The end of forward thinking
Football without strikers seems unthinkable, but according to Carlos Alberto Parreira, it's the future
Jonathan Wilson
June 8, 2008 12:45 AM
Five years ago, at the coaching conference he hosts in Rio de Janeiro, Carlos Alberto Parreira made a prediction that left the room stunned. Discussing how tactics might evolve, the coach who had led Brazil to victory in the 1994 World Cup, suggested that the formation of the future might be 4-6-0.
True, wingers had once seemed sacrosanct, only to be refined out of existence and then reinvented. Yes, playmakers were undergoing a similar process of redevelopment. But centre-forwards? Could football really function with no centre-forward - without a recognised forward line at all? The answer came in this season's Champions League final: yes, it could. Manchester United won the world's premier football tournament with a team that featured no out-and-out striker.
Such radicalism remains rare, for while it may represent the highest form of the game, a system without forwards is hugely difficult to play effectively. United scored six goals in their first eight games of last season and ended up forlornly using John O'Shea as a central striker in their goalless opening-day draw with Reading, who finished with the second-worst defensive record in the league. It takes time for effective fluidity to be achieved and that is why, given the limited number of training sessions available, no nation at Euro 2008 will follow the no-striker route.
Even in international football, though, strikers are vanishing. Of the 16 teams in Austria and Switzerland, fewer than half are likely to start with two forwards. The first international match, between Scotland and England in 1872, involved 13 forwards; you will not have seen that many in the Euros until the fourth or fifth day of the tournament. Not that a surfeit of strikers necessarily means plenty of goals: that first international finished 0-0.
Roma showed the way two seasons ago, fielding as their lone front man, Francesco Totti, who had previously been seen as a classic trequartista, operating in the 'hole' between attack and midfield. Totti was not fixed. Operating as a focal point as, say, Didier Drogba was for Chelsea, he held up the ball, drifted, and created space for his team-mates to break into. Roma's 4-1-4-1 formation frequently became 4-1-5-0. United beat Roma (minus Totti) 7-1 last year in a Champions League quarter-final, but Sir Alex Ferguson, having broadly turned away from 4-4-2 after a humbling 3-2 defeat by Real Madrid in 2000, had seen enough. Roma's was the model to follow.
For much of the season just finished, United deployed Wayne Rooney as the nominal front man. He constantly foraged deep and perhaps he has, as Ferguson suggested, been 'too unselfish'. But it was Rooney's movement, and the intelligence of his interchanges with Carlos Tevez, that created much of the space for Cristiano Ronaldo, who profited with 42 goals. United's system was, in effect, 4-2-4-0. At times, particularly in Europe, Ferguson fielded an extra holder in midfield, which usually meant Ronaldo central in the Totti role (4-3-3-0).
That in itself is nothing new. The Austrian 'Wunderteam' of the early 1930s had great success with Mathias Sindelar, a centre-forward who constantly dropped deep, and Vsevolod Bobrov did similarly for the Dynamo Moscow tourists who so delighted British crowds in 1945. It was then Nandor Hidegkuti's role as a deep-lying centre-forward that so perplexed England when Hungary won 6-3 at Wembley in 1953. 'The tragedy to me,' said England's centre-half Harry Johnston, 'was the utter helplessness... not being able to do anything about it.' If Johnston followed Hidegkuti, he left a hole in the centre of England's rearguard; if he stayed put, Hidegkuti roamed free.
The solution to that problem was zonal marking, developed by Zeze Moreira in Brazil in the 1950s. The notion that Brazilian football is only about artistry and free expression is laughable. The history of tactics is the story of the attempt to achieve the greatest balance of attacking fluidity and defensive solidity, and the reason Pele and Garrincha, say, were given such freedom was that their formation allowed them to do so. By the time of their first World Cup win in 1958, Brazil were comfortable in a zonal back four while the rest of the world persisted with the man-to-man back three of the W-M system.
That was when the systematisation of football, the acknowledgement that the game was not simply a matter of individual battles, but about the most efficacious deployment of players, really took hold. It had begun in the 1930s in Switzerland, where Karl Rappan, a former Austria international, had grown frustrated that his semi-professional Servette side were regularly overpowered by fitter opponents. He introduced a sweeper, providing additional cover for three defensive markers, and encouraged his sides to sit back and let the opposition pass the ball in front of them. Similar thinking would later lead in Italy to catenaccio.
As nutrition and the understanding of physical preparation improved in the 1960s, the great Muscovite coach Viktor Maslov introduced 'pressing' at Dynamo Kiev, which may be seen as the birth of modern football. His sides would hound the opposition in possession, but their system was good enough that players covered those pressuring the man with the ball, closing up gaps that might otherwise have been exploited. That mode of football developed at Dynamo Kiev under their great coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi and at Ajax under Rinus Michels. The Ajax style may have grown up almost organically among players who had played together from a young age, while Lobanovskyi, pioneering the use of computer technology in coaching, imposed his vision on Dynamo Kiev. For all the difference of ideology, though, the way the sides played was almost identical.
That style reached its apogee with Arrigo Sacchi's AC Milan, as they won the European Cup in 1989 and 1990 - the last team to win Europe's top trophy in successive seasons. He demanded that, when his players were not in possession, there should never be more than 25 metres between his two forwards and his back four. 'All of our players,' he said, 'always had four reference points: the ball, the space, the opponent and his team-mates.' There were, in other words, no fixed positions: everything was relative.
That his philosophy was effective can hardly be doubted, but it did not make his system popular with the players. Ruud Gullit, in particular, objected to the repetitive training sessions necessary to develop the required level of mutual understanding.
'I told him that five organised players would always beat 10 disorganised ones,' Sacchi explained. 'And I proved it to them. I took five players: Giovanni Galli in goal, Tassotti, Maldini, Costacurta and Baresi. They had 10 players: Gullit, Van Basten, Rijkaard, Virdis, Evani, Ancelotti, Colombo, Donadoni, Lantignotti and Mannari. They had 15 minutes to score against my five players and the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from 10 metres inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once.'
Sacchi insists that football has not advanced from his great side. 'Many believe that football is about the players expressing themselves,' he said. 'But that's not the case. Or, rather, it's not the case in and of itself. The player needs to express himself within the parameters laid out by the manager.'
Sacchi is scathing of the modern trend for 4-2-3-1, believing the use of two midfield 'holders' to provide a platform for the creators as pandering to the egos of those attacking players - which may explain the brevity of his spell as sporting director at Real Madrid in the galacticos era, when Claude Makelele was expected to provide defensive cover for Zinedine Zidane and Luis Figo. Like Lobanovskyi, he values 'universality', those willing take on more than one role.
Perhaps Sacchi is fundamentalist in that regard, for United's system is based on multifunctional players: a winger who can play as a centre-forward and centre-forwards who can play as attacking midfielders. Even the two 'holders' are more varied than Makelele. Universality breeds fluency, and that means that the one-dimensional centre-forward of old, the target-man or the poacher, is becoming a thing of the past. Maslov, who effectively invented 4-4-2, and was criticised for it, foresaw modern developments. 'Football is like an aeroplane,' he said. 'As velocities increase, so does air resistance, so you have to make the head more streamlined.'
That said, 4-6-0 is no panacea, as the former Scotland coach Andy Roxburgh, who is now Uefa's technical director, explained. 'The six players in midfield all could rotate, attack and defend,' he said. 'But you'd need to have six Decos in midfield - he doesn't just attack, he runs, tackles and covers all over the pitch.' Deco is a classic example of a universal player, something he combines with high levels of physical fitness.'
At a lecture he gave in Belgrade last year, Roberto Mancini, who has just led Internazionale to their third straight title and is in the running to replace Avram Grant at Chelsea, insisted that the likely evolution of football will be more to do with improved physical preparation than with tactical development. It is debatable, though, whether it is possible to separate the two: the style of Dynamo Kiev and Ajax only became possible as rationing came to an end and sports science developed, for 'pressing' places great physical demands on players. In a fully systematised team, nobody can be carried - everybody must be carrying out their share of work.
A system with no forwards places a premium on fast, accurate passing through the midfield, which is fine on a good day. There will always, though, be days when the passing fails to click, or when a team is forced on to the back foot and needs an outlet for holding the ball and relieving the pressure. Ferguson has acknowledged that he is in the market for a centre-forward this summer to fulfil the role that Louis Saha - fast, mobile and decent with his back to goal - would have played had he been fit.
As fitness improves, so the demands on forwards change, not least because defences cannot be relied upon to lose shape as they become exhausted. Modern centre-forwards must be universalists, a hybrid of the old strike-partnerships. Drogba and Emmanuel Adebayor are both battering-rams and goalscorers. A Thierry Henry or a Dimitar Berbatov is capable of dropping deep or pulling wide, as adept at playing the final ball as taking a chance. Somewhere in between the two extremes are ranged Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Samuel Eto'o and Fernando Torres. Just as wingers and midfielders had to, forwards are having to reinvent themselves.
What, then, can we expect to see in the way of tactics in Austria and Switzerland? Neither Sacchi nor Lobanovskyi enjoyed significant success at international level. It is, Sacchi admitted, 'impossible' to develop a fully systematised approach in the time available to international coaches. So the Euros will be more about individuals than the Champions League, about the sort of gap-plugging Sacchi so despises. There will be less fluidity which is why, for instance, Ronaldo can become isolated for Portugal in a way he rarely is for United.
'Systems are dying,' said Slaven Bilic, the Croatia coach. 'It's about the movement of 10 players now.'
Even in international football, the tendency is for football to follow Maslov's aeroplane, and to bank on players breaking from midfield to supplement a diminishing number of forwards.
It is increasingly looking as though Parreira may be proved right.
Football without strikers seems unthinkable, but according to Carlos Alberto Parreira, it's the future
Jonathan Wilson
June 8, 2008 12:45 AM
Five years ago, at the coaching conference he hosts in Rio de Janeiro, Carlos Alberto Parreira made a prediction that left the room stunned. Discussing how tactics might evolve, the coach who had led Brazil to victory in the 1994 World Cup, suggested that the formation of the future might be 4-6-0.
True, wingers had once seemed sacrosanct, only to be refined out of existence and then reinvented. Yes, playmakers were undergoing a similar process of redevelopment. But centre-forwards? Could football really function with no centre-forward - without a recognised forward line at all? The answer came in this season's Champions League final: yes, it could. Manchester United won the world's premier football tournament with a team that featured no out-and-out striker.
Such radicalism remains rare, for while it may represent the highest form of the game, a system without forwards is hugely difficult to play effectively. United scored six goals in their first eight games of last season and ended up forlornly using John O'Shea as a central striker in their goalless opening-day draw with Reading, who finished with the second-worst defensive record in the league. It takes time for effective fluidity to be achieved and that is why, given the limited number of training sessions available, no nation at Euro 2008 will follow the no-striker route.
Even in international football, though, strikers are vanishing. Of the 16 teams in Austria and Switzerland, fewer than half are likely to start with two forwards. The first international match, between Scotland and England in 1872, involved 13 forwards; you will not have seen that many in the Euros until the fourth or fifth day of the tournament. Not that a surfeit of strikers necessarily means plenty of goals: that first international finished 0-0.
Roma showed the way two seasons ago, fielding as their lone front man, Francesco Totti, who had previously been seen as a classic trequartista, operating in the 'hole' between attack and midfield. Totti was not fixed. Operating as a focal point as, say, Didier Drogba was for Chelsea, he held up the ball, drifted, and created space for his team-mates to break into. Roma's 4-1-4-1 formation frequently became 4-1-5-0. United beat Roma (minus Totti) 7-1 last year in a Champions League quarter-final, but Sir Alex Ferguson, having broadly turned away from 4-4-2 after a humbling 3-2 defeat by Real Madrid in 2000, had seen enough. Roma's was the model to follow.
For much of the season just finished, United deployed Wayne Rooney as the nominal front man. He constantly foraged deep and perhaps he has, as Ferguson suggested, been 'too unselfish'. But it was Rooney's movement, and the intelligence of his interchanges with Carlos Tevez, that created much of the space for Cristiano Ronaldo, who profited with 42 goals. United's system was, in effect, 4-2-4-0. At times, particularly in Europe, Ferguson fielded an extra holder in midfield, which usually meant Ronaldo central in the Totti role (4-3-3-0).
That in itself is nothing new. The Austrian 'Wunderteam' of the early 1930s had great success with Mathias Sindelar, a centre-forward who constantly dropped deep, and Vsevolod Bobrov did similarly for the Dynamo Moscow tourists who so delighted British crowds in 1945. It was then Nandor Hidegkuti's role as a deep-lying centre-forward that so perplexed England when Hungary won 6-3 at Wembley in 1953. 'The tragedy to me,' said England's centre-half Harry Johnston, 'was the utter helplessness... not being able to do anything about it.' If Johnston followed Hidegkuti, he left a hole in the centre of England's rearguard; if he stayed put, Hidegkuti roamed free.
The solution to that problem was zonal marking, developed by Zeze Moreira in Brazil in the 1950s. The notion that Brazilian football is only about artistry and free expression is laughable. The history of tactics is the story of the attempt to achieve the greatest balance of attacking fluidity and defensive solidity, and the reason Pele and Garrincha, say, were given such freedom was that their formation allowed them to do so. By the time of their first World Cup win in 1958, Brazil were comfortable in a zonal back four while the rest of the world persisted with the man-to-man back three of the W-M system.
That was when the systematisation of football, the acknowledgement that the game was not simply a matter of individual battles, but about the most efficacious deployment of players, really took hold. It had begun in the 1930s in Switzerland, where Karl Rappan, a former Austria international, had grown frustrated that his semi-professional Servette side were regularly overpowered by fitter opponents. He introduced a sweeper, providing additional cover for three defensive markers, and encouraged his sides to sit back and let the opposition pass the ball in front of them. Similar thinking would later lead in Italy to catenaccio.
As nutrition and the understanding of physical preparation improved in the 1960s, the great Muscovite coach Viktor Maslov introduced 'pressing' at Dynamo Kiev, which may be seen as the birth of modern football. His sides would hound the opposition in possession, but their system was good enough that players covered those pressuring the man with the ball, closing up gaps that might otherwise have been exploited. That mode of football developed at Dynamo Kiev under their great coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi and at Ajax under Rinus Michels. The Ajax style may have grown up almost organically among players who had played together from a young age, while Lobanovskyi, pioneering the use of computer technology in coaching, imposed his vision on Dynamo Kiev. For all the difference of ideology, though, the way the sides played was almost identical.
That style reached its apogee with Arrigo Sacchi's AC Milan, as they won the European Cup in 1989 and 1990 - the last team to win Europe's top trophy in successive seasons. He demanded that, when his players were not in possession, there should never be more than 25 metres between his two forwards and his back four. 'All of our players,' he said, 'always had four reference points: the ball, the space, the opponent and his team-mates.' There were, in other words, no fixed positions: everything was relative.
That his philosophy was effective can hardly be doubted, but it did not make his system popular with the players. Ruud Gullit, in particular, objected to the repetitive training sessions necessary to develop the required level of mutual understanding.
'I told him that five organised players would always beat 10 disorganised ones,' Sacchi explained. 'And I proved it to them. I took five players: Giovanni Galli in goal, Tassotti, Maldini, Costacurta and Baresi. They had 10 players: Gullit, Van Basten, Rijkaard, Virdis, Evani, Ancelotti, Colombo, Donadoni, Lantignotti and Mannari. They had 15 minutes to score against my five players and the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from 10 metres inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once.'
Sacchi insists that football has not advanced from his great side. 'Many believe that football is about the players expressing themselves,' he said. 'But that's not the case. Or, rather, it's not the case in and of itself. The player needs to express himself within the parameters laid out by the manager.'
Sacchi is scathing of the modern trend for 4-2-3-1, believing the use of two midfield 'holders' to provide a platform for the creators as pandering to the egos of those attacking players - which may explain the brevity of his spell as sporting director at Real Madrid in the galacticos era, when Claude Makelele was expected to provide defensive cover for Zinedine Zidane and Luis Figo. Like Lobanovskyi, he values 'universality', those willing take on more than one role.
Perhaps Sacchi is fundamentalist in that regard, for United's system is based on multifunctional players: a winger who can play as a centre-forward and centre-forwards who can play as attacking midfielders. Even the two 'holders' are more varied than Makelele. Universality breeds fluency, and that means that the one-dimensional centre-forward of old, the target-man or the poacher, is becoming a thing of the past. Maslov, who effectively invented 4-4-2, and was criticised for it, foresaw modern developments. 'Football is like an aeroplane,' he said. 'As velocities increase, so does air resistance, so you have to make the head more streamlined.'
That said, 4-6-0 is no panacea, as the former Scotland coach Andy Roxburgh, who is now Uefa's technical director, explained. 'The six players in midfield all could rotate, attack and defend,' he said. 'But you'd need to have six Decos in midfield - he doesn't just attack, he runs, tackles and covers all over the pitch.' Deco is a classic example of a universal player, something he combines with high levels of physical fitness.'
At a lecture he gave in Belgrade last year, Roberto Mancini, who has just led Internazionale to their third straight title and is in the running to replace Avram Grant at Chelsea, insisted that the likely evolution of football will be more to do with improved physical preparation than with tactical development. It is debatable, though, whether it is possible to separate the two: the style of Dynamo Kiev and Ajax only became possible as rationing came to an end and sports science developed, for 'pressing' places great physical demands on players. In a fully systematised team, nobody can be carried - everybody must be carrying out their share of work.
A system with no forwards places a premium on fast, accurate passing through the midfield, which is fine on a good day. There will always, though, be days when the passing fails to click, or when a team is forced on to the back foot and needs an outlet for holding the ball and relieving the pressure. Ferguson has acknowledged that he is in the market for a centre-forward this summer to fulfil the role that Louis Saha - fast, mobile and decent with his back to goal - would have played had he been fit.
As fitness improves, so the demands on forwards change, not least because defences cannot be relied upon to lose shape as they become exhausted. Modern centre-forwards must be universalists, a hybrid of the old strike-partnerships. Drogba and Emmanuel Adebayor are both battering-rams and goalscorers. A Thierry Henry or a Dimitar Berbatov is capable of dropping deep or pulling wide, as adept at playing the final ball as taking a chance. Somewhere in between the two extremes are ranged Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Samuel Eto'o and Fernando Torres. Just as wingers and midfielders had to, forwards are having to reinvent themselves.
What, then, can we expect to see in the way of tactics in Austria and Switzerland? Neither Sacchi nor Lobanovskyi enjoyed significant success at international level. It is, Sacchi admitted, 'impossible' to develop a fully systematised approach in the time available to international coaches. So the Euros will be more about individuals than the Champions League, about the sort of gap-plugging Sacchi so despises. There will be less fluidity which is why, for instance, Ronaldo can become isolated for Portugal in a way he rarely is for United.
'Systems are dying,' said Slaven Bilic, the Croatia coach. 'It's about the movement of 10 players now.'
Even in international football, the tendency is for football to follow Maslov's aeroplane, and to bank on players breaking from midfield to supplement a diminishing number of forwards.
It is increasingly looking as though Parreira may be proved right.
I will read the rest though.
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