Tactics don’t win games.” When Harry Redknapp said this, he was pilloried as a managerial Neanderthal, a knuckle-dragging exponent of the blinkered thinking that has hampered English football since the national team were humiliated 6-3 by Hungary at Wembley in 1953.

Yet most coaches probably agree with him.

A young Arsene Wenger prayed his team would win. “Later,” he said, “I thought it would be better to pray for better players.” And Auxerre’s charming coach Jean Fernandez recently told Champions magazine: “At the highest level it isn’t tactics that win games – it’s the players.”

Redknapp made his first-team debut for West Ham in 1965. And when he rounded off
his reflection on tactics by saying, “The numbers game isn’t the beautiful game” he was harking back to the 1960s. Back then, British football writers routinely derided talk of formations and tactics as ‘the numbers game’ – much to the fury of Sir Alf Ramsey, who swore by them. Yet Sir Matt Busby, England’s most successful club manager of the 1960s, happily admitted to Arthur Hopcraft, author of The Football Man, that he hadn’t used a chalkboard to run through tactics at Manchester United in nine months.

Those who sided with Busby, not Ramsey, felt vindicated when the 1970 World Cup was won in captivating style by a superlative Brazilian side that seemed, briefly, to have abolished a tension between the team and the individual that has always marked football. Carlos Alberto, Pele, Rivelino, Tostao – they didn’t play by numbers. Their football was of such beauty that even a hardened pro like Don Howe would, 35 years later, come over all misty-eyed at the mere mention of their training sessions.

How times change. At the 2010 World Cup, five of the world’s best players – Lionel Messi, Kaka, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Fernando Torres – all disappointed, as coaches discovered the functional virtues of the 4-2-3-1 perfected by Jose Mourinho’s Inter. If the World Cup proved anything, it was that you can have too much teamwork. As The Guardian’s Rob Smyth said in Intelligent Life magazine: “Individuals are the soul of sport, even team sports.”

One reason Real Madrid’s appointment of Mourinho seems a kind of watershed is that it marks the apotheosis of the cult of the coach and his creed: teamwork. The Special One is the galactico now, using knowledge gleaned from a thousand dossiers to refine his tactics and strategies. It’s not Mourinho’s fault that he is more charismatic than any of the teams he has created, but it is a sign that something is rotten in the state of football.

And that ‘something’ is our obsession with tactics. The Guardian’s Barry Glendenning lambasted the “bulls**t artists who try to complicate a perfectly simple game by waffling on interminably about formations and tactics… in a bid to make out they’re cleverer than anyone else. There is, of course, a time for such talk, but as somebody clever once said about analysing humour, dissecting football to that degree is like dissecting a frog. Nobody is particularly interested – and the frog dies.”

Glendenning is half right. Far too many people are fascinated by the tactical complexities of this simple game. But the frog still dies. We can blame or credit computer games, the Americanisation of analysis (we seem to suffer from a statistical inferiority complex compared to baseball and NFL), the internet and insight wars between pundits. None of us, I suspect, are immune to the suspicion – fuelled by UK pundits Alan Hansen, the recently shamed Andy Gray and Jonathan Wilson’s seminal tactical tome Inverting The Pyramid, plus our own Craig Foster on SBS – that if we dig deep enough we will find a kind of Da Vinci Code; a formula that solves the mystery of football.

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