Sweet Left Foot. Sweet Left Foot: Bunch of Fives: Iconic Football Strips. The Question: Could the sweeper be on his way back? | Jonathan W. The history of tactics is the history of the manipulation of space. Space is created – or emerges – for one player, and he begins to have a disproportionate influence on the game. Then a way is found to block him, and in turn space will appear somewhere else on the pitch. As the centre-half became a centre-back in the 20s, so the inside-forwards had to drop deep to cover the space he left in midfield. The withdrawn centre-forward terrorised sides in the 50s, and so by the 60s the holding midfielder had been developed to counter him. More recently, the attacking full-back has become increasingly important. Ashley Cole's performance for Chelsea on Sunday showed exactly the damage such a player can cause if he can dominate an essentially attacking wide midfielder – Aaron Lennon in this case – and then exploit his lack of defensive ability.
The modern game's key contest In a number of games recently the key contest has been that between full-back and wide attacker. Space for the centre-backs. The Question: How did a nutmeg change football tactics in the no. A little over a hundred days into the new millennium Manchester United suffered a defeat so striking that it defined the tactical direction of English football for the decade to come.
It is rare that you can pinpoint the precise moment at which the world changed, but for Sir Alex Ferguson it did on 19 April 2000 with a 3-2 defeat at home to Real Madrid in the Champions League quarter-final. This was his equivalent of Liverpool's defeat to Red Star Belgrade in 1973, the game that persuaded him to tear up the old blueprints and start again. Then Bill Shankly, despite having won the Uefa Cup the season before, decided that if Liverpool were to dominate Europe, they had to alter their approach.
"We realised it was no use winning the ball if you finished up on your backside," said Bob Paisley. "The top Europeans showed us how to break out of defence effectively. For Ferguson, too, the decision to change was a tremendous risk. The misperception of inadequacy Why United lost The fatal flaw. The Question: How will football tactics develop over the next de. It is hugely difficult to imagine the future as a radically different place, which is probably why so many visions of the future in the past century have stuck to three basic templates: silver suits and hover-boots; totalitarian nightmare; apocalyptic wasteland.
Still, given the way football has evolved in the 146 years since it was codified, it is probably safe to assume that the age of revolutions is over, and that developments in tactics over the coming decade will be incremental rather than radical. The great revolutions – passing, the move from 2-3-5 to W-M; catenaccio; the development of the back four; total football – all sprang up either in response to rule changes, or from a culture with little previous experience of football, and thus a less rigid conception of how it should be played. In the modern world of blanket television coverage, it is almost impossible for football to grow up in the sort of isolation that could allow tactical quirks to develop. The aeroplane model. The Question: Why are so many wingers playing on the 'wrong' win. Football used to be an easy game. The big lads played at centre-half and centre-forward, the hard lads played at full-back, the bright lads played at inside forward, the hard lads who were a bit bright and the bright lads who were a bit hard played at wing-half, and the little, quick lads played on the wing.
Left-footers played on the left and right-footers played on the right. And the one with no mates went in goal. Eight decades on, and it's all rather more complicated, and not just because not all goalkeepers these days are entirely socially dysfunctional. Wingers disappeared for a while, and became a luxury item, almost a museum piece, but now they're back, all over the place, and the tendency is for them to play on the opposite flank. There have always been a handful who did that.
But now these inside-out wingers are everywhere. It's the same in England. The death of the traditional winger The reinvention of the winger There are other advantages to a wide player coming inside. The Question: Why is the modern offside law a work of genius? | Nothing in football is so traduced as the offside law. Most seem to regard it as a piece of killjoy legislation, designed almost to prevent football producing too many goals and being too much fun, while for the punditocracy it has become the universal scapegoat, the thing that "nobody understands".
Just because Garth Crooks doesn't get something, though, doesn't make it a bad thing. The modern offside law may be the best thing that's ever happened to football, and it is almost certainly the reason Barcelona have been so successful with a fleet of players whose obvious asset is their technique rather than their physique. A brief history of offside In 1866, the law was liberalised so that a player was considered to be onside if there were three defensive players between him and the goal (or was behind the ball, which has remained a constant); this was the variant to which Queen's Park committed when they joined the FA four years later.
The 1925 change Italia 90 The impact of the 2005 change. The Question: How important is possession? | Jonathan Wilson | S. One of the beauties of football is its capacity for reinvention, without great rewriting of the rules. Unlike certain other sports – for instance Aussie Rules, which I pick on for no reason other than that the issue was brought to mind by this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald – football seems to have (historically justified) faith that coaches and players will be able to mediate their own way away from predictability or, worse, unwatchability. Yes, there has been tinkering with the offside rule, and the backpass and the tackle from behind have been outlawed, but essentially a player from a century ago could be parachuted into a game today and would need no more than a two-minute tutorial to get him up to speed on the modern rules. He'd be gasping for the Woodbines after 10 minutes, admittedly, but he would at least know what was going on.
When a rigid W-M seemed dominant, fluid 4-2-4 rose up to overcome it. As catenaccio threatened to strangle the game, along came Total Football. The Question: How do Fulham do it? | Jonathan Wilson | Sport | g. There is something endearingly old-fashioned about Fulham, about their ground, about their manager, even about the way they set about winning European ties. Which is not to decry their achievements; rather it is to acknowledge that wherever the tides of tactical evolution take football, certain virtues remain constant. Watching Fulham beat Shakhtar Donetsk at Craven Cottage earlier this season, you could have been watching almost any game between an English side and an eastern European team from the 70s or 80s, as pluck and organisation eventually overcame technically superior opponents. It was a similar story in their 0-0 draw with Hamburg last week, methodical patient obduracy eventually breaking the will of opponents who, if football were merely a test of skill, would surely have won quite comfortably.
Yes, Mark Schwarzer made a couple of useful late saves, but Fulham were never subjected to the sort of onslaught to which, for instance, they subjected Juventus. Hodgson's method. The Question: Is Harry Redknapp winging it tactically? | Jonathan Wilson | Sport. Mention Harry Redknapp and tactics in the same breath and the general reaction tends to be a snigger. Either that or those who refuse to believe football is a game that should ever be given more than cursory thought get all excited and claim that Redknapp's successes prove that talk of tactics is all nonsense and that you should just pick your best 11 players and tell them to get on with it.
Neither response makes much sense. Tactics, for something so often written off as boring and nerdish, seem to provoke an oddly emotive response, as any glance through the comments under previous Question pieces will show. Talking about them, apparently, is taking the fun out of the game, over-intellectualising it, robbing it of its soul, football's equivalent of somebody stopping the tape near the end of Casablanca or Cinema Paradiso and explaining that it's all just pheromones, actually. He is not one of the game's theoreticians, that's true. The Clough paradigm Redknapp in practice. The forgotten story of ... Danish Dynamite, the Denmark side of. NB: This is a feature-length piece, so you might want to print it off and read it on the way home. Not if you're driving, obviously. guardian.co.uk is not legally responsible for any bumpers damaged in the reading of this article Winning is for losers.
Many of life's more interesting stories focus on those who didn't quite make it; who didn't get the girl or the job or the epiphany or even the Jules Rimet trophy. Johan Cruyff said his Holland side of the 70s were immortalised by their failure to win the World Cup and, when World Soccer invited a group of experts to select the greatest teams of all time a couple of years ago, three of the top five sides won nothing: Hungary 1953, Holland 1974 and Brazil 1982. Lying 16th on the list – above any side from Argentina, Spain, Germany, Liverpool, Manchester United or Internazionale – was the Danish team of the mid-80s.
As the Danish supporters' song went: they were red, they were white, they were Danish Dynamite. There are so many what ifs. World Cup 2010: Forget total football, Holland just need total s. Holland are famous for total football but the current national coach, Bert van Marwijk, is a pragmatist. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP Walk up to a Dutch supporter and say these words: "Remember 1974? " Do so and you'll bring to mind the vivid series of events that defined how an entire generation views football. It was the 1974 World Cup in Germany that gave the Dutch a glimpse of football at its breathtaking best and the world, seeing such a spectacle for the first time, christened the flurry of orange: total football. It was a combination of formation, tactics and team mentality that caught the world off guard.
Total football did not strike the legendary manager Rinus Michels like a bolt from the blue but was, in fact, a style of play that emerged originally through two rival teams: Ajax Amsterdam and Feyenoord Rotterdam. The recipe settled upon for what became known as total football consisted of (1) Two wingers running alongside the central forward providing maximum width.
Anatomizing England. Onathan Wilson says that his fine new book The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches has no thesis, but I believe a thesis is lodged within, though perhaps it can’t be expressed in a single sentence. The book’s implicit argument goes something like this: From the beginnings of soccer the English have believed that the game should be played one way: energetically, straightforwardly, and very physically. Courage and work rate have been prized above all other virtues, and to emphasize skill and tactics has been thought unmanly and over-intellectual. When the English lose to more skilled and tactically sophisticated sides—the most famous of these losses being the one to Hungary in 1953, at Wembley—there tends to be a public feeling of having been sort-of cheated, coupled with a determination on the team’s part to work just that much harder, play that much more physically, next time. There’s another aspect of the book that fascinates, a theme that Wilson mentions in his Prologue.