Rotating the Midfield: A History of Australian Football Positions: part one

In the early days of football, positions were vaguely-defined and in flux. This diagram from 1876 on a Carlton supporters’ wiki shows how teams lined up in those days. There were twenty players, and apart from some terminological differences, the eighteen traditional positions were all there, in addition to a ‘goal sneak’ and ‘goal keeper’, these each being a third type of what we would today call a ‘key (position) forward’ or ‘key (position) defender’.

By the time that the eight clubs seceded from the Victorian Football Association to form the Victorian Football League in 1897, it seems that teams had begun to re-deploy their extra two players as on-ballers. As the ‘ruck-rover’ position only came into being in the mid-twentieth century (Jack Dyer and Ron Barassi junior being its earliest exponents), this meant four ruckmen from each team crowding around the ball, attempting to tap it to a single rover. Not surprisingly, there were complaints that the game was becoming too congested (a familiar refrain throughout the sport’s history) and the League reduced teams to eighteen players for the 1899 season.

It was around this time that the fifteen positions other than the ruckmen and rovers came to be conceived as five banks of three – the backs, half-backs, centres/wingmen, half-forwards, and forwards. In Victoria, newspapers would list the eighteen players selected for a match in six rows of three, with the three ‘followers’ on the bottom row. In South Australia, the five lines were listed in the reverse order (i.e. the forwards in the top row and the backs in the fifth row), the first-string followers were labelled the ‘first ruck’, and a seventh row was added to the teamsheet. This was the ‘second ruck’, and listed the three players who played on the ball when the three first-string followers were resting in the forward and back lines.

(For an example of an old-fashioned team listing which shows the second ruck and which players they interchanged with, see this line-up in The Argus of the Victorian team selected for the 1930 interstate carnival in Adelaide.)

The pattern that existed from 1899 to the introduction of the interchange bench in 1978 was that a team would consist of twelve players who played permanently in one position and six followers. The twelve positional players were the full-back (called a ‘goalkeeper’ in South Australia and Western Australia until the 1950s), a ‘permanent’ back pocket, three half-backs, one centreman, two wingmen, three half-forwards, and one full-forward (sometimes called a ‘centre forward’ in South Australia and colloquially known everywhere as a ‘goalsneak’). The backup ruckman would start in the back pocket with the backup ruck-rover and rover heading to the forward pockets; the two ‘line shifts’ (to borrow a term from ice hockey) of followers would, according to this 1937 article in The Argus written by dual Brownlow medallist Ivor Warne-Smith, switch positions at least once per quarter.

The positional role which changed the most over the first three quarters of the twentieth century was the one which came to be known as the ruck-rover. After the fin-de-siècle elimination of two of the four ruckmen on each side, teams began to realise that it was more effective to use only one of the ruckmen to contest bounces and to use the other one to negate the opposition’s main ruckman. This so-called ‘ruck shepherd’ role, which seems to have been more prominent in South Australia than in Victoria, was umpired out of the game, but the division of labour at ruck contests remained. By the time that Ron Barassi was deployed in this position under Norm Smith in the great Melbourne side of the late 1950s, the clunky term ‘ruck-rover’ had come into use to describe the ‘first receiver’ of hit-outs at the ruck.

For most of this era, no single position on a football field was lionised in quite the manner of, say, the quarterback in American football or the number ten in Argentine soccer. The full-forward came close, however, during the late 1920s and 1930s. A change in the out-of-bounds rule in 1925 provided for a free kick against the team which last touched the ball (all out-of-bounds had resulted in a boundary throw-in previously; free kicks were first awarded for out-of-bounds on the full in 1969). This forced a change in tactics: teams were less willing to play along the wings, preferring instead to bomb the ball long to the forward line. The great full-forwards of the era became the stars of the game before the rule change was rescinded in 1939.

The complaints about congestion which accompanied the reduction of teams to eighteen-a-side in 1899 continued; for example, The Australasian’s chief football writer ‘Markwell’ complained of the VFL in 1908 that “…though there are nominally but two followers, practically the whole eighteen men are on the ball, and open work is impossible.” The VFA played with seventeen-man teams between 1908 and 1911 (by removing the second ruckman) and with sixteen-man teams between 1912 and 1918. The decline in spectator numbers during the Depression led to further questioning of the eighteen-man orthodoxy: in 1937, the Ballarat League proposed shifting to fifteen players per side, while in the same year the VFA considered replacing centre bounces with a kick-off, lessening the importance of ruck contests so that the two taller followers could be removed to make the game sixteen-a-side.

The VFA did opt for sixteen-a-side football in 1959, only reverting to eighteen-a-side in 1992. The two positions removed, however, were the wingmen, which created an end-to-end, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am style of play which endeared the Association to casual television audiences in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the next instalment, I will look at how positions have evolved since the introduction of the interchange bench in 1978.

La Grande Milan

Since I first began studying soccer tactics (mainly through the writings of Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian and Michael Cox at Zonal Marking), I have noticed that the AC Milan side which won back-to-back European Cups in 1989 and 1990 has a certain cult status among connoisseurs of tactics. Being too young to have seen them in action at the time (although some of the players were still knocking about when SBS came to Albury in 1997), I decided to get on YouTube and find out just why this team are so revered.

I rossoneri were coached by Arrigo Sacchi, who later took Italy to the 1994 World Cup final. Sacchi’s preferred style consisted of a 4-4-2 with a flat midfield four, pressing, and an ideological preference for team structure over individual flair (in the mid-2000s, he lasted only twelve months as technical director at Real Madrid, disagreeing with the club’s fetish for signing celebrity players at the expense of cultivating young talent).

The quality of the cattle at Sacchi’s disposal is evident by looking at Milan’s line-ups for its two European Cup victories (a 4-0 win over Steaua Bucharest at the Nou Camp and a 1-0 victory over Benfica in Vienna). Full-back Paolo Maldini and centre-back (and captain) Franco Baresi feature in many modern ‘greatest ever’ XIs. Frank Rijkaard and Carlo Ancelotti commanded the centre of midfield. Marco van Basten played slightly ahead of compatriot Ruud Gullit up front. In those days before the Bosman ruling, the Dutch trio were the only non-Italians in the team.

The match which I will be focusing on is the second leg of their 1989 European Cup semi-final, a 5-0 win over Real Madrid at the San Siro which followed a 1-1 draw at the Bernabéu. So far in the then-knockout competition, Milan had beaten Levski Sofia comfortably, Red Star Belgrade on penalties, and Werder Bremen narrowly; their opponents had needed extra time to get past PSV Eindhoven, while Steaua Bucharest and Galatasaray were the other two semi-finalists. (English clubs were, at the time, banned from European competition due to that country’s hooligan problem; Sports Illustrated recently speculated that this milanista side would have beaten the great Liverpool team of that era.) The Madrid side boasted names like Emilio Butragueño, Bernd Schuster, and Hugo Sánchez; in the match, they wore an all-royal blue away kit with long sleeves and oh-so-eighties white chevrons down the seams.

After an opening eighteen minutes in which the best chances came from corners, Milan took the lead thanks to a wonder strike from Ancelotti. Full-back Mauro Tassotti’s throw-in found Gullit who proceeded to lose the ball, but the Madrid players were immediately surrounded by a phalanx of red-and-black-striped shirts and found themselves unable to cleanly take possession. The defenders pushed the ball back to the Dutchman who survived a strong challenge to find Ancelotti unmarked in midfield. The current Real Madrid manager dribbled around two opponents and fired a shot past the keeper from roughly thirty metres out.

Six minutes later, after the madrileño defence successfully forced the ball back to the halfway line after a corner, a lightning counter-attack won Milan a second. Winger Roberto Donadoni passed short to Tassotti, whose cross was (in the words of Dennis Cometti) centimetre-perfect and Rijkaard rose above his marker to head it into the auld onion bag. “Milan, splendido!” said the commentator, adding that it was a “stupendo secondo gol per il Milan.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Butragueño had a legitimate appeal for a penalty turned down after being brought down by goalkeeper Giovanni Galli while chasing a loose ball. Gullit then showed sublime ball control to send Sánchez the wrong way and execute an on-target shot from the same range as Ancelotti’s earlier goal. The oranje playmaker was everywhere, getting a header away to Donadoni’s post-corner cross, and then being brought down in the box by Ricardo Gallego after Rijkaard collected the ball from a goal kick and found him with a lovely through ball.

Milan would go to the break with a 3-0 lead (having made eight shots to three), courtesy of the man of the moment. Ancelotti was advancing forward and managed to offload the ball to Donadoni as he was tackled. Donadoni weighed up his options before combining with Gullit for a one-two past Manuel Sanchís. Now in the left-hand corner of the pitch, Donadoni again got the better of the hapless Sanchís, dribbling around him to put in a cross with his right foot. He had van Basten and Gullit in the box, and right-winger Angelo Colombo advancing unmarked toward the goal. But the number ten was in the best position, and he headed toward the far post, leaving marker Rafael Gordillo and keeper Paco Buyo wondering exactly what had just happened.

It wasn’t long before they had their fourth goal. The attack began in the centre circle, as Tassotti found Rijkaard in space due to a distinct lack of defensive pressure on the part of los merengues. Rijkaard then launched a high ball towards Gullit in the penalty area. He collected the pass with his head, and in doing so drew the two centre-backs towards himself, leaving van Basten with enough time to control the ball well before hitting the top left-hand corner of the net.

Gullit had earlier been seen in the technical area receiving treatment for an injury, and he was stretchered off before the hour mark and replaced by the grey-haired Pietro Paolo Virdis. It made little difference as Tassotti and Donadoni again combined to force an attack from a corner kick. On this occasion, Donadoni decided to blast the ball from the corner of the penalty area into through a crowd of players. The final half-hour was a quiet affair as the 5-0 scoreline meant that the Italians’ spot in the final was all but assured.

(As mentioned earlier, that final ended with them running out 4-0 winners against Gheorghe Hagi’s Steaua Bucharest.)

Sacchi’s Milan had it all: a solid back four who pressed together in a way that made them look like a rugby league team advancing on an opposing ball-carrier, wingers capable of using the space on the flanks to create chances, Ancelotti’s brilliance on the ball, and the Gullit-van Basten partnership up front. They were also known for their offside trap (a skill which has been made less useful by FIFA’s mid-2000s changes to the offside rule); in the first leg of the tie at the Bernabéu, the home side bothered the linesman twenty-seven times.

Since retiring from coaching, Sacchi has gone on record to assert that soccer has not evolved tactically since his great Milan side. On one level, this sounds silly – surely he must have noticed the tiki-taka of Barcelona, the gegenpressing of Bayern München and Borussia Dortmund, and the innovative methods of coaches like Marcelo Bielsa and Louis van Gaal.

But on another level, Sacchi may be right. His gameplan is spoken of as the philosophical successor to the totaalvoetbal of the Netherlands and Ajax in the 1970s; indeed, a few years ago, Sacchi ranked that cohort of players with his rossoneri and Pep Guardiola’s blaugrana as the three greatest he had ever seen.

The essence of totaalvoetbal was the subordination of the individual to the collective by the interchanging of player positions. In soccer, due to the restricted number of substitutions allowed per match (three in competitive matches today; two in the heyday of Cruijff and Co.), players cannot be easily replaced by another specialist in their position in the way that, say, AFL on-ballers or NFL running backs can be. Thus, players are forced to be versatile. With the globalisation of the sport (leading to the exaltation of individual talents like David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo) and larger squad sizes (meaning that players can easily be interchanged between matches even if they can’t be within them), it is easy to see that soccer is moving away from the ideal of ‘universality’ favoured by Sacchi towards a focus on the creativity and flair of the individual player.

This, then, was one of the greatest squads ever assembled. Like the Paris Commune and the Bavarian Soviet Republic, however, it didn’t last. The physical demands of Sacchi’s style, particularly the pressing, took their toll on the players. And, perhaps, with the rise of squad rotation, the idealisation of the great number nines and tens, and the division of labour between holding and attacking midfielders, we will never see another team quite like La Grande Milan.

Anzac Test match review: Australia v. New Zealand at Brisbane

A spate of four tries in the twenty minutes leading up to half-time, coupled with a twenty-minute period of superlative defensive work after the break, have ensured that New Zealand retain bragging rights in the battle of the two finest exponent nations of le rugby à treize.

Australia attacked hard early, and when they won a penalty in front of goal against the run of play in the eighth minute, an unsure New Zealand took the two points. Five minutes later, a goal-line drop-out was returned for a Kangaroo try, Cooper Cronk hitting Sam Thaiday with a low, flat pass. And then the avalanche began.

In the twentieth minute, St. George winger Jason Nightingale intercepted an Australian pass, and the All Golds hustled the ball up the low-grade Lang Park turf, Manu Vatuvei doing the honours. The same player doubled his try tally eight minutes later, catching a sixth-tackle kick and bustling over in the corner. Then, in a manner reminiscent of Germany’s domination of the restarts in their 7-1 win over Brazil in last year’s World Cup semi-final, i bianconeri needed only one set of six to go from kick-off receivers to try-scorers; this time it was Shaun Johnson diving through the Australian defence.

The nightmare wasn’t over for the home side. A Cronk fumble was followed in short order by a penalty, which led to a Nightingale kick. Greg Inglis uncharacteristically miscued his jump, leaving Easts centre Shaun Kenny-Dowall with little to do but pounce on the loose ball, grounding just as the clock ticked over to complete its fortieth minute.

What followed after the break was quite possibly one of the finest displays of goal-line defending ever witnessed. On five occasions leading up to the fifty-eighth minute did la oro y verde advance to within metres of the Kiwi line; on five occasions were they denied. Josh Dugan was forced into touch in-goal; Cronk was tackled short of the line by Roger Tuivasa-Sheck; Dugan went close again but could only engineer a scrum from a Vatuvei knock on.

It was only on their sixth forward thrust of the period that Australia were able to score, Melbourne Storm centre Will Chambers narrowing the deficit to sixteen points, and Jonathan Thurston’s conversion shaving off two more. But that, aside from a forward pass denying Luke Lewis a try and an offside call denying Kenny-Dowall a second, was to be all she wrote.

Australia 12 – New Zealand 26

Tries: Thaiday 13’; Chambers 59’ (Aust.); Vatuvei 20’, 28’; Johnson 32’; Kenny-Dowall 40’ (N. Z.)

Conversions: Thurston 2/2 (Aust.); Johnson 3/4 (N. Z.)

Penalties: Johnson 2/2 (N. Z.)

A-League elimination final match review: Adelaide United v. Brisbane at Adelaide

The first match of this season’s A-League finals was a superb display of attacking association football by both sides, and one felt disappointed that only one of them could go on to fight another day.

The excitement began in the seventh minute, when Craig Goodwin curled in a spectacular free kick (at a distance later measured at 27.7 metres) to put the hosts 1-0 up. The same player nearly doubled the lead seven minutes later when Sergio Cirio put him through on goal. There followed more Adelaide chances, and just as many Brisbane counter-attacks, before Dylan McGowan failed to clear the ball from defence, allowing the on-rushing Thomas Broich to steal the ball and put himself one-on-one with the keeper.

Though their coach is Catalan, there was nothing tiki-taka about Adelaide’s play; their verticality and gegenpressing instead evoking antipodean echoes of Borussia Dortmund. Brisbane, too, defended solidly and then moved the ball forward with the minimum possible number of passes.

The second half opened at a slightly slower tempo, and la roja looked somewhat less dangerous at set pieces. Both clubs made substitutions; Adelaide traded Marcelo Carrusca for target man Awer Mabil, while the Roar brought on Costa Rican import Jean Carlos Solórzano. Matters then began to proceed at the ferocity of the first half: a seventy-third-minute through ball to Pablo Sánchez and a seventy-fifth-minute corner which caused a commotion in the box made Adelaide look the likelier side; this impression was furthered when Cirio settled and had his shot saved in the eightieth minute.

The men in orange, however, weren’t finished yet. Two minutes later, Solórzano set up Andrija Kaluđerović who crashed into Reds’ keeper Eugene Galekovic, followed closely by captain Matt McKay having a crack himself. But it was Adelaide’s off-the-ball work which won them the match. Miguel Palanca, earlier substituted on for countryman Sánchez, stole the ball from an oranje attacker in his own half with three minutes of regulation time left on the clock. He combined with Cirio to counter-attack forward, and it was his cut-back from the goal line which found Mabil. Former English youth international goleiro Jamie Young, who had been magnificent all night, was unlucky here in getting only his fingertips on the ball, and the Reds found themselves heading to the Sydney Football Stadium for a blockbuster preliminary final.

Adelaide United 2 (Goodwin 7’; Mabil 87’) – Brisbane 1 (Broich 27’)

Ultra-football

There’s nothing I love more than the crisp aroma of a fresh Wikipedia article. It would appear that Aspirex has taken time out from his wonderful series of articles chronicling each season of the VFA-cum-VFL to write the definitive history of a forgotten episode in the history of our great game: the period between 1938 and 1949 when the Victorian Football Association and allied district leagues in central and north-eastern Victoria, Gippsland, and north-western Tasmania permitted the so-called ‘throw-pass’ as a means of disposing the ball to evade a tackle.

Of the five rule changes brought in by the VFA for its 1938 season, three have since become permanent features of football (the prohibition against dropping the ball, downfield free kicks, and players being able to take free kicks on behalf of an injured teammate). The fourth was the re-introduction of the boundary throw-in (a free kick had been awarded against the last player to touch the ball before it went out of bounds since 1925; the modern distinction between throw-ins and set kicks for ‘out on the full’ dates from 1969). It was the fifth rule change which had the greatest effect: players were allowed to make a two-handed throw, either forwards or backwards, as long as their hands remained below shoulder height; in other words, the throw was not intended to be a means of advancing the ball (as per the rugby codes) but instead a means of getting out of danger. (Contemporary reports suggest that throw-passes usually travelled fewer than ten yards.)

Even more interesting were the proposed rule changes which were not adopted. First, teams would be reduced to sixteen players by eliminating the ruckman and ruck-rover (the VFA did go to sixteen-a-side between 1959 and 1992, however it did so by eliminating the two wingmen). Second, centre bounces would be replaced by a kick-off. Third, only two players from each team could contest boundary throw-ins. Fourth, umpires could send players off (complaints about rough play had become common in the 1930s due to the proliferation of scrimmages). Fifth, three points would be awarded for hitting the post (a rule trialled many years later in the AFL’s 1996 one-off revival of the lightning premiership, complete with [if I remember correctly] red flags waved by the goal umpires).

(An extended aside. Doing some ‘troving’, I found this set of rule changes proposed contemporaneously in the Ballarat League. Many are similar to the VFA’s ideas, except that the Ballarat administrators wanted to do away with behinds and award three points for a goal and one for a ‘poster’.)

The idea that the VFA’s rule changes constituted the formation of a separate football code is not a commonly-accepted one, and the split did not possess the social and political je ne sais quoi of that between the two rugby codes. Nevertheless, because the history of the sport has been written by the winners (i.e. the VFL-cum-AFL), the improvements made by the VFA have never quite gotten the recognition they deserve.

I use the word ‘improvements’ deliberately. In the first season of the new rules, the average score per team per match jumped from 84.74 points to 100.46. The 1938 Grand Final, played at Toorak Park between Brunswick (the Magpies; black and white stripes) and Brighton (the Cabbage Growers; white with red yoke) produced only six ball-ups, somewhat down on the 65.9 seen in the first round of this year’s AFL season, and thirty-eight boundary throw-ins. Furthermore, the VFA entered one of its golden eras, signing big names like Ron Todd, Bob Pratt, and Laurie Nash away from the junior circuit.

Until its abandonment of the throw-pass in exchange for a seat at the table of the sport’s governing body, the football produced in the VFA was fast, furious, and free-flowing. By contrast, the football played today is blighted by constant stoppages caused by players not doing enough to evade tackles and by the scrimmages which inevitably form at ball-ups and boundary throw-ins. The increasing number of ruck duels as well as the hard surface at Docklands Stadium has led to the dominance of tall players, and the art of kicking from set shots has declined due to the enforcement of a time limit.

In reviewing the second round match between Port Adelaide and Sydney at the Adelaide Oval, this blog marvelled at the intensity of the first quarter of that match, labelling it (in an obscure reference to a line of dialogue from a Spanish film screened on SBS2 earlier that morning) ‘ultra-football’. What made that quarter ‘special’ (to use a Bruce McAvaneyism) was the constant defensive pressure applied by both sides. The ball was being jarred loose by the ferocity of the tackling, and players about to be tackled preferred to get rid of the ball rather than let their opponents get settled in at a ruck contest.

The VFA’s proposed rule changes of 1938 would go a long way to making every quarter of football like that one. My proposal is that the AFL adopt all of them, with the exception of the reduction of teams to sixteen players (we don’t want to eliminate ruckmen entirely, just reduce the exaltation of height in the modern game) and the granting to the umpires the power to send players off (let the tribunal handle that sort of thing).

But, of course, they won’t. Twenty-minute quarters and constant stoppages make the game more digestible for casual television audiences at the expense of the integrity and heritage of the sport. Perhaps a split like the one that existed between 1938 and 1949 is exactly what football needs.