Inverting the Pyramid – Jonathan Wilson

by Sriyansa Das

Football, Jonathan Wilson writes in the prologue of ‘Inverting the Pyramid’,

… is not about players, or at least not just about players; it is about shape and about space, about the intelligent deployment of players, and their movement within that deployment...

Yet, no one remembers football this way; it is always about the Peles, the Maradonas, the Rooneys and the Messis and never about a team or how eleven players played. The beauty and appeal of the football lies in the fact that it is both exceedingly simple in the conception, and yet allows for enormous complexity in the game-play. There is thus a history to be told of this complex game-play, and Jonathan Wilson tries in this book to trace the tactical evolution of football from the early days to the modern form.

The first basic question is that in a ‘simple’ game like football, do tactics and organization matter at all? Arrigo Sacchi, the former Italy and A.C. Milan coach, to prove the efficacy of organization,

took 5 players [playing per his rules]…. they [the non agreeing players] had 10 players … they had fifteen minutes to score against my five players, the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over 10 meters inside their own half … they never scored. Not once.

Organizing a team allows a team to effectively utilise the space on the pitch. Or to get one or more of the opposition players out of the game by denying them the time or the space to operate. As formations evolved, players with time and space started getting less of it leading to some innovative coaches searching for space in some other part of the pitch. The entire tactical evolution of football, Wilson demonstrates, can thus be seen as a story of spaces found and shut out over the pitch.

However, it isn’t just the formation that is important. It is also how players play within it. On how the early players operated, Wilson writes,

… one of the founding fathers of the game felt it necessary to explain to others that if one of their team-mates were charging head-down at goal, it might be a good idea to go and help him – although expecting to receive the ball volitionally seems to have been a step too far.

Passing the ball to a team-mate sounds very basic and intuitive part of the game today. But it has not always been considered so. Even this concept has evolved as a technique at some point of time in the footballing history. So are concepts like switching positions, pressing opponents and retaining possession no matter what. Each of these techniques came up in response to some earlier development. In recent memory, when Inter Milan won the semi finals of Champions League against Barcelona, Jose Mourinho talked about how he taught Inter to play without the ball because Barcelona would almost never give up possession.

The story of football is as much of people and places as it is of how the game is played or the formations used. Jimmy Hogan, Herb Chapman, Bela Guttman, Helenio Herrara, Alf Ramsey, Rinus Michels, Valery Lobanovskyi and many others find mention because of their ideas on football. In a rather dry book, the author is at his dramatic best when he describes these men who have changed the game. Football, the author demonstrates, has also got a cultural angle. Often a culture chooses football as its spokesperson; whether it be the influence of the intellectual cafe culture of Vienna on the Austrian Wunderteam in 1930s or the concept of La Nuestra that defines Argentinian football to this day, football and the way it is played has never been just a game.

The single greatest reason to read the book is that it allows fans to see the game in a new way. After reading this book, it will be hard to ignore the player who runs across, as Messi stands over the ball facing two defenders; he provides an outlet for a pass or even better draws away one defender, allowing Messi to nutmeg the one remaining and score a brilliant goal. It will a little hard to claim that it was only Messi’s genius at play.

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