There comes a time in any holiday when pick up the obligatory holiday book and rifle through a few pages while you sit by the pool. Well, you do that if you’re not me, anyway. I tend not to read by the pool for one simple reason: you won’t find me by the pool. I’ll either be in the pool, or I’ll be somewhere else. I get in, swim for an hour or so, wander back to the hotel room, shower, and then read a bit more.

In fact, I took a thumping 4,036 pages worth of books with me to read whilst on holiday (although I only made it through around 3,200 of them). The first book to be carried around me, which is now indelibly imprinted with the smell of insect repellent — after a bottle leaking incident which ruined my phone — was Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid, a book about the history of football tactics.

Correction: make that the book about the history of football tactics. I’m very aware that even in writing this review that I cannot adequately do justice to the book: it is simply better than I can express, and conveys much more information than I can hope to iillustrate with a couple of quotes. What I can say is that if you are interested in the development of football — why teams use the tactics they do, as well as how they evolved, then you simply must read this book.

Even if, like Ricky Tomlinson’s Mike Bassett, the only formation for you is four-four-bloody-two, this will still tell you how it got there.

It takes us back to the start of formalised football: when other than the goalkeeper you basically have much of the rest of the players running around after the ball trying to score — and introduces the very first pyramid system to us, the 2-3-5.

This may seem alien to people unfamiliar with older football tactics (wot? only two defenders?) but it demonstrates beautifully where a lot of the British football terminology comes from: after having seen the diagrams, I’m familiar with what an ‘inside-right’ actually was…

And it isn’t just a story about tactics: it also provides colour to historical managers and players you may (or may not) have heard about. From Herbert Chapman’s development of the W-M formation (and the fact that the third defender dropped back from the previous position in central midfield) it explains the seeming peculiarity of British defences being made up of full backs and centre halves, and this is coupled with an abbreviated version of the ‘Herbert Chapman story’ — that prior to joining Arsenal he was actually banned from football for life, only for the FA to relent after a couple of years.

Nor is the story just about the British game: tactics from Russia, from Hungary, from France, from South America are scrutinised as well as a chapter on Italy’s Catenaccio. And it is in the development of these tactics that some little gems of stories and characters start to emerge: Béla Guttman probably deserves a book of his own but his quirkiness — and some unexpected success — lead to some delightful stories:

…when the time came to negotiate a new deal, he insisted on a huge bonus should Enschede win the league. As the club was struggling to avoid relegation out of the Eastern Division, the directors readily agreed. Their form promptly revived and, after they had narrowly missed out on the national championship, their chairman admitted that towards the end of the season he had gone to games praying his side would lose. Guttman’s bonus would have bankrupted them.Inverting the Pyramid, p97

There’s a chance to look at why the traditional numbering systems in the standards 4-2-4 tactic differ between England, Argentina and Uruguay — basically the three countries evolved their use of the tactic through different routes and with different players switching their positions.

Even the ‘long-ball’ games gets discussed with different variations and explanations — Graham Taylor’s effective ‘pressing with long range passing’ at Watford through to the ‘purer’ long ball of Wimbledon. There’s quite an informative look at the statistics which were used by Charles Hughes (although devised much earlier) who when he was at the FA insisted that the long ball game was the way forward for English football and set out recommending it.

Not only are the deficiencies of the long ball game ruthlessly dissected (although this is only fair: the deficiencies of every other tactic covered are ruthlessly dissected also) but points out that the statistics used to favour the long ball actually, if you look at them closely, show that moves of six or more passes are in fact more likely to lead to a goal than moves of five or fewer — at which point the kindest thing is possibly just to say that the people who used these stats to promote the long ball didn’t really understand statistics so well.

Influences on the likes of Sven-Göran Eriksson and Roy Hodgson are discussed, and there’s even time to acknowledge that the goal-poacher centre forward is now something of an anachronism in today’s game and of increasingly less use to the team (as illustrated all too painfully to me by Newcastle’s decline being mirrored by an increasingly ineffectual Michael Owen).

…Owen was highly critical of the then-England coach Kevin Keegan’s efforts to expand his repertoire in the build up to Euro 2000 but the reality may be that putting the ball in the back of the net is no longer sufficient — or, at least, not at the very highest level. [...] He appears a player left behind by the tactical evolution of the gameInverting the Pyramid, p349

Intriguingly on the following page there is an analysis of Manchester United — now Owen’s current team. It will be interesting to see therefore whether he is a success at Old Trafford — how he fits into Ferguson’s tactics, whether he can adapt his game long term (he certainly attempted this under Keegan at Newcastle, with a slightly deeper-lying role) and in short whether he makes a successful Manchester United stay as a goal poacher only.

Only time will tell, and only time will tell where the next evolutionary step in the development of football tactics will be, but it would appear that after taking us through 2-3-5, W-M, 4-2-4, 4-3-3, 3-5-2, many more — including of course 4-4-2 — that Jonathan Wilson suspects that the first steps are already being taken towards a 4-6-0 type of formation…