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

possession, Austria continued to dominate, spinning their webs of passes, but their lack of thrust was to cost them. Zischek bundled in a corner with five minutes remaining, but it was too late. They lost 4-3, but their performance captured the imagination. ‘A revelation,’ said the Daily Mail , while The Times awarded Austria the ‘moral victory’ and rhapsodised about their ‘passing skills’.
    Two years later, what was essentially the Austria national team played Arsenal at Highbury, although they were presented as a Vienna XI, matches between club and national sides being frowned upon by Fifa at the time. They lost 4-2, prompting Roland Allen to write in the Evening Standard that, ‘It looks fine, it is fine: when the Austrians have learned how to turn all their cleverness into something that counts: when … they have organised the winning of football matches as highly as they have organised the taming of a football, they will make [everyone] sit up and take notice.’ The writing was on the wall, but nobody in England was minded to read it.
    Instead the two games were taken as confirmation of the cliché that continental European teams lack punch in the final third. Applied to the Austrians, there was a certain truth to it, but the wider point about ball retention was obscured, a situation that wasn’t helped by Meisl’s habit of talking in idealistic terms. ‘To us Middle Europeans,’ he said, ‘the attacking play of the British professional, seen from an aesthetic point of view, seems rather poor. Such play consists of assigning the job of scoring goals to the centre-forward and the wings, while to the inside-forwards is allotted the task of linking attackers and defenders, and more as half-backs than as attacking players… The centre-forward, who, among us in Europe, is the leading figure, because of his technical excellence and tactical intelligence, in England limits his activity to exploiting the errors of the opposing defence.’
    He did, though, laud the pace at which the British played the game, saying it had left his own players ‘confused and disoriented’: ‘Although their passing, swift and high, is rather lacking in precision, the English players compensate for this by the rare potency and great rapidity of their attacks.’ The familiar battle-lines were drawn: England, physical, quick and tough; the continent, technical, patient and probably lacking in moral fibre.
    Austria finally enjoyed the victory over England Meisl so craved in Vienna in May 1936. When he presented his team to Hogan, the Englishman questioned the stamina of the inside-forwards, to which Meisl replied that he expected to take a decisive lead in the first twenty minutes, and spend the rest of the game defending it. He was right. Sindelar repeatedly dragged the centre-half John Barker out of position - foreshadowing Harry Johnston’s travails against Hungary’s Nándor Hidegkuti seventeen years later - and England soon found themselves two down. George Camsell pulled one back early in the second half but, for all Meisl’s bowler-hatted nervousness on the touchline, Austria’s superiority was obvious. ‘We didn’t know whether we were coming or going,’ Jack Crayston admitted. ‘And it was disgustingly hot.’ When the heat makes manic charging unsustainable and prioritises possession, British teams have never prospered.
    By then, though, the Wunderteam was in decline, and the Austrians had ceded their European supremacy to Italy. In terms of formation, the Italians - almost inadvertently - took up a middle ground between the English W-M and the 2-3-5 of the Danubians, but what set them apart was their ethos. ‘Technically less brilliant than its European rival,’ Glanville wrote, Italian football ‘compensated … by its greater forcefulness and the excellent physical condition of its players’. A belief in the primacy of athleticism was perhaps natural under fascism, but it corresponded too to the