees on a single floor tile, and football players created their own language in that tiny space where they chose to retain and possess the ball rather than kick it, as if their feet were hands braiding the leather. On the feet of the first criollo virtuosos, el toque, the touch, was born: the ball was strummed as if it were a guitar, a source of music.’

Between the two rioplatense national teams, the ants are the Uruguayans, the cicadas are the Argentinians.’ This is a fundamental: it could be said that the whole history of tactics describes the struggle to achieve the best possible balance of defensive solidity with attacking fluidity. So grew up the theory of la garra charrúa – ‘charrúa’ relating to the indigenous Charrúa Indians of Uruguay and ‘garra’ meaning literally ‘claw’ or, more idiomatically, ‘guts’ or ‘fighting spirit’.

The available evidence suggests Sindelar’s death was an accident, and yet the sense that heroes cannot mundanely die prevailed.

‘The good Sindelar followed the city, whose child and pride he was, to its death,’ Polgar wrote in his obituary. ‘He was so inextricably entwined with it that he had to die when it did. All the evidence points to suicide prompted by loyalty to his homeland. For to live and play football in the downtrodden, broken, tormented city meant deceiving Vienna with a repulsive spectre of itself… But how can one play football like that? And live, when a life without football is nothing?’

In a piece in A Gazeta in 1949, Mazzoni wrote that: For the Englishman, football is an athletic exercise; for the Brazilian it’s a game. The Englishman considers a player that dribbles three times in succession is a nuisance; the Brazilian considers him a virtuoso. English football, well played, is like a symphonic orchestra; well played, Brazilian football is like an extremely hot jazz band. English football requires that the ball moves faster than the player; Brazilian football requires that the player be faster than the ball. The English player thinks; the Brazilian improvises.

‘How do you beat a team that has a great forward?’ Lorenzo asked. ‘Very simple. If you don’t want somebody to eat, you have to stop the food coming out of the kitchen. I don’t send somebody to mark the waiter; I have to worry about the chef.’

Camus writes of how bored he was by Amsterdam, a city where ‘for centuries, pipe smokers have been watching the same rain falling on the same canal’.

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,’

If goals alone were a mark of excellence, there would be thousands queuing to watch primary-school football.

When Norway beat England 2–1 in qualifying for the 1982 World Cup, it was such a shock it sent the radio commentator Børge Lillelien into barely coherent delirium: ‘Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, vi har slått dem alle sammen, vi har slått dem alle sammen [we have beaten them all, we have beaten them all]. Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher […] your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating!’ When Norway beat England 2–0 in Oslo in 1993, a game that also produced a notorious catchphrase – Taylor’s ‘do I not like that’ – it was entirely predictable.

football is not about eleven individuals but about the dynamic system made up by those individuals.

‘Football has a script,’ he said. ‘The actors, if they’re great actors, can interpret the script and their lines according to their creativity, but they still have to follow the script.’

In music, repenitización is used for the practice of playing a piece without having practised it first: it’s not extemporisation as such in that it involves sight-reading, and yet in football it clearly has some sense of improvisation. It carries a sense of urgency, too. In a sense it’s the key to the whole Bielsa philosophy: it demands players repeatedly do things for the first time, a paradox that perhaps suggests the glorious futility of what he is trying to achieve. ‘The possible is already done,’ Bielsa said during his time at Newell’s. ‘We are doing the impossible.’

‘In the pause,’ the columnist Ezequiel Fernández Moores wrote in La Nación, quoting a phrase common in the blues tradition of Argentina, ‘There is no music, but the pause helps to make the music.’

Clemente will ‘forever be associated with the phrase “patapún y p’arriba” — “bish-bosh, up it goes”, a kind of Spanish “’Ave it!”

Barça, to widespread surprise, appointed the Queens Park Rangers manager Terry Venables.

Samuel Weber, in his re-reading of Freud, asked, what better way for the ego, when facing its own dissolution, to assert mastery than to dissolve itself by following to the ultimate the philosophy from which it derived meaning?