You may notice, if you've been reading this blog for a while, that I have so far reviewed only fiction. However, I have catholic tastes when it comes to reading material, and so, having had a brief internal debate about whether I should include non-fiction reviews or not, I decided in the affirmative. I love football, therefore I read about football, and thus, I am writing about football.
Sports writing has been on the up and up for some time now, with a whole host of academic, scholarly, meticulously researched books hitting the shelves and catering for us sports afficianados who want, as the epigraph of this book has it, to "understand the causes of things". Anybody who thinks that sports journalism is all raving red top articles will be swiftly disabused if they read a text like Jonathan Wilson's 'Inverting The Pyramid'.
Narrative poems, during the Renaissance, would precede the poem itself with "the argument" a short summary of the poetic matter about to be presented to the reader. Wilson's "argument" in this book is that the game of football is less about players than the systems they perform in. Throughout the history of the game, a well drilled side of average players has almost always beaten a side of stars with no direction. In pressing this line of argument, Wilson traces the entire history of player formations and the tactics encouraged by those systems, and from this comes the title of the book: in football's early years, teams played a 2-3-5 formation which formed, when viewed from above, a pyramid. In these early days, defending was viewed as negative and contrary to the spirit of the game, and so only two outfield players, the "full backs" were tasked with defensive duties. However, as time has gone on, more players have been added to this defensive unit, so that the pyramid has been "inverted" (when the British press bemoaned Terry Venables' "Christmas Tree" in the run up to Euro 96, this is what they were railing against, a continental system adopted in preference to 4-4-2).
Wilson's analysis of the trends and historical antecedents of parts of the game we now take for granted takes him across the footballing world. He starts in Victorian England and then moves on to Montivideo in the early Twentieth Century as he traces the genesis of the pyramid system. He then progresses to café culture Vienna, where the "Wunderteam" first experimented with players shifting positions to confuse the opposition. Meanwhile, in England, Arsenal's Herbert Chapman shifted a man back into defence, thus creating the "W-M'" formation (so named because of the shape the players made on the pitch) which soon became ubiquitous. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Hungary became the best side in the world, humbling England 6-3 in 1953 as their players effortlessly shifted into areas England did not expect them to. Brazil was the home of the next tactical change, as 3-2-5 became 4-2-4, leading to their world cup triumphs in 1958 and 1962. Alf Ramsay, in 1966, created his "wingless wonders", an example of what Wilson terms "The English Pragmatism", while the World Cup of 1970 turned out to be the last time a team rolled their best players onto the pitch, told them to play, and triumphed. Total Football is the next subject on the agenda, a chapter Wilson shares between Ajax, Holland, Dynamo Moscow and the Soviet Union, as the principles of this vision of the game seemed to develop independently in two different locales. The comprehensive historical survey of the game's tactics ends with a discussion of the inevitable move back towards attacking players who can unlock massed defences.
One of the biggest strengths of 'Inverting The Pyramid' is its ability to move from continent to continent. Wilson has a particular affinity with Eastern Europe, and his discussion of Valeriy Lobanovski's Dynamo Kiev is particularly enjoyable and comprehensive, while he also goes to great lengths to explain the development of football in Argentina and Brazil. Another strength is his illumination of the great characters behind the tactics, from Jimmy Hogan, the great exporter of football expertise to Central Europe to Helenio Herrera, master of Catenaccio, the defensive system whose influence on Italian football persists to this day. Wilson's insights into all of these diverse characters give the book a real humanity, a warm beating heart beneath the cool, sophisticated skin of the prose.
For anybody who loves football, this is a must read. Not only is it brilliantly researched, well written and full of wonderful detail, it sweeps across a hundred odd years of football history while never losing sight of the argument made in the preface- that tactics are everything. Once you've read 'Inverting The Pyramid', you may well find yourself agreeing.
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