Tactics: Box-to-box Midfielders?

The Question: is the box-to-box midfielder dead?

In the latest in our series analysing football tactics, we look at where the Robsons, Keanes and Matthaus's have gone in the modern game

Bryan Robson Photograph: Peter Robinson/EMPICS Sports Photo Agency

Doing some research into the 1990 World Cup recently, I was struck by a comment made by the England manager Bobby Robson after his captain, Bryan Robson, had picked up his customary World Cup injury, rupturing an Achilles during the 0-0 draw against the Netherlands. Bryan is, Bobby said, "as good a player as we've ever produced".

As good a player as we've ever produced. Even allowing for the magnifying lens of context, for the sense of despair Bobby Robson must have felt to lose his captain at such a crucial stage – and just when England had produced a performance, if not a result, to rebuff their most poisonous critics – that is an extraordinary statement. Not "he'll be a big loss", not "he's been a key player for us over the years", but "as good a player as we've ever produced".

The stats show the importance of Robson the player to Robson the manager. Bobby was in charge for 88 games. Bryan played in 62 of those, of which England lost only 10; of the 26 he missed, England lost seven. So that got me thinking: if Robson really is one of the best ever, where would he fit in the present England set-up?

And the answer is that he wouldn't, not comfortably, not if England continue to play a loose 4-2-3-1. It seems churlish to define such a great player by what he was not, but did he really have the technical ability to operate in one of the three attacking midfield slots? But equally, given his goal-scoring ability, would it not be a waste to play him as a holding player? And, anyway, until his pace had gone late in his career, did he really have the discipline to operate as one of the holding players?

He would probably have to play in the awkward compromise position Frank Lampard occupied against Slovakia and Ukraine, as the freer of the two holders, alongside a Gareth Barry figure. Which would just about work, I think, and yet it seems terrible to circumscribe the role of a player whose greatest assets were his stamina, his courage and his completeness. And anyway, that role seems best occupied not by a shuttler chafing constantly at the reins, but by an intelligent passer such as Xabi Alonso or Michael Carrick.

And then it occurred to me that complete midfielders, those great drivers of teams who could both score goals and make tackles, are generally a declining breed. After Robson there came Löthar Matthaus, David Platt, then Roy Keane and thereafter, well, nobody. The question is why.

Reason one: The decline of the traditional 4-4-2 formation and the rise of the holding midfielder

Perhaps the point is not that complete midfielders don't exist so much as that they are no longer able to play as complete midfielders. Michael Ballack, Cesc Fàbregas and Michael Essien, for instance, have all played this season both as holding midfielders and as attacking midfielders, but rarely, if at all, just as midfielders.

This, surely, is the key issue in the debate over whether Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, both of whom would seem to have the full range of attributes that in a previous age would have made them Robson-style box-to-box players, can play together in the same midfield.

In a sense, the problem is less the answer than the question. For what the question omits is the assumption that we're taking about them playing together in the centre of a 4-4-2 (for how, until Fabio Capello opened our eyes, could our players possibly have veered from the one true path of 4-4-2?).

This, arguably, was the main reason for the farrago of the golden generation: England were blessed with a remarkably talented generation of players; the problem was that Michael Owen and David Beckham needed a 4-4-2, while Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard needed an additional holding player. Neither Sven-Göran Eriksson nor Steve McClaren ever had the clarity of thought to opt for one system over the other and cull players accordingly. It was almost as though football itself were taunting England for its lack of tactical sophistication and its concomitant obeisance to the cult of the celebrity player.

Perhaps in a club situation, working together every day, Lampard and Gerrard could have come to an understanding, but at international level they palpably couldn't. The World Cup qualifier away to Austria in September 2004 showcased the problem. Both Lampard and Gerrard scored, and with 20 minutes to go England seemed comfortable, only for Roland Kollmann to knock in a free-kick conceded by Lampard, and Andreas Ivanschitz to equalise with a drive that deflected off Gerrard and squirmed under David James.

Both goals, ultimately, resulted from the vast space that opened up between back four and midfield as Gerrard and Lampard advanced. That area has always been English football's great weakness. It was from that position that Matthias Sindelar almost exposed England when Austria lost 4-3 at Stamford Bridge in 1932, from that position that Vsevolod Bobrov so tormented Chelsea in their 4-4 draw against Dinamo Moscow in 1945, and, most notoriously, from that position that Nandor Hidegkuti crafted Hungary's 6-3 demolition of England in 1953. Even in the 1990s, Eric Cantona and Gianfranco Zola were able to exploit the stratified nature of the average English set-up, prospering in the space between the lines.

As lone forwards became increasingly common, so it became increasingly necessary for sides to deploy a midfield holder to combat the withdrawn forward, precipitating the gradual shift – at the highest level at least - to 4-2-3-1. Once that formation has been adopted, midfielders are necessarily categorised as either defensive or attacking, and completeness, although it allows a player to play in either role, becomes within the immediate context of the game far less of an asset.

Reason two: modern football is about specialists

The game nowadays increasingly demands universality. It is no longer enough simply to be a winger or a playmaker or a poacher. Full-backs have to be able to attack. Which makes the decline of the most universal player on the pitch paradoxical.

It also explains the distaste of Arrigo Sacchi – along with Valeriy Lobanovskyi one of the two high priests of universality – for 4-2-3-1. "Today's football is about managing the characteristics of individuals," he said. "And that's why you see the proliferation of specialists. The individual has trumped the collective. But it's a sign of weakness. It's reactive, not pro-active."

Sacchi saw that most clearly during his time as sporting director of Real Madrid in 2004. "There was no project; it was about exploiting qualities," he said. "So, for example, we knew that Zidane, Raúl and Figo didn't track back, so we had to put a guy in front of the back four who would defend. But that's reactionary football. It doesn't multiply the players' qualities exponentially. Which actually is the point of tactics: to achieve this multiplier effect on the players' abilities. In my football, the regista – the playmaker – is whoever had the ball. But if you have [Claude] Makélélé, he can't do that. He doesn't have the ideas to do it, though of course, he's great at winning the ball. It's all about specialists."

Sacchi remains as committed to 4-4-2 now as he was when his AC Milan side won successive European Cups in 1989 and 1990. Neither of his central midfield pairing of Carlo Ancelotti and Frank Rijkaard were as prolific as Robson or Matthaus, but both were certainly capable of both destroying and creating. Given players with the physical and technical attributes of Lampard and Gerrard, he would, presumably, play both in a 4-4-2 – if, that is, they had the mental attributes he demanded. He is not sure that Gerrard, in particular, does.

"When I was director of football at Real Madrid I had to evaluate the players coming through the youth ranks," he said in response to a question about Gerrard. "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.

"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, situations like that, I just have to say, he's a great footballer, but perhaps not a great player."

Rafa Benítez, who is probably the most Sacchian manager English football has known, seems to have harboured similar doubts. Twice, he was willing to sell his captain (to Chelsea, who would presumably have used Lampard and Gerrard to flank Makelele in a 4-3-3), and his regular deployment of Gerrard on the right or the left of a midfield four was surely evidence of his uneasiness at giving him responsibility in the centre.

It was, of course, the use of Didi Hamann as a holding player that released Gerrard in the 2005 Champions League final, while Benítez's conversion to 4-2-3-1 more recently has given Gerrard licence, because he has two holders behind him. Gerrard started as a complete midfielder, might have become a holding midfielder who get forward, and has become instead an attacking midfielder who can put in the odd tackle.

Lampard's role at Chelsea is slightly deeper-lying, but he is, none the less, more comfortable with a holding player behind him. It will be fascinating to see whether he has the acuity to adapt to the slightly more defensive brief Capello seems to envisage for him with England.

The question then is the extent to which the need to use Gerrard and Lampard in conjunction with more defensive players is a facet of them lacking "knowing-how-to-play-football", and how much it is inherent in the way the tactical evolution of the game has affected the position they grew up playing.

To an extent, the comparison of England's 2004 performance against Austria and a Sacchi side is absurd, for no Sacchi side would ever allow the sort of gap between defensive and midfield lines to open up as emerged in Vienna (something that may, in part, have been caused by the defence's desire to prevent David James, who was having one of his more erratic days, from being tempted into leaving his box).

Reason three: the liberalisation in the offside law

That said, Sacchi's ideal was for attack and defence to be separated by no more than 25m, providing a compact structure that facilitated his hard-pressing game, and it may be that such a high defensive line is no longer practicable given the liberalisation of the offside law.

It is impossible to prove, but it seems reasonable to suggest that Sacchi's approach would be undermined today as much by the modern interpretation of offside as by the egos of millionaire modern players. The change in the offside law has stretched the game, so we now tend to see it in four bands, and it is that that has effectively decommissioned the complete midfielder.

Historically, that is entirely consistent. The notion of a complete midfielder itself is far from constant across football's history. It first emerged as the centre-half in the 2-3-5, which came to prominence in the 1880s was a multi-skilled all-rounder, defender and attacker, leader and instigator, goal-scorer and defender, but by the early thirties he had all but disappeared as W-M took hold (the last of the old-style centre-halves was probably Ernst Ocwirk, who continued to mastermind the Austria midfield until the early 1950s, but he was very much an anachronism by then).

The old-style centre-half was replaced by the stopper and, as the inside-forwards dropped off to become advanced midfielders, the resulting 3-2-2-3 neatly split midfielders into those whose responsibilities were defensive and those whose were attacking.

Only in the mid-sixties as the four bands of the W-M were replaced by the three bands of 4-2-4, and then old-style 4-3-3 and 4-4-2 – a development that was soon followed by pressing and the squeezing of the game – did the complete midfielder re-emerge.

Now, as three bands once again become four, midfielders are specialising once again.