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Their coach, Gustav Wieser, was an Austrian, and under him they practiced a version of the whirl that became known as der Kreisel—the “spinning top.” According to the defender Hans Bornemann, it was not the man with the ball but those out of possession running into space who determined the direction of their attacks. “It was only when there was absolutely nobody left you could pass the ball to that we finally put it into the net,”
“A good player runs to the ball,” Rowe said. “A bad player runs after it.”
“We appreciated Grandad first for his human qualities and only second as a coach,” said Andriy Biba, Dynamo’s captain between 1964 and 1967. “And for his part, he looked at us first of all as people with all our positives and negatives, and only after that as footballers. He managed his relations with the players in such a manner, and was so sincere with us that it was impossible to have any bad feelings against him. He trusted us and we responded in the same way.”
He would pin motivational notices to the locker-room walls: “Fighting or playing? Fighting and playing,” read one; another insisted: “He who plays for himself plays for the opposition. He who plays for the team, plays for himself.”
Rinus Michels and Valeriy Lobanovskyi each came to the same realization about how soccer should be played. The game, as they saw it, was about space and how you controlled it: make the field big when you have the ball and it is easy to retain it; make it small when you do not and it becomes far more difficult for the opposition to keep it.
If you get a ball in the Liverpool team you want options, you want choices… you want at least two people to pass to, maybe three, maybe more.… Get the ball, give an early pass, then it goes from me to someone else and it switches around again. You might not be getting very far, but the pattern of the opposition is changing. Finally, somebody will sneak in.
“A team,” he insisted, “blossoms only when it has the ball. Flowers need the rain—it’s a vital ingredient. Common sense tells you that the main ingredient in football is the ball itself.”
The essence of Guardiola’s philosophy was simple. “In the world of football there is only one secret: I’ve got the ball or I haven’t,” he said. “Barcelona have opted for having the ball although it is legitimate for others not to want it. And when we haven’t got the ball we have to get it back because we need it.”
When it is not aimed directly at the opposition goal, passing is designed to allow the team to generate the right structure, whether to mount an attack or to be prepared to counterpress. Guardiola has said it takes fifteen passes for that structure to be created.
