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.
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