Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson

in Madrid in 1929, but two years later they felt the full force of the backlash, being hammered 7-1 at Highbury. Buoyed by the victory over Scotland, many in Austria were exuberantly hopeful, but Meisl, who always tended to pessimism, was concerned, and turned to his old friend and mentor, Jimmy Hogan.
    Disenchanted with England, Hogan had moved to Switzerland in 1921, spending three years with Young Boys of Berne and then Lausanne, before returning to Budapest with MTK, in their new guise as FC Hungária. He then moved to Germany, working as an advisor to the football federation, coaching SC Dresden - where one of his pupils was Helmut Schön, who was assistant to Sepp Herberger when West Germany won the World Cup in 1954, and led them to victory himself in 1974 - and generally evangelising for a technically adept style of football that would ensure English football was soon overhauled by Europe.
    He was initially greeted with suspicion and, when various local coaches complained about his lack of fluency in German, the German FA asked Hogan to prove himself by delivering a lecture without a translator. It began badly, as Hogan inadvertently presented himself as ‘a professor of languages, not a master of football’, and got steadily worse. Attempting to stress the importance of the mind in football, he told his bemused audience that it was a game not merely of the body, but also of the committee. Faced with laughter and derision, Hogan called for a ten-minute intermission and left the stage. When he returned, he was wearing his Bolton Wanderers kit. He removed his boots and his socks and, telling his audience that three-quarters of German players could not kick the ball properly, smashed a right-footed shot barefoot into a wooden panel 15 yards away. As the ball bounced back to him he noted the value of being two-footed and let fly with another shot, this time with his left foot. This time the panel split in two. His point proved, Hogan undertook a lecture tour, in one month alone speaking to 5,000 footballers in the Dresden area. When he died in 1974, the then secretary of the German Football Federation (DFB), Hans Passlack, wrote to Hogan’s son, Frank, saying that Hogan was the founder of ‘modern football’ in Germany.
    Uneasy about the political situation, Hogan left Germany for Paris, sewing his savings into the seams of his plus-fours to avoid restrictions on the export of currency, but he struggled to maintain discipline there among a team of stars and returned to Lausanne, where he never came to terms with a chairman who believed that players should be fined for missing chances. When Meisl came calling, he was desperate for a challenge.
    Austria, it must be said, seem to have been in need of him, or at least in need of some outside confirmation of their talents. A fortnight before the game in London, with Sindelar unwell and playing far below his best, Austria had struggled to beat a scratch Vienna side 2-1. Nerves, evidently, were an issue, while there were fitness concerns over Adolf Vogl and Friedrich Gschweidl. Nonetheless, Austria was agog. Crowds gathered in the Heldenplatz to listen to commentary relayed over three loudspeakers, while the Parliamentary Finance Committee adjourned a sitting to listen to the game.
    The Wunderteam did not begin well, and within twenty-six minutes England were two up, both goals coming from the Blackpool forward Jimmy Hampson. Austria pulled one back six minutes into the second half, Sindelar and Anton Schall combining to set up Karl Zischek. Walter Nausch hit a post amid a welter of pressure, but then, as England rallied, an Eric Houghton free-kick deflected off the ducking Schall and past Rudi Hiden in the Austria goal. Sindelar, with consummate control and a cool finish made it 3-2, but almost as soon as he had done so a long-range effort from Sam Crooks put England back in charge. With England baffled by their opponents’ habit of dropping behind the ball when out of