Tactics: Rule of Three

Rule of Three

November 12, 2010

By Joshua Askew

Ronaldinho – Ludovic Giuly – Samuel Eto’o (Barcelona)

At the end of the 2003-04 season, it was a time of reflection for Barcelona. In Frank Rijkaard’s first season as manager of the Catalan giants he had improved on their previous 6th-placed finish, coming second, five points behind Rafael Benitez’s Valencia.

Simply bettering Louis van Gaal and caretaker coach Raddy Antic’s work wasn’t good enough for Barcelona, further improvement was necessary. Partnering Ronaldinho in Barcelona’s front three had been Luis Garcia and Javier Saviola; the Brazilian’s class was obvious but, while good players, the others weren’t of the needed quality. Garcia followed reigning La Liga champion Benitez to Liverpool and Saviola left for Champions League finalists Monaco. In return for Saviola, Monaco sent Ludovic Giuly to Barcelona for €7 million while Mallorca’s all-time leading domestic goalscorer Samuel Eto’o was brought in for €24 million.

With their new strikeforce Barcelona won the 2004-05 La Liga title and a league and Champions League double the next year, finishing 12 points clear of second-placed Real Madrid. Their greatness was backed up by individual accolades too: Ronaldinho named Ballon D’Or winner in 2005 and Samuel Eto’o Pichichi award winner in 2006.

Ronaldinho was the playmaker, cutting in from the left onto his favoured right foot to weave his magic; Samuel Eto’o was the focal point of the attack, his intensity giving Barca an added dimension to their pressing as well as an accomplished goalscorer; Ludovic Giuly was the least talented of the three, but was key to freeing the others’ talents. Although comfortable playing centrally, Giuly was best when played wide – Ronaldinho and Eto’o needed space to work in so Giuly stretched the defence, opening up gaps for the others to work in.

Then it began to unravel. Giuly was first to go, ousted by youth graduate Lionel Messi, and was followed a year later by an out-of-form Brazilian whose party lifestyle had caught up with him and not impressed his new manager Pep Guardiola. Samuel Eto’o was forced out a year later despite his excellent performances in Guardiola’s debut season and is the only one to sustain his high level of play, winning the treble in his first season at Internazionale and currently leading their scoring charts with 17 goals in 15 appearances.

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Gunnar Gren – Gunnar Nordahl – Nils Liedholm (Milan/Sweden)

A trio so good their names were forced together by the Italian media. Gre-No-Li burst onto the footballing conscious at the 1948 London Olympics, where they won gold for Sweden with twelve goals in four games. AC Milan had finally found the players they needed to win their first league title since 1907.

Nordahl was the first to arrive, taken from IFK Norrköping in 1949. A tall powerful striker, Nordahl scored two goals on his debut against Pro Patria and carried on in this vein, scoring 225 goals in 291 games – second in Italian football’s all-time records, behind only Silvio Piola, who scored his 274 goals in well over 500 games. However, arguably his most valuable contribution was the meeting he had with Milan’s owners to persuade them to purchase Gunnar Gren and Nils Liedholm from IFK Göteborg. Reunited again, Milan won the scudetto just a year after their arrival.

Gren spent a year managing Milan before heading to Fiorentina, and goalscorer extraordinaire Nordahl followed him in 1956, having won another Serie A title in 1955 and been overall top scorer in five of his six seasons, moving to Roma. Meanwhile, Liedholm was the only one to stick around, continuing to play for Milan until his retirement in 1961 and spending several spells over the next few decades.

Francesco Totti – Gabriel Batistuta – Marco Delvecchio (Roma)

As Fabio Capello’s first season coaching Roma didn’t go exactly to plan – finishing sixth while city rivals Lazio won Serie A – a shake-up was needed. The previous season, strike partners Marco Delvecchio and Vincenzo Montella had combined for 30 league goals, but there was still room for improvement: Montella was the clever poacher and Delvecchio was the hard-working target man – Capello wanted a striker that mixed these attributes.

Roma’s Director of Football Franco Baldini looked to have found a suitable man: Fiorentina’s Gabriel Batistuta. The problem facing them now was getting him. “Batigol” was fiercely loyal to the Florentine club and had made it clear he didn’t want a move away, however, with Fiorentina’s precarious financial situation, there was a chance that he could be convinced to leave if it was clear we would be helping the club by leaving. The issue soon became convincing owner Franco Sensi to spend a large enough sum on a 31 year-old to convince Fiorentina to let him go.

Teaming up with Mario Sconcerti, editor of the flagging Corriere dello Sport, they hatched a plan to pressure Sensi into opening his chequebook. Baldini revealed their plans for Batistuta and Sconcerti ran the story; the situation was mutually beneficial – Roma would get Batistuta, Corriere would get more readers wanting to find out about the story. Initially, Sensi became more popular, however with each day that went without Batistuta showing up in the capital, the pressure began to mount. Sensi gave in and signed the Argentinian for £23.5 million.

With his shiny new striker, things were looking rosy for Capello, but a fresh problem would soon arise. Everyone had expected fan favourite Montella to start alongside Batistuta, but it soon became clear that Capello planned to use Delvecchio in place of Montella. Both strikers were penalty box players and playing two of this kind of player together seems a bit stupid. Aside from the obvious defensive issues, it would also cause attacking problems too; with both Montella and Batistuta in front of him, talisman Francesco Totti – probably the most talented Italian player of his generation – had less space to work in with it being occupied by two players doing the same thing. If you have a player that all but guarentees a goal if you create a chance for him, is it worthwhile having another player that offers the same thing when you could have another player to help create these chances and defend?

With Delvecchio in the team, Vincent Candela and Cafu were under less pressure to provide width and defend, Totti had more space to work in and the team had a tall forntman to use as an outlet. Montella was understandably frustrated at all the time he spent on the bench despite his incredible form as a super-sub, claiming he was “bitter and angry”. Eventually, Montella’s feats became too much for him to be left on the bench and he was named ahead of Delvecchio, however it should be remembered that it was the unfashionable forward that made the system work.

Tactics: Harry Redknapp's Spurs

The Question: Is Harry Redknapp winging it tactically?

Harry Redknapp often tries to mask his tactical approach but he is following in the footsteps of Brian Clough as he does so

Harry Redknapp, filmed secretly giving Tottenham Hotspur players tactical instruction. Photograph: Matthew Impey/PA Wire/Press Association Images

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.

Presumably nobody, though, actually thinks a team of 10 centre-forwards and a goalkeeper would win a game; once you've accepted there is a need to balance defence and attack, a tactical element has been introduced. Equally, it would be absurd to claim tactics are the only thing that matter, but they provide the basic structure of each game and, alongside ability, motivation, fitness (physical and mental) and luck, are among the key components that determine the result of a game. If Redknapp really is a tactical klutz, he must have had an awful lot of luck.

He is not one of the game's theoreticians, that's true. He is not a Viktor Maslov, a Rinus Michels or an Arrigo Sacchi – but so what? He does what he does. He is probably a better motivator than he is a tactician, just as Rafael Benítez is a better tactician than he is a motivator. But that doesn't mean Redknapp is clueless, even if it at times it suits him to set himself up as the bluff English alternative to all the sophisticated foreign mumbo jumbo, a line that always plays well with the media he courts so superbly.

That is not to suggest, though, that Redknapp is secretly issuing minutely detailed tactical instructions behind the scenes. "There are no long and boring speeches about tactics, like I was used to at Real Madrid," Rafael van der Vaart said in a recent interview. "There is a clipboard in our dressing room, but Harry doesn't write anything on it. It's not that we do nothing – but it's close to that."

In his suspicion of theory, Redknapp comes from a long English tradition that extends far beyond football. "Our habits or the nature of our temperament do not in the least draw us towards general ideas," as John Stuart Mill put it. In football, the greatest manager in that strand of English anti-intellectualism was Brian Clough.

The Clough paradigm

Clough was always scathing of those guilty of what he saw as "over-complicating" the game, and regularly used the term "tactics" dismissively, but with him it seems to have had specifically negative connotations; to have referred to stopping the opposition rather than how his own side played. "Tactics," he insisted in Walking on Water, "played very little part in my method of management. I concentrated 90% on how my team played, in preference to wondering about how the opposition would set out their stall."

He may have thought tactics was a dirty word, something fit for only Italians or Don Revie, but the idea he just sent 11 players out on the field and hoped for the best is nonsensical. Although he usually affected indifference to the opposition, there were times when he took specific action to counter them. Alan Durban, for instance, was once given specific instructions to cut out the supply from Mike Bailey to the left-winger David Wagstaffe in a match between Derby and Wolves. In Nottingham Forest's 1980 European Cup final against Hamburg, meanwhile, with Trevor Francis injured, Clough opted to deploy Lee Mills as a fifth midfielder, helping to stifle Kevin Keegan.

Those are micro examples, but Forest's basic style after winning promotion in 1977 was decided during a pre-season friendly against Shepshed Charterhouse, in which Martin O'Neill's performance in a tucked-in position on the right, with John Robertson wide on the left, persuaded Clough that a lop-sided hybrid of 4-3-3 and 4-4-2 was the future. Terry Curran, a right-winger who had been a regular until injury in the promotion season, never played another game for the club. What was that decision rooted in, if not the tactical realisation that fielding two out-and-out wide men was unworkable in the First Division and that, in O'Neill, Forest had a player who could offer balance?

Peter Taylor always insisted that he and Clough discussed tactics regularly, and had done since their days as players together at Middlesbrough. One of their great gifts was their ability to boil that down into simple instructions. They didn't believe in drawing diagrams on blackboards, and they certainly didn't, as Revie did, hand out dossiers on the opposition. "Telling them how to play took no time," Taylor said in his autobiography.

He explained what those instructions would be at Derby. "To [John] O'Hare it was: 'Hold the ball no matter how hard they whack you.' To [Kevin] Hector: 'Watch O'Hare. You've got to be ready when he slips that ball to you.' And to [Alan] Hinton we didn't say any more than: 'Stay wide.'" It sounds simple, and each individual component was, but multiply those components together and the total was devastatingly effective.

During games, it was simply a question of reinforcing those messages. "I'd shout reminders," Clough said, "adjustments when they occasionally got themselves out of position, which is easy to do in the heat of the moment. I'd emphasise the need to keep the ball and pass it forward whenever possible." It sounds simple – it was simple – but it was also a clear tactical manifesto.

Taylor's conception of the game, he explained in an interview in this newspaper in 1972, was – like so many of his generation – inspired by Hungary's 6-3 win over England at Wembley in 1953. Seeing the Brazilian side Santos play a friendly against Sheffield Wednesday in 1962 convinced him of the importance of attacking full-backs, and led Derby 10 years later to break the British transfer record to sign the Leicester City full-back David Nish because he was comfortable advancing with the ball. Viv Anderson continued the theme at Forest.

"The ability to command space is vital in a good defensive system," he said. "By that I mean that a player who is on his own when the opposition has the ball must be poised and capable of assessing whether he should commit himself or funnel back. [Igor] Netto of Russia was the first player I noticed with this. Dave Mackay has it, so have Bobby Moore and Terry Hennessey ... Then there is the ability to play the ball accurately. At Derby everybody has it. It is essential because the game has got to flow. We believe in playing football right from the back. We do not want our forwards to have a service of high and hard balls out of defence which are impossible to control."

None of that requires complex diagrams or lengthy explanations to players, but it is tactics nonetheless. Teddy Sheringham tells of how he was dropped by Clough at Forest and watched the next match with him from the bench. Listening to Clough during the game, he said, he realised the importance of a centre-forward holding the ball up to relieve the pressure on his defence, rather than attempting flicks that might break through the opposition, but might equally surrender possession. Again, just because Clough wasn't scribbling away on a whiteboard doesn't mean he wasn't imparting tactical instructions.

Redknapp in practice

Redknapp is so much of the lineage of Clough that he even deploys the same percentages. "You can argue about formations, tactics and systems forever, but to me football is fundamentally about the players," he began a column in the Sun. "Whether it is 4-4-2, 4-2-3-1, 4-3-3, the numbers game is not the beautiful game in my opinion. It's 10% about the formation and 90% about the players. If you have the best ones and they do their jobs, then they can pretty much play any way you want them to."

Which, leaving aside the question of how, when things are so interconnected, you can separate them to make up such a statistic – or even the irony of using a number to denounce the use of numbers – is fair enough. Of course the best players usually win. Besides, the formation is only part of a team's tactical set-up, something Redknapp acknowledges by adding the caveat "if they do their jobs". Those jobs, whether it is acknowledged or not, are tactically determined. Even his famed instruction to Roman Pavlyuchenko to "fucking run about a bit" let the striker know he wanted him to play as a mobile front man, looking to drag defenders out of position, and wasn't particularly different in essence to the instructions Clough and Taylor handed out at Derby.

The same applies to the comment John Giles makes in The Football Man that was helpfully quoted in the comments section last week. "The fact remains that the ball is the most important thing on the pitch," he said, "that good players will take up correct positions in relation to it, while bad players will continue to take up poor positions, regardless of tactics or formations." But to determine whether a position is good or bad itself requires tactical understanding.

And whatever Redknapp says, he has proved himself tactically astute at times this season. In the away leg of the Champions League play-off, Spurs were unsettled by Young Boys' high pressing, and could have been annihilated before half-time. Redknapp withdrew Benoît Assou-Ekotto to add an extra holding midfielder in Tom Huddlestone, dropping Gareth Bale back to left-back, which steadied the ship, then brought on Niko Kranjcar for Modric, giving Spurs a player who naturally cuts in from the left, adding midfield solidity and creating a pathway for Bale's surges. 3-0 was transformed into 3-2, a deficit Spurs rapidly wiped out in the second leg.

Against Aston Villa, Spurs, having begun with a 4-4-2 with Van der Vaart on the right and Peter Crouch and Pavlyuchenko as twin strikers, trailed 1-0 at half-time. Off came the Russian, on went Aaron Lennon, while Van der Vaart, who had been drifting infield anyway, took up a central role just behind Crouch. With a direct opponent, Stephen Warnock was pinned back, and Villa lost much of their thrust down the left. Van der Vaart, involved in more dangerous areas and revelling in playing off Crouch, scored twice.

Then at Arsenal a week ago last Saturday, Redknapp made the opposite change, bringing on Jermain Defoe for Lennon and pushing Van der Vaart out to the right from a central role. This time, of course, Redknapp was happy to talk tactics. "I changed it at half-time, opened it up even more really – stuck Rafa out on the right, and brought Jermain on to give us two targets upfront," he said. "In the first half I played with two wingers, and we were stretched … I've got a front man up there, with Rafa in behind, when we lost possession they outnumbered us in midfield and played through us and played around us, and we had to narrow it up in the second half."

The ability to turn games round has been a feature of Tottenham's season. That speaks volumes for their self-belief and powers of resilience, but Redknapp must also take credit for his tactical changes. Of course the corollary to that is to ask why they so often fall behind; and perhaps it's that Redknapp is better at intuitively understanding a game and feeling what needs changing than he is at envisioning a match beforehand.

How far the open, attacking approach can carry Spurs in Europe remains to be seen; Manchester United were once similarly expressive, even won a treble by being so, before one too many goals conceded against the run of play finally convinced Sir Alex Ferguson into caution. But whatever happens to Spurs in the Champions League the idea that Redknapp exists in a world remote from tactics is just wrong.

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Is Harry Redknapp a master tactician or just lucky?

December 1, 2010

By Guest Writer

By Thomas Levin

Harry Redknapp is the first to admit that he is doesn’t do football tactics; calling him an intelligent tactical master will probably offend him as much as calling him a ‘Wheeler Dealer’. His view is that you should pick the best eleven players and tell them to go on the pitch and run around, an approach Rafael van der Vaart proclaims has been the secret to his good form:

“There are no long and boring speeches about tactics, like I was used to at Real Madrid. There is a clipboard in our dressing room but Harry doesn’t write anything on it.”

Redknapp doesn’t share the wisdom of his decision with his players, but does that really mean that Harry Redknapp has built a solid career in top flight football without ever really giving much attention to tactics?

Harry seems quick to distance himself from any intelligent decision making, making websites such as this one or Zonal Marking to be nothing more than futile exercises over-complicating a game with 22 men and one ball.

But Redknapp is not as stupid as he wants to make himself out to be. Of course he is tactically aware; the capture of van der Vaart demonstrates this perfectly. His frivolous spending of course could explain the Dutch playmaker’s introduction to the Premier League, but it has made them a stronger force as they look to compete in Europe on a regular basis and has transformed them into a side tipped to compete for the title.

The domination of the midfield being so important in modern football, has forced the most English of English managers to change his formation from a 4-4-2 to a 4-5-1, especially when up against the elite of Europe.

Tactics can often be explained by finding patterns of play. If left to the players themselves even the best of men will be lost without instruction or organisation. The changes at the Emirates in the London derby, putting van der Vaart on the wing, utilising his natural tendency to come inside narrowed the pitch and made it much more difficult for Arsenal to play their passing game. Spurs threw more forward to attack Arsenal and their inability to see out a lead and their dodgy defence crumbled.

What about the long balls to target man Peter Crouch who knocks it onto the deep runs of van der Vaart? Would this not be classed as a tactical decision? Utilising the players he has and giving them roles that would give synergy to their strengths and attack the weaknesses of the opposition.

To me Harry Redknapp’s “tactics don’t win you games” comments are nothing more than fitting in with a culture that is thankfully slowly dying in football, that of a fear of the educated and the intelligent in football. Long has it been feared in the game where the managers intuition has ruled. The Premier League is quickly becoming a place of in-depth analysis, crunching of numbers and close consideration of everything that happens on and off the pitch. Even Sam Alladyce can pride himself on using the information in front of him to get more out of his players.

Football isn’t won solely on tactics, but it is one part of a huge strategy that is taken into consideration by all managers when their team takes the football pitch, and just turning up with a team sheet won’t cut it.

By keeping things simple and recruiting good players, allowing them to play their natural game (Harry has rarely tried changing the way a player plays his football) Redknapp is showing his man-management skills. Not letting them worry about the bigger tactical picture, but on letting them be free to do what they enjoy.

While Harry’s tactical astuteness is as good as any top Premier League boss, he picks a squad of players that can play the system well. He can identify ready made players who will adapt to a successful way of playing football. This may be one of the reasons why he has very rarely brought through young players up the ranks.

I am not Harry’s biggest fan but I think we need to give his tactics credit, even if he refuses to acknowledge them.

Tactics: Herrera’s Inter

Catenaccio Revisited: Herrera’s Inter

October 19, 2010

By Joshua Askew

You can’t help but feel sorry for Inter. For one of the biggest clubs in Italy, they aren’t all that great. What other club could make the likes of Dennis Bergkamp, Roberto Baggio and Andrea Pirlo look rubbish? And when they are great, they do it in such a way as to make them near-universally disliked. Rather than respect or admiration, Inter mostly incur either pity or loathing.

Inter’s dominance after Calciopoli was always going to be questioned without success European success. With their main challengers severely weakened, you could be forgiven for thinking that Inter were only champions by default – they needed success against proper opponents to prove their quality, and consistently failed to do so under Roberto Mancini, never making it past the quarter-finals.

Enter Jose Mourinho. The confrontational self-proclaimed “Special One” was exactly what Italian football needed for its post-Calciopoli self-loathing, and was also what Inter needed. As clichéd as it sounds, Mourinho is one of those people who seems born to win. His pragmatic focus on system and defensive organisation above entertaining football; his psychological manipulation of players; his constant posturing, whether genuine or not, always keeping the eye on him rather than his team, ensuring they are relieved of a lot of pressure.

The focus on him inevitably meant that when Inter became the first Italian club to win the treble, it was his victory rather than the players’; it was his system rather than the players within it that had won the trophies; it was his man-management rather than their professionalism that had allowed it to work. He was the epitome of the modern manager – the most important man at the club. While Inter under Mancini could easily be known as Ibra’s Inter, the treble-winning side was without doubt Mourinho’s Inter, and it all seemed eerily familiar.

He was born on a white island in the Rio de la Plata or on the Tigre, nobody is quite sure when… the world was his country: he chose to be a foreigner, different, everywhere … he spoke a strange mixture of idioms, French, Spanish, English and Arabic. – Fiora Gandolfi

Born in Argentina to a Spanish trade-unionist – when exactly nobody is quite sure, but it’s supposedly sometime between 1910 and 1916 - Helenio Herrera grew up in Morocco and became a footballer in France. A decent if unremarkable defender, he was called up for the French national team twice, however the only thing of real interest to come from his playing days was his claims of being the first player to play as a sweeper.

“It was when I was in France, it was about 1945 and we were playing like this [in a W-M formation]. With 15 minutes to go, we were winning 1-0. I was the left-back, so I tapped the left-half on the shoulder, and said “you take my place, and I’ll go here behind the defence.” And we won, and when I became manager, I remembered that.”

There are few reasons other than his devilish personality to doubt Herrera – after all it is possible that two people can think of the same thing at the same time without it being plagiarism, particularly when global communication was not at the standards of today – but it was Austrian coach Karl Rappan whose verrou system involves the first notable example of the sweeper, or verrouilleur as it was known by the Swiss press. While Herbert Chapman’s W-M system had dropped the centre-half of the 2-3-5 back into the centre of defence, Rappan pushed the wing-halves back with the full-backs moving to the centre. With the wing-halves dealing with the wingers, the centre-half handling the inside forwards (this outnumbering was a problem solved by the defence dropping deep and marking tightly, essentially ceding the midfield), this left two central defenders marking just one man, so one would drop back, stationing themselves just in front of the goalkeeper, to cover.

The first appearance of the catenaccio system from the conflicting stories in Italy point towards Salernitana’s Gipo Viani, nevertheless it was Nereo Rocco who was the most impressive early exponent. After transforming Triestina and Padova, Rocco took over at AC Milan and won Serie A in his first season and the European Cup in his second. If Viani had introduced the system, Rocco had proven that it could work with big clubs, however it was Herrera who showed it to the world.

Herrera noted the success that others were having with catenaccio and finely honed it – the base of the system was on the strict man marking and the reserve screening of the sweeper. Herrera added a little twist; for La Grande Inter, the full-backs would attack, adding greater flexibility to counter-attacking. We take attacking full-backs for granted now, but it was revolutionary at the time – think about the way Italy were unequipped to combat Carlos Alberto for his famous goal, then consider Inter had been doing that for years under Herrera. This allowed Inter to overload the opposition in defence and in attack.

The key to this was, of course, the players – the tall thin Giacinto Facchetti was spotted by Herrera playing as a forward for Trevigliese’s youth side and brought to Inter. Any doubts over the gangly youngster were immediately dispelled once he took to the field – other than his considerable defensive talents, his ability to sprint 100 metres in just 11 seconds ensured the rapid switching of defence to attack necessary for Herrera’s system to work was present. Herrera had such great faith in his full-back that he declared he would be the first of his players to make it into the national team, doing so at 20 at a time when Italy was wary of giving international opportunities to young players.

On the other side was Brazilian Jair da Costa, tasked alone with covering the entire right flank for Inter. There appears to a misconception that he was a full-back who attacked like Facchetti, most likely down to our tendency to note formations as symmetrical, when rather he was a tornanti – a winger who tracked back. Rather than any sort of tackling ability, Jair used his skill at reading the game to anticipate opposition moves and cut them out. Like Facchetti, Jair was blessed with the blistering pace and the stamina that allowed him to patrol that right flank, however he was an even more adept attacker than the Italian, embarrassing defenders easily to whip in a cross or get a shot away.

Alongside them were the uncompromising Tarcisio Burgnich and the elegant Aristide Guarneri, both playing as stoppers, with Armando Picchi sweeping up behind them. Starting his career as a full-back, Guarneri had a better technique than his more aggressive partner, but upon his signing for Inter he was switched to the centre, using his speed, positioning and tremendous aerial ability to stop whichever forwards he faced. Alongside him was the more tenacious Burgnich; while lacking some the more refined aspects of Guarneri’s game, he made up for it with his ragged determination and strength, immortalised in a quote from Pelé: “I told myself before the game, ‘he’s made of skin and bones just like everyone else’ — but I was wrong.” With Jair so often high up the pitch, Burgnich played wider than Guarneri, acting as a right-back.

With four defenders tasked with stopping the attacker, Herrera set up his own supposed creation behind them - again with a twist from what had come before. Although a far cry from the likes of Gaetano Scirea and Franco Baresi, iconic captain Armando Picchi was one of the first liberi to engage in attacking activities.

Until then, the sweeper position was inhabited by players like Ivano Blason – who would famously draw a line on the pitch and tell opposition forwards they weren’t allowed to cross it – good albeit clumsy defenders. If the defenders were the bolted door, they were an axe-wielding maniac guarding it. Picchi, on the other hand, would start attacks with a long accurate pass or stride forward towards the midfield, occasionally passing the half-way line but not popping up in the box as those that followed him did.

In front of the defence sat Gianfranco Bedin, the self-defined “role player.” Despite his good technique, he was pretty much the stereotypical ball-winner: he was reared to do the dirty work in midfield, tirelessly closing down opponents from the beginning of a match to the end. Home-grown and humble, like many defensive midfielders he wasn’t as celebrated as his more spectacular teammates, who would often credit him for his hard work.

This defensive base was balanced out with some of the greatest attacking talents the game has seen. Bedin’s midfield partner Luis Suárez followed Herrera from Barcelona for a world record fee and became the heart of Inter. Arguably the greatest passer the game has ever seen, his vision and long incisive balls were the key, along with Facchetti and Jair, to Inter’s counter-attacking. Other than possibly Jair collecting the ball deep and steaming into the huge space in front of him, the most frequent move Inter used once regaining possession was giving it to Suárez for him to ping towards Sandro Mazzola, the striker or the advancing Jair.

Plodding down the left was Mario Corso. Lazy (although not nearly as much as Herrera would have you believe) and inconsistent, he was never going to get along with Herrera but, despite his coach’s pleading, Corso was kept on – he was one of Inter owner Angelo Moratti’s favourites and he wouldn’t let him go. Even though Herrera was not fond of him, Corso played over 400 times for Inter and was capable of unlocking defences with “God’s left foot”. He also served a great tactical purpose by allowing Facchetti to play higher up the pitch; whether cutting in to shoot at goal or pulling off one of his trademark “falling leaf” crosses, he ensured that the opposition winger would have to track back, meaning that the man that Facchetti was tasked with marking played deeper so Faccheti would be higher up the pitch, closer to goal.

Sandro Mazzola, son of Torino star Valentino, played in a slightly withdrawn trequartista position. He was, however, the main goalscorer of La Grande Inter, mostly from close range or mazy dribbles, as the main striker – whether that be Aurelio Milani, Joaquín Peiró or Beniamino Di Giacomo – was generally the odd man out, because he simply wasn’t all that special. Their main job was to occupy the defenders enough to help Mazzola. The exception to this was Argentinian Antonio Valentin Angelillo, whose 33 goals in 33 appearences for Inter in 1958-59 remains a record, but Herrera disapproved of his lifestyle and he was sold on.

The system was exposed in the 1967 European Cup final against the attacking football of Celtic’s Lisbon Lions. They went one up with a penalty from Mazzola and shut up shop as usual. It didn’t work. Inter’s four defenders marked the attacking band of Celtic’s 4-2-4, but Celtic had attacking full-backs too – Bobby Murdoch passed it out to Jim Craig who cut it back for left-back Archie Gemmell. It was not possible to mark everybody without losing all attacking presence, and the problems of being outnumbered in midfield still hadn’t been solved.

Herrera blamed the players; he sold Guarneri and Picchi, who left with some stinging criticism of Herrera: “When things go right, it’s because of Herrera’s brilliant planning. When things go wrong, it’s always the players who are to blame.” The next season Inter finished 5th and he left for Roma.