Fahrenheit 4-2-3-1
December 11, 2011
Sir Stanley Matthews is perhaps the greatest English football player of all time.
GettyImagesStanley Matthews: An outside right in more innocent and carefree footballing days
He was the inaugural inductee to the English Football Hall of Fame in 2002 and remains the only English football player to be knighted while still plying his trade. He kept playing throughout his 40s and in 1985 played his last ever competitive match at age 70. When he died in 2000, an estimated 100,000 people lined the streets of Stoke-on-Trent to pay their respects. Despite all this vast recognition, however, Sir Stanley played in a position that football fans under a certain age will probably never have heard of: outside right.
In the mid-20th century, teams would often take to the field lined up in a 4-2-4 formation. Four at the back, two in the middle, four up front. The outside right was, unsurprisingly, the outermost of the front four, on the right - a very advanced winger, if you like.
With four forwards, football played well under the system was fast, attacking and exhilarating to watch. Nobody did it better than the Brazilians, who won the 1958 and 1970 World Cups playing that way; 4-4-2, the formation that has become the default formation for every level from kids' teams to pub sides to national squads, is a direct descendant. Invariably one of the two central midfielders remains slightly further back, but there is no such thing as an out-and-out defensive midfielder.
In the 1998-99 season, Manchester United were a swashbuckling, fearless side playing 4-4-2. The midfield paired Roy Keane with Paul Scholes; Scholes was the more attacking of the pair, but Keane still wrought trouble from box to box. Both missed the 1999 Champions League final due to suspension, but United's victorious European campaign was as joyously intrepid as football gets. In their 11 matches, there were 45 goals. Their run included a 3-2 win at Juventus in the semi-finals, and two unforgettable 3-3 draws with Barcelona in the group stages. Ferguson described the first of those as, "the perfect football match - both teams trying to win with scant regard for the consequences. That's how football should be played."
The legacy of this type of performance is that Ferguson is generally seen as a keeper of the attacking flame, which is, unfortunately, debatable. If Mourinho is the face of football's new pragmatism, then Ferguson is the face of the tactical change that occurred sometime around the turn of the century.
GettyImagesThe night that Manchester United began to pay close regard to the consequences: a home 3-2 defeat to Real Madrid in April 2000
Eighteen months after lifting that Champions League trophy, United surrendered the opportunity to defend it in a very similar match against Spanish opposition at Old Trafford. There should have been no shame in a numbing but ultimately unfortunate 3-2 defeat to Real Madrid, the eventual champions, but Ferguson seemed to lose his conviction in football "with scant regard for the consequences" - a position which was only reinforced when Carlos Queiroz joined as his assistant manager in 2002. Almost overnight, it seemed, United's approach to the really big games became cagey at best. Previously, the football Manchester United played in such matches had been sexy; now it became Sextonian. (If you don't remember the turgid nonsense served up by Dave Sexton in the 1970s, you didn't miss much.)
Ferguson has experimented with all manner of tactics in his time - including a briefly thrilling 4-3-3-0 - yet football's increasingly defensive nature can be summed up in four chilling syllables: Four. Two. Three. One. Adopted by numerous teams, notably the national sides of Germany, Spain and the Netherlands (the same Spanish and Dutch sides that met in the 2010 World Cup final, described by Johan Cruyff as "anti-football"), 4-2-3-1 has taken over from 4-4-2 as the vogue formation, having been introduced around the turn of the century; a Millennium Bug that has ruined football.
There is something insidious and deceitful about 4-2-3-1. If 4-4-2 is the bloke next door who will look you in the eye and drink you under the table, 4-2-3-1 is devious, a sneak and a phoney - not to be trusted. The problem is its fourpronged nature - formations should only really have three components: defence, midfield, attack.
Football fans are generally simple folk, but now we have to deal with tactical developments that involve players getting between the lines, and other players getting between the lines between those lines. Even Einstein, who could follow a pretty complex argument when the mood took him, apparently, said that "everything should be made as simple as possible".
Football, at its purest, should be straight-forward and carefree; whatever scaling up is inevitable in today's big-money game, we'd do well to remember that it is a game. Jimmy Greaves wasn't far off when he said that "football tactics are rapidly becoming as complicated as the chemical formula for splitting the atom". If it carries on like this, soon everyone will be playing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1. It's far too confusing. 4-2-3-1 is a formation that exemplifies the cagey, defensive mindset of modern football managers. In a sense 4-2-3-1 is actually 6-3-1, for many sides employ two holding midfielders whose function is essentially or almost exclusively defensive. And it is getting worse.
GettyImagesCraig Levein: Enemy of football
Mancini's Manchester City have been known to play three holding midfielders in a shape that is essentially 7-2-1, or 7-0-3. In 2010, Craig Levein, the Scotland manager, lined his team up in a 4-6-0 formation against the Czech Republic. "The result was a display so negative that the BBC really should have shown it in black and white," jibed the Daily Telegraph.
The spirit of football took refuge in a darkened corner that night, and hugged its knees into the foetal position when Levein suggested that "we might have to change our perception of what an interesting match is".
• This is an extract from Jumpers for Goalposts: How Football Sold Its Soul by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner , which is published by Elliott & Thompson
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