Johnny Nicholson: Manchester City are great, but ultimately a very good Ajax tribute band

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola gives instructions to defender Kyle Walker during the Premier League match against Newcastle United. Guardiola’s talent  lies in understanding history, then recruiting and organising teams physically and mentally to apply his research.

“Sexual intercourse began in 1963, (which was rather late for me),

Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban, and the Beatles’ first LP.”

This will probably be the first and last time you read Philip Larkin’s poetry here, but his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ speaks to how every generation thinks it has invented something new, oblivious to the fact that it has already existed.

This certainly applies to football tactics and playing styles.

Is there anything new in how football is played? Anything that is done today in 2021 that has never been done before, since the game was first codified in the 1870s?

Any new formation or new tactic? No. There isn’t. Everything presented or lauded as new, is really something someone has done before, or at best is a retooling of an existing model. Don’t believe the hype.

As Manchester City seem set to win every game until the end of time, their manager Pep Guardiola is once again, this being a day with a ‘y’ in it, being hailed as a genius and a revolutionary. It isn’t hard to see why.

Having the most financial resources at your disposal to buy the players you need at any cost, is all well and good, but it only puts you in the conversation to be a winner. You still have to cohere them into being successful. To do so repeatedly and so overwhelmingly, needs the kind of wide-eyed manic intensity and persistence that comes as second nature to him.

However, while this absolutely is remarkable, should so many be on their knees in supplication to him for his original thinking? Is anything he does really original and new?

Well, for a start, watching old Ajax games from the early ‘70s when they ruled European football looks remarkably like watching Manchester City, except the Dutch team was hard enough to look after themselves in a tussle with an Albanian tractor collective’s hardman and routinely faced more imposing physical battles, back in the days when you’d struggle to get sent off even if you had removed someone’s vital internal organs with your foot.

Of course, the line from Ajax, via their manager (and later Holland boss) Rinus Michels, to his protege Johan Cruyff, to Barcelona and Pep Guardiola is a straight one, so it is not surprising City are basically a very good Ajax tribute band, re-recording a lot of their old hits for a younger audience.

Similarly, the gegenpressing that Jurgen Klopp has become so renowned for is obviously not something he originated. Some say AC Milan and Italy coach Arrigo Sacchi originated it in the 1980s as a specifically deployed tactic but using strikers to close down defenders has been commonplace for at least the 50 years I’ve been watching football and doubtless long before that too.

In the mid-80s it was routine to hear commentators praising Ian Rush for doing what was then called ‘defending from the front’ which was really just running at the defender who had the ball and denying them space in an attempt to force an error. Just because this wasn’t articulated using tactics jargon or via statistical analysis on podcasts by men in their 30s with scraggy beards, doesn’t make it any less true.

Football fashions come and go in the same way clothes do. Today’s white kitten heels will soon be yesterday’s Ugg Boot. Those fashionably undersized jackets and pants young men all seem to wear, will soon just look like they’re wearing something which has shrunk in the wash.

Those caught wearing last season’s high fashion always look the most out of date but wait a few years and that which was the least fashionable item becomes once again desirable.

In football this very much applied to playing in a 4-4-2 formation which for about two or three decades had been a British default. Then it fell out of fashion about 15 years ago. And those still playing it were laughed at as being the footballing equivalent of Jeremy Clarkson’s jacket ‘n’ jeans fashion sense. And no-one wants that. If you were a manager who played 4-4-2, you were a dinosaur and out of touch with the new groove, daddio. Of course, this was always mad and of course, plenty of successful teams did play it. But drop 4-4-2 into any conversation and it is still wrongly seen as a marker for the out-of-date and unprogressive.

Same goes for long ball football today. God forbid anyone should punt it long for the big man any more. The fashion is for asking players who are not good enough to fanny around with the ball for ages, to fanny around with the ball for ages, doing the square root of sod all, boring the arse off everyone, before losing possession, or kicking it out of play. Well done. But soon enough, knocking it long into the channels will be back in fashion, if it isn’t already. Nothing lasts forever. Everything is recycled. Long balls have already been rebranded as the more upmarket ‘long passes’ and direct football as the more academic ‘vertical play’.

Because football is monetised on so many levels by so many different people and sectors, there is an urge to pretend that everything that happens in the holy Premier League is a new and fresh item out of the upmarket designer store, rather than a rather lived-in, vintage item from the charity store. We should look at these changes through the narrowed eyes of a cynic, with the whiskey squints.

Never mind your Andy Roberston or Kyle Walker, overlapping attacking full backs have their roots in 1930s Brazilian football with Domingos da Guia, or later in Italian football with Giacinto Facchetti. That great Ajax side deployed Wim Suubier, one of its Twelve Apostles, as an attacking right back.

That most trendy of things, the Ghost Nine which is sold to us as though it is some sort of sorcery, is nothing new at all. It has a long history and can be dated back to at least 1934 with Hugo Meisl’s Austrian side which reached the semi-final of the World Cup.

Any feasible numerical formation possible has been used at some point, except perhaps the 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 which I like to call the Riverdance formation, which could be very effective if performed with enough Flatley-esque kicking vigour.

Ball-playing centre halves, double defensive pivots, sweeper keepers, holding midfielders, double 10s, first ball, second ball, the diamond, the Christmas tree, it has all been done before.

So, it is understandable when a gnarly old fella like Mick McCarthy, currently doing wonders at Cardiff City, feels that younger, more fashionable coaches, get overrated for originality, recently saying, “All I hear whenever a job comes up it is that it’s got to be some young guy with bright new ideas. And you know what? There’s not that many new ideas that come around in football, it’s still kind of the same, keep it off the opposition and put it in their net and get it back.”

Of course, he’s right, but that is just not sexy enough for the game’s marketeers. There is an urge to over-sell and over-market today and saying that a manager has revived a pre-existing notion, rather than made one up in his own clever head, just doesn’t sound like its premium quality, worthy of all the money you need to spend to see it.

Guardiola’s talent lies in understanding history, then recruiting and organising teams both physically and mentally to apply his research. That is a hard art in itself. His is a triumph of studiousness, of intellect and motivation, not of originality. That he is routinely talked about as though he invented a new form of football is just lack of research mixed with bullshit sales pitch.

After 150 years, what in football could actually be new? Even if you want to play a bizarre 1-2-7 system, it’s been done before, back in 1872 when England lined-up in the first international against Scotland, who in turn played an ambitious attacking 2-2-6. Yes, there were 13 strikers on the pitch. The result? 0 - 0. There must be a lesson there.

Ironically, while the likes of Klopp and Guardiola are hailed and sold as original thinkers, they wouldn’t claim that for themselves, largely because they know where they’ve copped their ideas from. Their lack of originality isn’t or should not be a cause for criticism, because working out how to apply any system to the resources you’ve got is a skill in itself. But equally, there is no virtue in claiming earth-shattering originality for someone when it’s not really true, merely to try and hype them, because, ironically, it’s more likely to make us cynical about what they really have achieved, and that would be equally unjust.