Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

FIRST EDITION

© Michael Cox 2017

Cover design Simeon Greenaway © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com, DariuszPa/Getty Images

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Source ISBN: 9780008215552

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Version: 2020-01-02

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Part One – In the Beginning

1 A Whole New Ball Game

2 Cantona & Counters

3 The SAS & The Entertainers

Part Two – Technical Progress

4 Between the Lines

5 Arsènal

6 Speed

Part Three – Expansion

7 Euro Progress & Squad Rotation

8 The Foreign Revolution

9 Big Sam & Long Balls

Part Four – Universality

10 One Up Front

11 Invincibles & Convincibles

12 The Makélélé Role

Part Five – Reactive Strategy

13 Iberian Influence I

14 Iberian Influence II

15 The Midfield Trio

Part Six – Direct Attacking

16 Roonaldo

17 A Wet and Windy Night at Stoke

18 Inverted Wingers

Part Seven – Possession

19 The Italian Job

20 Tiki-Taka

21 Assisters & False Nines

Part Eight – Post-possession

22 Rodgers’ Reversal

23 Pressing Issues

24 Leicester

25 Three at the Back

Postscript

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Publisher

Introduction

‘Get it in the mixer!’

These five words represent the simplest tactic in football: launch the ball into the penalty box, take advantage of the ensuing chaos, perhaps following a goalmouth scramble, and hope to pinch a scruffy goal.

It’s an approach rightly ridiculed today, but as recently as the 1980s it was English football’s most popular tactic. During this period tactical thinking was influenced heavily by Charles Hughes, the Football Association’s director of coaching, who clumsily employed statistics to illustrate the value of launching the ball quickly downfield. He effectively formulated English football’s national coaching curriculum, as well as working alongside England managers Bobby Robson, who was sceptical about Hughes’s methods, and Graham Taylor, who was altogether much keener.

Hughes was obsessed with players thumping the ball into the ‘position of maximum opportunity’ (POMO) – inside the box, level with the far post – as often as possible. Hughes did have other, more sophisticated ideas, but his obsession with POMO dominated, and harmed, English football by creating predictable, simplistic teams and one-dimensional, brain-dead players. At the time of the Premier League’s formation in 1992, therefore, English football was considered to be about long balls, about route one, about POMO, about getting it in the mixer.

But this was a darker period for more significant reasons, as an overwhelming hooligan problem meant English football was derided both in the national media and across Europe. The nadir came with the 1985 European Cup Final at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium, when Liverpool supporters charged at Juventus fans, resulting in 39 people being killed by a collapsing wall. English clubs were subsequently banned from European competition for five years, and English footballing culture, traditionally slow to embrace tactical innovations from abroad, consequently became even more insular.

There were other tragedies. A fortnight before the Heysel disaster, 56 people were killed at Bradford City’s Valley Parade by a fire that engulfed an entire stand within minutes. Four years later, grave policing errors at Hillsborough resulted in the deaths of 96 people, a tragedy subsequently blamed, consistently and incorrectly, upon supporters.

In the aftermath of the Bradford fire a leading article in the Sunday Times described football as ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums, increasingly watched by slum people’. It was a desperately distasteful description, but serves as a useful low-water mark for measuring English football’s subsequent development. Slum people? The problem of hooliganism was largely defeated in the years that followed. Slum stadiums? The Taylor Report recommended all-seater grounds, and the Premier League’s formative years were dominated by new or dramatically renovated stadiums. Slum sport? English football changed enormously during the Premier League era, its popularity rising dramatically, first within England and then across the world.

While the Premier League was identical in its basic sporting structure to its predecessor, the old First Division, England’s top flight benefited from something of a rebrand considering the aforementioned problems, and 1992 isn’t an entirely arbitrary start date for football’s modern age – as explained in the opening chapter.

The concept of the Premier League enabled top-flight clubs to gain independence from the Football Association and the Football League, allowing them to negotiate lucrative broadcast and sponsorship contracts. The broadcasting aspect proved most significant; a bidding war between ITV and Sky ensued, with the latter securing TV rights in a move that completely transformed its previously loss-making satellite subscription service. Incidentally, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson was one of the fiercest critics of the Premier League, ridiculing the concept as a ‘piece of nonsense’ that would ‘sell supporters down the river’. But Ferguson would define the division more than anyone, winning 13 of the first 21 titles before his retirement in 2013.

This book isn’t an account of the Premier League’s business development, but it’s impossible to ignore the extraordinary surge in TV revenue. The Premier League received £51m per season in broadcasting rights between 1992 and 1997, then considered an astounding amount. This sum increased exponentially over the next two decades, reaching £2.75bn per season by 2016, 50 times more than in 1992. Sky were effectively paying over £11m to screen each live match, a staggering figure when you consider rights to the entire final old First Division season cost less than £15m. A division essentially created to provide televisual entertainment has proved successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

It’s worth remembering, too, that these figures weren’t plucked out of thin air. Broadcasters could justify paying these eye-watering sums because of the huge public demand, which was fuelled by the Premier League becoming such a fantastic spectacle, the world’s most thrilling league. Set against the dark days of the 1980s, it represents an incredible turnaround. How did the football – the ‘product’, as the marketing men would say – become quite so good?

This book seeks to explain how. Although the 25 years are represented by 25 chapters, this is a thematic rather than a literal season-by-season account. The focus is upon the revolutionaries: the innovative managers, the game-changing players, the inspirational teams, the new tactical concepts, the off-field developments that influenced playing styles. The story is about the Premier League becoming universal, in two different ways.

First, it became universal on a tactical level. In the early 1990s there were very specific demands for every position – defenders simply defended, attackers simply attacked. But gradually positions became more all-encompassing, with defenders expected to start attacking moves and attackers encouraged to start defensive pressure. Players were increasingly all-rounders rather than specialists.

Second, it also became universal on a geographical basis, as English clubs broadened their horizons and became increasingly dependent upon foreign players and managers. Amazingly, on the Premier League’s opening weekend in August 1992, just 11 foreign players started for the 22 clubs combined, and there were no foreign managers. By its 25th season, the majority of Premier League players and managers were foreign – and almost every major footballing nation on earth was represented. Of the top 25 countries in the FIFA rankings, only Mexico didn’t have a Premier League representative in 2016/17.

The combination of these two factors saw Premier League sides abandon ugly, straightforward, direct football and embrace a more cultured, continental, technical style. This is the story of the Premier League’s remarkable tactical evolution – from pie to paella, from route one to false nines.

Part One

In the Beginning

1

A Whole New Ball Game

‘The back-pass law is the best rule change ever – it has changed the game.’

Peter Schmeichel

We are constantly reminded that ‘football didn’t start in 1992’ in response to Premier League-centric historical records, but 1992 effectively marked the beginning of modern football. It was the beginning of a new, exciting, more entertaining era of the game, the watershed moment that prompted sweeping changes to create a more fast-paced, technically proficient sport.

However, it had absolutely nothing to do with the formation of the Premier League.

The introduction of the back-pass law in 1992 had a transformative effect upon football. Not since 1925 – when the offside law was altered so that only two opponents, rather than three, needed to be goalside of an attacker – had a law change been so effective at improving the spectacle of the world’s most popular sport. There have been minor alterations to the Laws of the Game during the Premier League era: different interpretations regarding offside, stricter laws governing tackles, revisions to kick-off. But 1992 was literally a game-changer.

The law change was simple. Previously, goalkeepers were allowed to use their hands if the ball was deliberately kicked to them by a teammate. Now, they were not. They could still handle the ball if a teammate headed, chested or even kneed it back, and throw-ins back to the goalkeeper could be picked up until 1997, but goalkeepers were forced to use their feet more than ever before, effectively becoming part of passing moves.

There was an extremely good reason for the law change. Hitherto, teams could time waste infuriatingly when leading matches; the goalkeeper would roll the ball out, the defenders would retain possession until an opponent challenged, then return the ball to the goalkeeper, who would pick it up and restart the process. It was often very tedious, and in hindsight it’s incredible that any team ever contrived to lose a lead. The ultimate example came in the dying seconds of Rangers’ European Cup first round tie against Dynamo Kiev in 1987. With Rangers 2–1 ahead on aggregate and building an attacking move, midfielder Graeme Souness received the ball midway inside the opposition half, immediately turned towards his own goal and thumped a 70-yard backward ball to his goalkeeper Chris Woods. Souness, incidentally, would later suffer from the back-pass change more than most.

Examples of negative play became particularly obvious at the 1990 World Cup, a tournament so dreadfully negative that FIFA felt compelled to take action. The new law came into effect two years later, in time for the inaugural Premier League campaign.

While some managers, like Luton Town’s David Pleat, spoke in favour of the change, there was a significant backlash from most top-flight managers, including the last two title-winning bosses. ‘I don’t think this is going to enhance the game at all,’ complained Arsenal’s George Graham, while Howard Wilkinson, who had taken Leeds United to the final pre-Premier League title in 1991/92, suggested the new laws would simply encourage long-ball football. ‘If the new rule is the authorities’ idea of how to foster better football, then the experiment will prove counter-productive,’ he declared. ‘The new ruling will be manna from heaven to a coach working with his long-ball side.’

Wilkinson predicted teams would concentrate on pumping long balls in behind the opposition and use a ‘goalie-blocker’, lingering in an offside position, to intercept potential back-passes from defenders to the goalkeeper’s feet, forcing them to hack the ball into touch instead. ‘FIFA have inadvertently encouraged more long-ball football,’ he maintained. ‘This isn’t a mad, scientific nightmare, this is the reality as stipulated by the overlords of the world game.’ Wilkinson’s view, that route one football would become dominant, found support from many managerial colleagues.

But the back-pass law served its initial purpose, and teams were no longer able to time waste so blatantly. Wilkinson’s predictions about long-ball football weren’t entirely inaccurate immediately following the law change – Leeds’s matches in a pre-season friendly tournament against Stuttgart and Sampdoria were notable for the opposition repeatedly playing hopeful balls in behind the Leeds defence, hoping for errors – but he failed to foresee how goalkeepers and defenders would adjust and gradually become comfortable in possession, creating a more technically advanced sport.

There were significant knock-on effects. Teams had a greater incentive to press in advanced positions, forcing defenders into mistakes, and managers were less inclined to play stiflingly aggressive defensive lines, because covering the space in behind now involved playing out of trouble. As a result the game became stretched, which created more room in midfield. Arguably the biggest change was in the speed of matches – players had previously become accustomed to breaks in play while goalkeepers held onto the ball. Suddenly the action had become non-stop.

These developments, the consequence of one simple law change, played into the hands of the Premier League, a division created specifically to provide televisual entertainment. Sky Sports introduced plenty of innovations, including a simple idea that has become universally established: displaying the score and clock on the top-left of the screen. Other Sky gimmicks were less successful: pre-match firework displays were scrapped after a stray rocket was launched out of The Dell and into a nearby petrol station, while the use of cheerleaders was short-lived, possibly after concerns from the presenter over their understanding of the offside rule. But none of this artificial razzmatazz was as crucial as the back-pass law in making the Premier League a fantastic show, and Sky were hugely fortunate that world football took an enormous step forward ahead of 1992/93. Without this significant improvement in the spectacle of matches, the Premier League wouldn’t have developed into the multi-billion-pound product it is today.

While supporters quickly realised the benefit of the back-pass change, many players found themselves exposed. The impact was first noticed in pre-season, when Manchester City goalkeeper Andy Dibble suffered a broken leg in a friendly against a League of Ireland XI, struck by sudden indecision as a slow back-pass approached, eventually attempting to tackle the opposition striker. ‘I wasn’t sure whether to kick the ball or pick it up,’ Dibble complained, describing himself as ‘the first victim’ of the law. However, defenders struggled more than keepers, and the Premier League’s opening day, 15 August 1992, was a comedy of errors.

Fourteen minutes into Leeds’s 2–1 victory over Wimbledon, Dons right-back Roger Joseph panicked inside his own penalty box, caught in two minds – should he pass back to goalkeeper Hans Segers or simply clear the ball? Eventually he did neither, scuffing the ball barely two yards, allowing Leeds’s Lee Chapman to pounce – and presumably leaving Leeds manager Wilkinson unsure whether he should celebrate or ruefully shake his head at the ‘reality as stipulated by the overlords of the world game’. Down at Highbury, Norwich recovered from 2–0 down to defeat Arsenal 4–2, a victory secured with a classic example of back-pass confusion. Norwich launched a high pass into the opposition half, forcing Arsenal captain Tony Adams to deal with a bouncing ball. He nervously glanced back to his goalkeeper, realised David Seaman didn’t want the ball, so instead attempted a square pass to centre-back partner Steve Bould. But Adams missed the ball completely and stumbled, allowing Mark Robins to steal in and chip Seaman, scoring the goal that ensured Norwich were the Premier League’s first-ever leaders.

Both goals in Chelsea’s 1–1 draw with Oldham at Stamford Bridge were related to the back-pass law: Oldham centre-back Ian Marshall, troubled by his inability to play the ball back to his keeper, slipped when attempting to control a long ball and allowed Mick Harford to open the scoring. But then Chelsea goalkeeper Dave Beasant, having received the ball from a defender, scuffed his kick, allowing Nick Henry to equalise. The new rules were causing chaos.

There was also a ‘positive’ goal scored from the back-pass rule, however. Sheffield United’s Brian Deane had headed the Premier League’s opening goal against Manchester United, then scored another from the penalty spot. This second arose because Blades midfielder John Gannon looked set to play a back-pass, saw an opponent making a run to intercept his potential pass (although he wasn’t quite a ‘goalie-blocker’) and so turned his way out of danger before playing a left-footed pass into the channel. Striker Alan Cork raced onto it, was tripped by Gary Pallister, and Deane converted the penalty. There were just seven seconds from Gannon’s turn until the penalty award – without the new law, the ball would still have been in the goalkeeper’s hands at the opposite end.

Compilers of ‘football’s funniest gaffes’ VHS tapes must have been delighted. The most comical error came in early September at Tottenham, and resulted in the dismissal of Sheffield United goalkeeper Simon Tracey. He’d already been booked for handling the ball outside the box, and then, when presented with a back-pass in the second half, panicked. He was closed down quickly by Spurs’ Paul Allen, and proceeded to dribble the ball sideways, taking it directly out of play for a Tottenham throw. When Tracey tried to retrieve the ball from next to the advertising hoardings to prevent Spurs taking the throw, a quick-thinking ball boy snatched it away, chucked it to Spurs sub Andy Gray, which prompted Tracey to rugby-tackle Gray to the floor. He was dismissed. Blades manager Dave Bassett wasn’t impressed. ‘He’s got the brains of a rocking-horse – and I told him so.’

This was not simply an English phenomenon, of course, and there were similar problems across Europe. North of the border, Rangers opened the scoring in October’s Scottish League Cup Final when Aberdeen goalkeeper Theo Snelders bizarrely chested a wayward clearance from a teammate straight into the path of a grateful Stuart McCall. It wasn’t an intentional back-pass anyway, and wouldn’t have been penalised, but Snelders was clearly unaware of the regulations and was left screaming at his defenders, ‘I can’t pick it up!’ The biggest impact came in Italy. Serie A was traditionally Europe’s most defensive division, and following goals-per-game averages of 2.11, 2.24, 2.29 and 2.27 in the four seasons before 1992/93 it suddenly jumped to 2.80, an unprecedented rise. The Premier League didn’t witness such a surge, rising from 2.52 in the final old First Division season to 2.65 in the opening Premier League campaign, but the back-pass law clearly affected the nature of the division, with certain teams particularly struggling.

The most famous victims were Liverpool. Many have linked their inability to win a Premier League title, having dominated the 1970s and 1980s, to the introduction of the back-pass law. In reality they finished sixth in both the final First Division season and the first Premier League season, but Liverpool’s players admit it affected them badly. ‘It was constantly in your mind as a defender – you can’t play the ball back,’ remembered defender Nick Tanner. ‘Previously, Liverpool would just kill the game off. We’d be 1–0 up, play the ball back to Bruce Grobbelaar. He’d bounce the ball a bit, Phil Neal would drop off, and Bruce would roll it out to him. That all stopped.’ Their manager during this period was Souness – the man responsible for the back-pass to end all back-passes.

Arsenal also suffered. They were the bookmakers’ title favourites, having scored the most goals in the top flight during 1991/92, but they struggled to build play from deep and scored the fewest goals during 1992/93, underlining the extent of the back-pass change. However, they adapted well defensively and remained an excellent side in knockout competitions, winning the League Cup and FA Cup – both, coincidentally, with 2–1 victories over Sheffield Wednesday.

But the biggest losers, significantly, were a very direct side – Wilkinson’s Leeds. Having triumphed the previous season, they slipped backwards alarmingly and finished 17th in the Premier League’s inaugural campaign, failing to win away all season. Considering that Wilkinson predicted route one football would prosper under the new regulations, it was ironic that his own players suffered precisely because they could no longer play that way. Goalkeeper John Lukic became the first Premier League goalkeeper to be penalised for handling a back-pass, from centre-back Chris Whyte – whom Wilkinson had rated as the division’s best centre-back in the previous campaign but who struggled considerably with modern football. ‘The back-pass law affected us particularly,’ midfielder Gary Speed later admitted. ‘The centre-backs used to stroke the ball back to the goalkeeper, and John Lukic used to launch it up to me and Lee Chapman. Suddenly we weren’t allowed to play that way anymore.’

Fellow midfielder Steve Hodge agreed. ‘Previously John Lukic would hold the ball and he’d launch it to us high up the pitch,’ he explained. ‘Now, Lukic would have to launch it from the floor and the ball wasn’t going far enough down the pitch. We were much less of a threat because the ball wasn’t landing or being flicked to the edge of our opponents’ area, it was bobbling around in the midfield. Also, teams would now really push up and made Lukic kick it quickly.’ It’s notable how much emphasis was placed upon the simple concept of how far the goalkeeper could kick, indicating the accepted method of distribution at the time.

Nottingham Forest also paid a heavy price for the new regulations, finishing bottom. Legendary manager Brian Clough had other problems by this stage, particularly his alcoholism, which, as he later admitted, clouded his judgement significantly. But his side’s style of football didn’t suit modern football, as Gary Bannister outlined. ‘Where we’ve suffered is when we’ve had the ball, we’ve played it back to Mark Crossley and he has cleared it,’ he said. ‘On most occasions the ball has come straight back at us, putting us under pressure. Mark having to hump the ball up the field has not helped us at all. Last season, a back-pass would have kept us possession and Stuart Pearce, Brian Laws or Gary Charles would have picked the ball up from the keeper to start us off again.’

Pearce, slightly surprisingly for a regular set-piece taker, looked particularly nervous when forced to play out and was responsible for the most famous misplaced back-pass of this era. After eight seconds of a November 1993 World Cup qualifier against minnows San Marino, he underhit the ball towards David Seaman, allowing Davide Gualtieri to give San Marino a shock 1–0 lead over England, who nevertheless won 7–1. That match was also the final England appearance for Pearce’s ex-Forest teammate Des Walker. He’d raced to 59 caps in the space of five years and was described as ‘the outfielder England manager Graham Taylor can least afford to lose’ in the Guardian a year earlier. But Walker discovered his talents no longer suited the modern game, and his England career was over at the age of 27. As Harry Redknapp later said, ‘When they did away with the back-pass in 1992 it made a huge dent in Des’s game. He used his speed to nip in front of the striker, mop up the ball and knock it back for the goalkeeper to pick up … suddenly, he was being required to play his way out of trouble, and that wasn’t his style at all.’

Indeed, one of the notable features of the early Premier League seasons – in line with Wilkinson’s prediction – was the frequent sight of defenders, when chasing long balls back towards their own goal, simply hacking the ball out of play to concede a throw-in. ‘I’ve told the players, “If you’re in doubt, kick it out,”’ said Coventry manager Bobby Gould. ‘“Stop fannying about and put it in Row Z.”’ It’s no coincidence that the first PFA Player of the Year during the Premier League era was Paul McGrath, the Aston Villa centre-back who played the ball comfortably with both feet. No other defender adjusted so impressively to the new law, and the Irishman became the template for the modern centre-back, as managers increasingly required ball-playing defenders rather than old-fashioned cloggers. A player like Rio Ferdinand, for example, would have been a midfielder rather than a centre-back were it not for the back-pass change.

Inevitably, the role of goalkeepers changed enormously. It was the first time that they had been forced to adjust since the 1912 law change that ruled they could handle only inside the penalty box rather than in the entirety of their own half. Goalkeepers, rightly famous for moaning, were outraged. ‘The new rule is making a mockery of my profession,’ complained Alan Hodgkinson, the ex-England shotstopper who became renowned as the country’s first specialist goalkeeping coach. ‘I know people will assume I’m biased but I can’t see the value of setting up goalkeepers so they look foolish. There’s not one who hasn’t been caught out. Is that good for the game? You have to remember that keepers have spent 20 years learning to catch the ball. It’s second nature to them. It’s not easy to adjust.’ Tough luck. The rules were here to stay, and goalkeepers were forced to spend long training sessions practising an entirely new skill – kicking a moving ball. The goalkeeper, football’s most specialised position, needed to become more of an all-rounder.

One of Hodgkinson’s key achievements was recommending Peter Schmeichel to Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, before acting as the Dane’s coach. Schmeichel would define goalkeeping during this period, and was the only Premier League player who was the world’s greatest in his position. He was physically imposing, capable of tremendous close-range reaction stops and a master of the double save, springing up quickly to thwart rebounds. Schmeichel’s approach wasn’t textbook, and his positioning wasn’t as flawless as Arsenal’s Seaman, his goalkeeping rival of the 1990s. The Arsenal shotstopper was his opposite: quiet, understated and solid, whereas Schmeichel was loud, bold and unpredictable. Schmeichel introduced English football to the ‘starjump’ save – where he would spread arms and legs while leaping towards a striker – having borrowed it from handball, which Schmeichel played regularly as a teenager. ‘A goalkeeper is not a footballer, a goalkeeper is a handball player,’ former Manchester City manager Malcolm Allison declared in the 1960s. For Schmeichel, that was literally true.

Schmeichel had benefited heavily from the pre-back-pass situation. He started the Premier League era on a completely unexpected high, having won Euro 92 with Denmark – who hadn’t even qualified for the tournament initially, but were handed a late reprieve when civil war forced Yugoslavia to withdraw. In the last major tournament before the back-pass change, Denmark demonstrated why reform was desperately required, with centre-back Lars Olsen continually knocking balls back to Schmeichel to pick up, an approach that gradually spread to the rest of the side. The second half of the final, a 2–0 victory over Germany, featured particularly infuriating examples of time wasting. With five minutes remaining, Danish forward Flemming Povlsen collected the ball midway inside his own half, dribbled determinedly towards the opposition goal, but was tripped on the halfway line. He picked himself up, dusted himself down, then turned around and fired the ball 50 yards back to Schmeichel. ‘Every time we got into the German half and couldn’t find someone to pass to, players would turn around and pass to me, and I would pick it up,’ Schmeichel later recalled somewhat sheepishly. ‘How can you win football matches like that?!’

The new law forced goalkeepers to become more comfortable in possession, and Schmeichel was proactive in evolving. Upon arriving at Manchester United the previous summer, with back-pass reform on the horizon, Schmeichel insisted that the goalkeepers should play a more active role in training. Rather than being separated from the main group, Schmeichel wanted to take part in passing sessions with the outfielders, an important change both tactically and psychologically. He would later stun opponents by charging upfield for corners when United were behind in the dying seconds, sometimes with great success. This has become accepted practice in modern times, but Schmeichel introduced the concept to English supporters, first showcasing his attacking qualities on Boxing Day 1994, when United were 1–0 down at home to Blackburn Rovers. With three minutes remaining, Schmeichel raced forward into the opposition box, distracting three startled opponents and enabling Gary Pallister to find space; he headed towards goal, and Paul Ince smashed in the equaliser.

Schmeichel had already scored multiple times in Denmark, and later netted a consolation goal for United with a powerful header in a 1995 UEFA Cup tie against Russian side Rotor Volgograd. He also had an overhead kick against Wimbledon disallowed for offside – surely the first-ever goalkeeper penalised for that offence – and would, fittingly, become the first Premier League goalkeeper to score, during his sole season at Aston Villa. Schmeichel was a genuine revolutionary, convincing fellow goalkeepers that they weren’t simply about defending their own goal from opposition attacks and that they could launch – and indeed finish – attacks of their own.

But Schmeichel wasn’t particularly reliable with his feet in traditional goalkeeping areas. In Manchester United’s second-ever Premier League game, a 3–0 home defeat to Everton, the great Dane made the first possession-based goalkeeping error of the post-back-pass era when he was tackled by Everton’s Mo Johnston, who curled the ball home. The majority of Schmeichel’s errors came with his feet or when sweeping outside his penalty box; he kicked the ball straight to West Ham’s Matthew Holmes in February 1994, allowing the winger to cross for a Trevor Morley goal, then three months later gifted Ipswich’s Chris Kiwomya an open goal when air-kicking outside his box, and he was dismissed in an FA Cup quarter-final against Charlton when handling 15 yards outside his penalty area.

Other, less celebrated goalkeepers adjusted well, like Norwich’s Bryan Gunn, who contributed to his side’s excellent passing football. Seaman also coped admirably, partly because he was accustomed to playing behind Arsenal’s famously aggressive offside trap and was encouraged to sweep proactively by George Graham. Even before the back-pass change, Graham had Seaman working on kicking the ball with his weaker foot, then an extremely rare skill for a goalkeeper, although the rule change did cause him problems. ‘When the rule came in, first of all, you went to the safety route,’ he admitted. ‘If someone passed it back to you, just booted it, you just made sure you got good contact. Then you develop that and get a bit more confident with the ball, so you try to control it … the more you do it, the better you get – you learn who to pass to, where to find players.’ As goalkeepers increasingly passed the ball rather than hoofed it, they acted as an eleventh outfielder, and teams started playing out from the back.

Schmeichel, meanwhile, once had a blazing row with Ferguson over the subject of his kicking. Manchester United were 3–0 up at Anfield in January 1994, but contrived to blow their lead and drew 3–3. Ferguson was understandably furious, but surprisingly targeted Schmeichel for continually sending balls up the middle of the pitch, where Neil Ruddock was heading them back, allowing Liverpool to maintain their pressure. Schmeichel didn’t appreciate the criticism, and after Ferguson had threatened to throw a cup of tea over his goalkeeper, he launched a volley of abuse. He later phoned his agent demanding a transfer, although Ferguson called him into his office the next day and told him that he was going to be sacked anyway. After the Dane apologised, both to his manager and his teammates, Ferguson reversed his decision, and Schmeichel spent five more years at the club, ending his extraordinary spell by lifting the European Cup as captain in 1999.

Schmeichel never entirely solved his kicking problems, however, making two atrocious errors with his feet both home and away in a 1998 FA Cup tie against relegation strugglers Barnsley, who won the replay. Considering the nature of his international success with Denmark, and his subsequent struggles with kicking, it’s impressive Schmeichel put personal preferences aside to declare that ‘the back-pass law is the best rule change ever – it has changed the game.’

Significantly, however, Schmeichel popularised the concept of a goalkeeper acting as a playmaker – but with his hands rather than his feet. His incredible long-range, overarm throws had barely been witnessed before in English football, and became a fundamental part of Manchester United’s attacking weaponry. Ferguson’s side largely played counter-attacking football at this stage, based heavily around wingers Ryan Giggs and either Andrei Kanchelskis or Lee Sharpe, who frequently received the ball on the run, because Schmeichel could accurately hurl the ball half the length of the pitch. ‘When I get hold of the ball, I try to create counter-attacking opportunities,’ Schmeichel explained. ‘It’s not always successful, but the tactic forces the opponents to turn around and head for their own goal, which is both strenuous and demoralising.’ Schmeichel even recorded assists with his hands. In February 1994, away at QPR, he launched the ball straight up the centre for the speedy Kanchelskis to dribble forward and open the scoring in a 3–2 win. Two years later, in a 5–0 thrashing of Sunderland – a game better remembered for Eric Cantona’s legendary chip into the top corner – Schmeichel caught a tame header and immediately, from three yards off his line, chucked the ball into the opposition half for Ole Gunnar Solskjær, who raced clear of the defence and finished calmly.

Not until Pepe Reina, who joined Liverpool in 2005, did the Premier League witness a goalkeeper so adept at these immediate, accurate long-range throws to launch counter-attacks. By this stage goalkeepers were generally also extremely comfortable with their feet, the majority growing up accustomed to the modern laws. ‘I was ten years old when they changed the back-pass rule,’ said Reina, who won the Premier League Golden Glove award three consecutive times. ‘I was still young enough, thankfully. It caught me just in time, as I was beginning to develop my skills.’ But even by this stage, in the mid-2000s, Reina’s kicking received significantly less attention than his throwing, indicative of how Schmeichel had created the template for the Premier League goalkeeper. ‘Schmeichel’s long throws were so powerful and allowed his team-mates to create danger at the other end … his approach was clearly ahead of his time,’ said Serie A veteran Samir Handanović. Nigeria’s Vincent Enyeama summarised the thoughts of a generation of keepers: ‘Even though Edwin van der Sar was my role model, Schmeichel brought in a different kind of goalkeeping.’ Schmeichel was the first Premier League player to provide inspiration across the world.

Van der Sar, who excelled for Manchester United around the same time as Reina was doing so for Liverpool, was famed for his quality in possession, primarily because he grew up at Ajax, where the visionary Johan Cruyff had insisted that the goalkeeper be an eleventh outfielder long before the back-pass change. Van der Sar became the accepted goalkeeping role model, with Thibaut Courtois and Manuel Neuer citing him as their inspiration because he was so comfortable on the ball. Kicking had become an essential part of modern goalkeeping, and those poor in possession found themselves marginalised.

Meanwhile, Schmeichel also helped revolutionise the Premier League in a different manner entirely. Of the 242 players who started a Premier League match on the Premier League’s opening weekend, just 11 were foreign. By virtue of simple probability, you’d expect only one of the 11 to be a goalkeeper. Instead, it was four: Schmeichel, plus Wimbledon’s Dutchman Hans Segers, Canadian international Craig Forrest at Ipswich and Czech Jan Stejskal for QPR. A year later, with overseas outfielders still rare, there were six more foreign regulars between the posts: Australian Mark Bosnich at Aston Villa, Russian Dmitri Kharine at Chelsea, Norwegian Erik Thorstvedt at Tottenham, Zimbabwe’s Bruce Grobbelaar, who had regained his place at Liverpool, and two more Czechs, Luděk Mikloško of West Ham and Pavel Srníček of Newcastle. Jim Barron, then the goalkeeping coach at Aston Villa, noted how foreign goalkeepers were more proactive than their English counterparts, commanding their box better and possessing superior distribution. England had always prided itself on the quality of its goalkeepers, but foreign imports were evolving the role.

Goalkeepers in the Premier League’s first couple of seasons were therefore significant for two clear reasons. First, the change to the back-pass law meant they broadened their skill set and became all-rounders rather than specialists, a development subsequently witnessed in every other position. Second, there was a concerted shift towards foreign players at the expense of homegrown talent, another process that would be replicated across the pitch. Goalkeepers were traditionally considered outsiders, but now they were leading the way into football’s modern age.

2

Cantona & Counters

‘Being French, to me, is first and foremost being a revolutionary.’

Eric Cantona

Upon the formation of the Premier League, Manchester United hadn’t lifted the league trophy in a quarter of a century, which made their dominance of its early years even more remarkable. Alex Ferguson’s side triumphed in four of the first five seasons.

These five years coincided with the half-decade reign of Eric Cantona – and United’s only failure during this period, finishing second in 1994/95, came when the fantastic French forward was suspended for half the campaign. His impact upon United was extraordinary, turning them from also-rans to consistent champions almost overnight, and his influence on the Premier League was unparalleled. Cantona, more than anyone else, popularised technical football.

At a time when foreign players were still rare, this was a Frenchman of Italian and Spanish descent who strolled into English football stadiums, collar upturned, as if he owned them. Cantona was unlike anything England had previously encountered: when listing his inspirations, he mentioned Diego Maradona and Johan Cruyff, but also Pablo Picasso, Jim Morrison and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Brilliantly, when he referenced French poet Rimbaud, journalists mistakenly believed he was talking about 1980s action movie character Rambo. Cantona was almost a satirical character, a French philosopher trapped in English dressing rooms, where cutting up teammates’ clothes was considered the height of wit – and he clearly played along with the act. Teammates said he spoke English well, yet when quizzed by tabloid reporters his language skills suddenly deserted him, preserving his status as the baffled outsider. When Manchester United’s squad went for a post-match drink, the standard round was 17 lagers and one glass of champagne.

It wasn’t entirely about Cantona being from abroad, however. He’d earned a similar reputation in France, where he bounced between various Ligue 1 clubs with alarming regularity, usually after serious breaches of discipline. In his enlightening biography of the man, Philippe Auclair notes that in the late 1980s Cantona had become ‘the first celebrity footballer in his country’s history’, known primarily for his peculiar cultural references rather than his pure footballing ability. He’d risen to national prominence following his displays for France’s U21 side, who featured heavily in the sports programming of the new, innovative subscription TV channel Canal+. Cantona was the perfect protagonist for the trendy channel’s focus and, sure enough, he became the ideal figurehead for Sky and the Premier League, too.

Cantona’s most infamous moment in English football came in January 1995. Just after being dismissed for kicking out at Crystal Palace defender Richard Shaw, he reacted to abuse from Palace supporter Matthew Simmons by launching himself over Selhurst Park’s advertising hoardings to perform an extravagant ‘kung-fu’ kick on Simmons, an incident that brought an eight-month worldwide football ban and effectively ended his international career. While a disgraceful act, it was nevertheless a momentous incident for the Premier League; it featured heavily on news bulletins in countries as distant as Australia and New Zealand, the first time that England’s new top flight had become a genuinely global story.

It was probably inevitable the division would initially receive attention for negative reasons, considering the problems of the 1980s, but as reports explained Cantona’s background, they introduced viewers to the most intriguing character in English football, someone who clearly bucked the stereotype. British newspapers went to town: the Sun featured the incident on their front page two days running, on the second with a panel reading ‘The Shame of Cantona: Full story pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 22, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47 & 48’. The Premier League was big news. After Cantona successfully appealed against a two-week prison sentence for his attack, he reluctantly attended a press conference, where he slowly, thoughtfully told the assembled press: ‘When the seagulls … follow the trawler … it’s because they think … sardines … will be thrown into the sea. Thank you very much.’ He then stood up, shook the hand of his lawyer and swiftly departed to stunned laughter.

The crucial factor in Cantona’s image, however, was that he wasn’t simply different to every other Premier League player in terms of personality; he was also different to every other Premier League player in terms of footballing style. The references to philosophers and artists worked precisely because he was a footballing genius who boasted guile, creativity and unpredictability. He thrived upon space between the lines and was a creator as much as a goalscorer, boasting the Premier League’s best-ever assists-per-game record. He loved chipping goalkeepers, he casually rolled home penalties, and he produced a succession of outside-of-the-foot flicks and elaborate, stabbed, dinked passes to teammates.

Cantona was also exceptional in a physical sense, ready for the rough and tumble of the English top flight. When Cantona had finally burnt his bridges in his home country, France assistant manager Gérard Houllier – keen to find Cantona a top-level club for the sake of the national side – suggested England specifically because Cantona possessed the strength and aerial power to survive. Cantona was six foot two, and his most distinctive physical feature was his chest, eternally puffed out. He held up the ball excellently, shrugged opponents aside nonchalantly, and a surprising number of his goals and assists came with his head. He was also quicker than assumed, as his speedy Manchester United teammate Ryan Giggs often mentioned.

Cantona didn’t move straight from France to Manchester, however, and his introduction to English football was somewhat inauspicious. Sheffield Wednesday accommodated him for a week, although the precise purpose of this exercise was seemingly lost in translation; Cantona believed he was coming to sign, journalists assumed it was a trial, while manager Trevor Francis insists he was simply doing a friend a favour by letting him train. Whatever the truth, Cantona’s only appearance in a Wednesday shirt was, utterly bizarrely, in a six-a-side friendly against American indoor specialists Baltimore Blast, which ended in an 8–3 defeat at Sheffield Arena, where Francis had enjoyed a Simply Red concert earlier in the week.

Cantona ended up 35 miles north, signing for Leeds United midway through their 1991/92 championship-winning season. Although he only scored three goals in 15 appearances that season – none of them directly winning a point – he became something of a cult figure among Leeds supporters, who once improvised a questionable version of ‘La Marseillaise’ in tribute to their star centre-forward. But Leeds didn’t suit Cantona; manager Howard Wilkinson distrusted flair players and stated bluntly that no foreign forward had ever succeeded in English football, underlining how Cantona was fighting against the tide. ‘Can Eric adapt to life in England or can we adapt to Cantona? Do I ask him to change or do I ask Leeds to change to the French style?’ pondered Wilkinson, before declaring, ‘There will be no French revolution because that, in our football terms, would inevitably suffer a defeat.’ Cantona was often bypassed as Leeds played a succession of long balls, although he started 1992/93 in tremendous form, hitting the only hat-trick in Charity Shield history, then the first-ever Premier League hat-trick. Still, his relationship with Wilkinson, and his history of rebelling against authoritarian managers, meant that he never had a long-term future at Elland Road. Ferguson and Manchester United pounced.

The story about Cantona’s transfer is famous – Wilkinson phoned Manchester United to enquire about the availability of full-back Denis Irwin, and Ferguson took the opportunity to ask about Cantona. But it wasn’t simply a fortunate swoop: Ferguson had already been seriously interested, and had specifically asked centre-backs Gary Pallister and Steve Bruce for their opinion after Leeds’s visit to Old Trafford. Both suggested he was a difficult opponent because he took up unusual positions, and Cantona had also produced a spectacular bicycle kick, saved by Peter Schmeichel, that drew an unusual round of applause from across Old Trafford for an away player.

Crucially, as revealed in Auclair’s biography, Ferguson had recently attended a Rangers v Leeds Champions League tie, sitting alongside Houllier, and after Cantona reacted angrily when substituted, Houllier expressed concern, wryly remarking that he’d need to find Cantona another club. Ferguson was immediately interested, but only pounced after youngster Dion Dublin, a considerably more straightforward striker, suffered a broken leg. Ferguson sniffed around other players: creative forwards like Matt Le Tissier and Peter Beardsley, but also more typical strikers like David Hirst and Brian Deane. He was open-minded about the type of forward he required, because first-choice striker Mark Hughes was a one-in-three rather than one-in-two goalscorer, and many suggested he needed to play alongside a ruthless goalscorer, prompting Ferguson’s interest in Alan Shearer before he joined Blackburn that summer. But Cantona was for sale when others weren’t, and joined United for the ludicrously small fee of £1.2m – incredible considering Ferguson had unsuccessfully offered over £3m for Hirst.

The purchase of a player in Cantona’s mould revolutionised United’s tactical approach overnight. While Ferguson unquestionably deserves enormous credit for United’s success during this period, his side lacked a defined style until the Frenchman’s arrival. Ferguson encouraged attack-minded football with width, in keeping with United’s traditions – but there was a rudimentary approach in the final third, epitomised by the time winger Andrei Kanchelskis stormed off the training pitch in frustration at yet another crossing drill, muttering ‘English football is shit’ on his way – not an unreasonable comment at the time. Ferguson was considered a man-manager rather than a footballing philosopher or astute tactician. Schmeichel, who would become Cantona’s roommate on away trips, summarised Cantona’s first training session concisely. ‘From that day, Manchester United’s style of play changed,’ he said. ‘The arrival of Cantona suddenly made it clear to the coaching staff exactly how the team should play to be successful.’ Cantona was the catalyst for United’s revolution, and their success set the tone for the tactical development of rival Premier League clubs, which was initially accelerated by the influence of inspirational foreign players rather than managerial philosophies.

Cantona was capable of playing either as a traditional centre-forward or as a playmaker, having filled both roles at various stages of his career. For United, he was generally used in the number 10 role behind a traditional striker, effectively turning United’s 4–4–2 system into a 4–4–1–1. The Premier League had very few deep-lying forwards in this mould; Teddy Sheringham, who would later replace Cantona at United, became renowned as an excellent ‘withdrawn’ forward, although at this stage was more of a target man, winning the inaugural Premier League Golden Boot with 22 goals, having transferred from Nottingham Forest to Tottenham three games into the campaign. Southampton’s Matt Le Tissier was in a similar mould to Cantona, but was suffering under the management of Ian Branfoot, who wanted his defenders to thump long balls downfield. Neither Sheringham nor Le Tissier had yet been capped by England. Peter Beardsley, another of Ferguson’s targets, was the most similar type of forward, although often found himself out of the Everton side. Besides, Beardsley lacked Cantona’s flamboyance and wasn’t superstar material – he was among the quietest, humblest players in the top flight, whereas Cantona was surely the most arrogant, albeit with some justification.

English football was historically suspicious of deep-lying forwards, despite the likes of Ferenc Puskás and Diego Maradona causing the national team so much misery over the years. It was considered a foreign role, and extravagance in English football was usually the domain of tricky wingers, with Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews and George Best among the most revered players. Even Paul Gascoigne, England’s most talented player of this era, was a number 8 rather than a number 10, a midfielder who burst forward from deep. It was unfortunate the Premier League didn’t witness Gascoigne at his best: he spent its first six years with Lazio and then Rangers, only returning to England with Middlesbrough and Everton in his thirties. Ferguson, incidentally, says being beaten by Spurs to Gascoigne’s signature in 1988 is one of his biggest regrets in football, and Gascoigne would later phone Ferguson in the summer of 1995 (when Cantona was serving his eight-month ban and intending to leave England) begging for a move to United. Ferguson, however, concentrated on convincing Cantona to stay.

Ferguson had a close relationship with Cantona throughout his five years at Old Trafford. Whereas Ferguson took a schoolmasterly approach to the majority of his players, Cantona was afforded the rare privilege of a cup of tea with his manager before training every day, and while it’s difficult to imagine anyone entirely understood Cantona, Ferguson came closest. Managers often suggest the toughest part of their job is affording star players special treatment without prompting dissent from the rest of the squad, and Ferguson quickly realised he needed to make allowances for Cantona, sparing him from blasts of ‘the hairdryer’, as Manchester United players called Ferguson’s tendency to scream in their faces after bad performances.

Winger Lee Sharpe tells an amusing, revealing anecdote about the United squad’s reception at Manchester Town Hall shortly after their first title victory. The rest of the squad wore smart black suits, but Sharpe arrived in an olive-green silk outfit with a green tie. This inevitably prompted Ferguson to come over and admonish him, at which point Cantona strolled into the room with a suit, no tie – and red Nike trainers. Ferguson let out a cry of frustration and simply stormed off. A similar incident occurred when Ferguson was about to criticise Sharpe for getting a skinhead haircut on a pre-season tour, only to suddenly notice Cantona had the same, forcing him to bite his tongue. ‘There were times when the different treatment Eric got was laughable,’ Sharpe complained. ‘It was one set of rules for him, and another for the likes of me.’ After Cantona’s infamous kung-fu kick at Selhurst Park, Ferguson’s first instinct in the dressing room afterwards was to complain about sloppy defending for Crystal Palace’s equaliser.

In general, footballers accept a star teammate being indulged, and on the pitch Cantona was effectively handed a free role with licence to roam wherever he pleased. He contributed little in defensive situations, as Roy Keane later recalled. ‘Often we’d give him a bollocking for not tracking back. We certainly did more than our share of running for him. Then, just when exasperation was being felt, and expressed, Eric would produce a bit of magic to turn the game our way.’ English football was learning that players in Cantona’s mould were worth embracing, worth freeing from defensive responsibilities, and a footballing culture that valued hard work and commitment above everything else was forced to reconsider its principles. United’s youth coach Eric Harrison, upon first seeing Cantona in training, said he ‘wanted to kidnap him and spend a week talking to him about football’.

Tactically, opponents simply weren’t structured for stopping Cantona. Ordinarily, centre-backs were fighting against centre-forwards, and central midfielders were involved in running battles with their opposite numbers. Players like Cantona, who interpreted the game differently and dropped into the space between opposition defenders and midfielders, were able to enjoy plenty of time on the ball. ‘Eric, no matter the tempo or the maelstrom of Premier League football,’ Ferguson said, ‘has that ability to put his foot on the ball and to make his passes. That in itself is almost a miracle.’ So much of this, however, was simply about Cantona’s initial positioning, combined with his ability to hold off defenders when they approached. Previously, United had focused on attacking down the flanks, or hitting longer passes to centre-forward Hughes, who was superb at bringing down high balls and feeding teammates. But Cantona orchestrated United’s attacking play wonderfully, and like the very best number 10s – particularly Maradona, but also, in Premier League terms, Dennis Bergkamp and Gianfranco Zola – was a selfless footballer who recognised that his individual freedom should be used for the collective good.

In addition to Cantona’s on-field contribution, he was also a tremendous example to his teammates in training. He insisted upon some level of autonomy – his own warm-up routines before joining in with the other players’ warm-up, for example – but United teammates agree he raised the standard of training considerably. His professionalism inspired the club’s emerging youngsters, including the ‘class of ’92’, featuring Giggs, David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Paul Scholes, and Gary and Phil Neville, surely the greatest set of footballers ever produced by an English youth academy.

‘During my time at Manchester United I was lucky enough to have a lot of people who put in countless extra hours to get better,’ Ferguson wrote in his autobiography. ‘Gary Neville turned himself from an average footballer into a wonderful one because of his work ethic, as did David Beckham. I remember Eric’s first day, and after the training session had finished he asked for a goalkeeper, two players from the junior team who were still there, and a few footballs. I asked him what he needed those for, and he said he wanted to practise. When word got back to the other players, one or two more turned up the next day for an extra session and so the number grew. That was all because of Cantona’s work ethic and influence.’ Phil Neville has a slightly different interpretation, which makes more sense considering there are plenty of tales about the incredible dedication of him, his brother and Beckham before Cantona joined. He says that Cantona didn’t inspire the youngsters to work hard – they did that already – but he made it ‘acceptable’ to do so, ensuring they weren’t seen as teacher’s pets by experienced members of the squad.

Where it counted, on the pitch, Cantona made an immediate difference. His stunning, instant impact is occasionally overlooked: he arrived at Old Trafford in late November 1992 with United in eighth place, nine points behind surprise leaders Norwich City, having scored a pitiful 17 goals in 16 league games. A title challenge was unthinkable. But with Cantona’s arrival United’s scoring rate doubled and they rose to top of the table after the first game in January.

Manchester United’s most famous victory during the title run-in was unquestionably their 2–1 victory over Sheffield Wednesday at Old Trafford, when United found themselves 1–0 down going into the final five minutes, before two headers from centre-back Steve Bruce produced an unlikely turnaround. Bruce’s second arrived deep into an unusually extended period of stoppage time – the referee had been replaced because of injury – which was the start of Manchester United’s habit of scoring crucial late goals throughout the Premier League era, and gave rise to the expression ‘Fergie time’. Ferguson and his assistant Brian Kidd famously spilled onto the Old Trafford pitch in their jubilant celebration of a winner that put Manchester United top of the table, a status they wouldn’t relinquish. However, United’s most tactically significant victory occurred five days earlier, away at Norwich. This display would dictate the big-game approach under Ferguson for years to come, and is the single most influential team performance in the history of the Premier League.

For a significant period of 1992/93, Norwich were title favourites. They’d been the first Premier League leaders after a surprise 4–2 victory over Arsenal, which appeared nothing more than a freak opening-day result, Norwich having only escaped relegation on the final day of the previous season and being widely tipped for the drop having sold star striker Robert Fleck to Chelsea. However, Norwich’s key man was actually Mike Walker, a likeable, calm, silver-haired Welshman and among the most promising managers in the country. In an era when route one remained dominant, Norwich’s passing football, their tendency to score spectacular goals and their underdog status ensured they became the neutral’s favourite. Other Premier League managers were man-managers and disciplinarians, but Walker loved discussing tactics and offered a clear, forward-thinking philosophy. He’d been dismissed from his only previous managerial job, at Colchester, because his chairman considered Walker’s brand of passing football ‘too soft’ for the lower leagues – despite the fact Colchester were only one point from the top of Division Four. Walker claimed he was ‘happy to win every match 4–3’, although Norwich actually suffered several heavy defeats and, peculiarly, finished in third place despite a goal difference of –4.

Norwich’s default formation was 4–4–2, but it was a flexible system most notable for the advanced positioning of the two full-backs, Mark Bowen and Ian Culverhouse. Right-winger Ruel Fox was among the quickest wingers in the league, central midfielder Ian Crook boasted a fine passing range and Mark Robins banged in the goals up front. They were the Premier League’s first good footballing side, and when they defeated Wimbledon 2–1 in December, their lead at the top was an incredible eight points after 18 games.

But then Norwich somehow failed to score in their next five games, almost proving the old-fashioned British dogma that continental football wasn’t suitable when winter arrived and pitches became boggy. Norwich recovered to play a significant part in the title fight, and started April top of the Premier League once again, with Aston Villa and Manchester United a point behind. The Canaries’ next fixture was a home match against Ferguson’s side, and while Villa couldn’t be ignored, this felt like a title decider. United appeared to be wobbling; winless in four matches, and without suspended centre-forward Hughes. It was widely anticipated that Ferguson would introduce veteran Bryan Robson in central midfield, with Brian McClair returning to the striking role he’d played before Cantona’s arrival.

Instead, McClair stayed in midfield alongside Paul Ince, and Ferguson deployed three natural wingers at Carrow Road, with Andrei Kanchelskis in the same team as Sharpe and Giggs, who essentially played as a centre-forward in advance of Cantona. The outcome was a quite astonishing spell of counter-attacking football, with Norwich dominating possession but United scoring on the break three times in the first 21 minutes.

The goals were incredibly direct. For the opener, Schmeichel typically hurled the ball 40 yards to Sharpe, on the left, who prodded the ball with the outside of his left foot to Cantona, waiting between the lines. The Frenchman controlled the ball, paused briefly as he waited for midfield runners, then played a through-ball that found no fewer than three United players – Sharpe, Ince and Giggs – beating Norwich’s offside trap simultaneously. Giggs collected the ball, rounded goalkeeper Bryan Gunn, could have passed, but rolled the ball home himself. From penalty box to goal in 12 seconds and eight touches.

The second featured even better interplay. Schmeichel moved to collect a loose ball inside the penalty area, but Steve Bruce thumped it to the right – straight to Kanchelskis, who volleyed the ball into the centre circle for Ince, who volleyed it back out to Giggs, who knocked the ball backwards for McClair, whose first-time pass found Kanchelskis running through on goal. The Russian winger had Cantona in support, but dribbled past Gunn and converted. From penalty box to goal again in 14 seconds and nine touches.

Just a minute later, Ince – the man supposedly anchoring the midfield behind five attackers – collected a loose ball in central midfield and immediately stormed past one, two, three challenges, bore down on Gunn and then flicked the ball right for Cantona, who fired into an empty net. This time, the move had only started from midway inside United’s half, but it took nine seconds and six touches for the ball to end up in the net.

The counter-attacking looked so simple; United simply waited for Norwich to push forward, then attacked into space with frightening speed. Each time they broke in behind with multiple players, each time they took Gunn out of the game before converting into an open goal. ‘We were a good counter-attacking side, but our performance exceeded even our own expectations,’ raved Bruce. ‘The speed and incisiveness of our movement, the quality of the passing, it was right out of the top drawer and Norwich couldn’t live with it.’

Ferguson could barely contain his excitement, saying, ‘Some of our football was breathtaking, unbelievable stuff,’ while Cantona later provided the best summary. ‘That was the turning point,’ he said. ‘We played a perfect game. We played perfect football.’ United went on to win the title, and that performance pointed the way to Premier League glory. Had Norwich defeated United and gone on to win the title themselves, their incredible underdog success might have popularised possession football. Instead, inspiration came from United’s speed.

Manchester United’s first Premier League title was achieved when things fell into place almost accidentally, but the following season, 1993/94, saw them reach a different level entirely. Players often remark upon the difficulty of defending a title – there’s less motivation to succeed, and opponents up their game against the champions – but Ferguson, who had retained the Scottish title with Aberdeen in the mid-1980s, astutely ensured his players maintained their desire. Before the start of the campaign he announced to United’s squad that he had a sealed envelope in his office drawer, containing a piece of paper with a list of players he believed lacked the hunger to win a second title. The trick proved highly effective, with his players determined to prove him wrong.

Ferguson, typically for this period, canvassed the views of his players about potential new recruits, and after they unanimously agreed that Nottingham Forest’s Roy Keane was a top-class midfielder, Ferguson broke the British transfer record to make one of his most important signings. This changed the balance of United – with McClair relegated to the bench, Keane formed a brilliantly aggressive, combative central midfield partnership with Ince. Cantona’s influence was naturally greater because he was present from the outset, while Giggs became a greater goal threat from the left and Kanchelskis, peripheral in the previous campaign, was outstanding down the right. Such was the emphasis upon battling central midfielders and electric wingers, some journalists depicted United’s formation as 4–2–4, although in reality it was a 4–4–1–1, and not dissimilar to the 4–2–3–1 that only became a recognised Premier League system a decade later.

United were utterly dominant throughout 1993/94. Within the opening fortnight they’d won away at their two title rivals from the previous campaign, Norwich and Aston Villa, and topped the table from the end of August onwards. They only lost twice until the end of March, both against Chelsea – although United defeated them 4–0 in the FA Cup Final, which clinched the club’s first-ever double. Ferguson’s first-choice XI played together 13 times, and won 13 times.

Subsequent United teams would become more cultured, particularly when Paul Scholes and David Beckham emerged to provide passing quality from midfield, which helped United progress in Europe. But in Premier League terms, Ferguson’s 1993/94 first-choice XI was perfectly suited to the week-in, week-out challenges of a division still based around physical football, with tough tackles, poor pitches and 42 games – four more than from 1995/96 onwards, when the division was reduced from 22 to 20 teams. They were ‘real tough bastards’ in Ferguson’s words, and he later suggested that his 1993/94 side were as good as the treble winners of five years later.

Manchester United’s 4–4–1–1, with combative central midfielders and speedsters out wide, would essentially become the standard tactical template throughout the Premier League’s first decade. The difficult part for teams hoping to follow in their footsteps, however, was obvious: finding their Cantona.

3

The SAS & The Entertainers

‘I’ll tell you, honestly, I will love it if we beat them. Love it.’

Kevin Keegan

Sir Alex Ferguson famously described his greatest challenge at Manchester United as ‘knocking Liverpool right off their fucking perch’. He had turned United into English football’s dominant side, and they would eventually overtake Liverpool in terms of league titles. During the mid-90s, however, United’s greatest title fights were not against Liverpool, but against clubs managed by two ex-Liverpool forwards: Kenny Dalglish’s Blackburn Rovers in 1994/95 and Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle United in 1995/96.

Under these managers, Blackburn and Newcastle did everything a year apart. Dalglish had taken charge of second-tier Blackburn in 1991 and achieved promotion in 1992. Keegan took charge of second-tier Newcastle in 1992 and won promotion in 1993. Blackburn hadn’t won the championship since 1928, Newcastle not since 1927. There were similarities between Keegan and Dalglish, too; they were born within a month of one another in 1951, and when Keegan left Liverpool for Hamburg in 1977, his replacement up front was Dalglish.

Tactically, both sides played 4–4–2, concentrating upon width, crosses and a towering number 9, and there was also a common link in defensive midfielder David Batty, who came into the side towards the end of both Blackburn’s 1994/95 triumph and Newcastle’s 1995/96 campaign. Both clubs, meanwhile, suffered a significant late-season slump during their title challenge. That might sound peculiar, considering Blackburn triumphed in 1994/95 and Newcastle are remembered as ‘bottlers’ for blowing a 12-point lead the following season, but Blackburn’s collapse had been equally dramatic. They contrived to lose three of their final five games during their title-winning season, including a dramatic final-day defeat at Anfield, where even Liverpool supporters wanted Blackburn to win, to deny rivals Manchester United another title and to witness Dalglish, an Anfield legend, lift the trophy.

Left-back Graeme Le Saux later outlined the extent of Blackburn’s nerves in the final weeks, admitting that the players became obsessed with Manchester United and claiming that Dalglish didn’t know how to control the situation. At half-time on that final day at Anfield, winger Stuart Ripley sat down in the dressing room and declared he was so nervous he couldn’t get his legs to work properly. Blackburn were saved by Manchester United’s failure to win away at West Ham. In the ‘bottling it’ stakes, therefore, there was minimal difference between Blackburn in 1994/95 and Newcastle in 1995/96 – aside from the fact that Dalglish convinced the outside world he had things under control, while Keegan had a meltdown live on TV with his famous ‘I will love it if we beat them’ rant.

Dalglish and Keegan were primarily man-managers and motivators rather than tacticians or training-ground coaches; they attracted players through their reputation as legendary players and broadly left them to their own devices. The most significant difference was the nature of their assistants. Dalglish’s only previous managerial post was at Liverpool, where he maintained the pass-and-move football his predecessors had introduced. At Blackburn, however, he was starting from scratch, and with more limited players, so his approach was much simpler. Dalglish decided he wouldn’t take charge of Blackburn without Ray Harford, widely considered one of the most intelligent, inventive English coaches of his generation.

Harford boasted managerial experience, having been promoted from assistant to manager at Fulham, Luton (where he won the League Cup) and Wimbledon. He would later succeed Dalglish at Blackburn, too. His Luton and Wimbledon sides were renowned for their direct football, and he provided the coaching expertise that Dalglish lacked for creating a straightforward but effective crossing side. Dalglish said his ‘coaching, organisation, his deep knowledge of football’ made him the perfect assistant, and Harford took almost every Blackburn training session, concentrating heavily upon ‘pattern of play’ sessions that improved Blackburn’s passing and movement.

Keegan, on the other hand, appointed his old Liverpool teammate Terry McDermott. Not only did McDermott, like Keegan, boast absolutely no previous coaching experience, he also had no coaching badges, had no intention of becoming a coach and had recently been spotted manning a burger van at a racecourse. ‘He’s not here in any capacity other than to help the atmosphere of the club,’ said Keegan, who personally paid for McDermott’s employment from his own salary. McDermott concentrated on taking players aside after training and improving a specific part of their technique. Blackburn had an assistant manager who took every training session and focused upon the collective, while Newcastle’s assistant manager didn’t take any sessions and focused upon individuals. Ultimately, that was a perfect microcosm of the sides’ approaches.

Blackburn were new kids on the block. Before the Premier League era they hadn’t featured in the top flight since before England won the World Cup, even dropping into the third tier during the 1970s. Their sudden rise owed much to the wealth of Jack Walker, a Blackburn-born millionaire who had inherited Walkersteel, a scrap-metal business, from his father and turned it into the largest steel stockholder in Britain. His munificence explains how second-tier Blackburn managed to attract Dalglish, already a multiple title winner as both player and manager with Liverpool, and how, having won promotion in time for the Premier League’s inaugural campaign, they promptly finished fourth, second and then first. Dalglish insists Blackburn’s title wasn’t solely about Walker’s millions, with some justification – although the signings of centre-forwards Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton both broke the record for the highest transfer fee paid by a British club. Both were old-fashioned number 9s who thrived on crosses, in keeping with Blackburn’s simple footballing approach, and they quickly became nicknamed ‘the SAS’ because of their ruthlessness in front of goal. They contributed 49 goals during Blackburn’s title-winning campaign and remain arguably the Premier League’s most famous strike partnership. Their off-field relationship, however, was less successful.

When Shearer signed for Blackburn in 1992 he was befriended by new strike partner Mike Newell on a pre-season tour of Scotland, and as he waited for his wife to move to Lancashire he spent plenty of time at Newell’s house. It was a classic footballing friendship; they played golf together, they travelled to training together, they were roommates on away trips and their great relationship continued on the pitch. Newell had previously been an out-and-out striker, but after Blackburn recruited the country’s hottest young goalscorer, Newell adjusted and played a deeper, supporting role. ‘He was an ideal striking partner, so unselfish and willing to cover every blade of grass,’ Shearer said. ‘Sometimes he gave the impression he would rather lay on goals for me than score himself … with him just behind the attack, opposition teams would push a defender out to mark him and that would give me more room in which to operate. He was a big reason for my success.’ Shearer won the Golden Boot in three of the first five Premier League seasons, and finished on a record 260 Premier League goals.

The arrival of Sutton, who had only recently become a permanent centre-forward at Norwich having often played in defence, changed things in two ways. Most obviously, Newell was the major victim and started just twice in Blackburn’s title-winning season. Meanwhile, Sutton stole Shearer’s thunder, taking his status as Britain’s most expensive player. He briefly became Blackburn’s highest-paid player, too, although Blackburn immediately handed Shearer a rise to reflect his seniority. ‘Suddenly, Alan was being asked to play with a guy who wanted to score as many goals as him,’ said Le Saux. ‘That was when I saw a side of Alan that I wasn’t keen on … Alan knew his relationship with Mike revolved around himself, and neither he nor Mike reacted well when Chris broke up their partnership.’

Sutton, a fearsome striker but a sensitive character who occasionally lacked confidence, later recalled the ‘lack of warmth’ from Shearer, blaming his friendship with Newell. When Sutton hit a hat-trick in a 4–0 victory over Coventry in Blackburn’s third game of the season, he was upset when Shearer didn’t celebrate with him. Publically, Dalglish insisted there were no problems between his two star strikers, but with Blackburn’s attacking play no longer based entirely around him, Shearer wasn’t best pleased.

It was nevertheless a stunningly effective strike partnership. Blackburn’s opening goal of their title-winning season, away at Southampton, set the scene. Captain Tim Sherwood lofted a long pass into the box, Sutton nodded the ball down, and Shearer smashed the ball home. Simple, but effective. Blackburn now had two strikers in the penalty box whenever possible, and without Newell playing the link role, focused heavily on getting the ball wide and sending in a stream of crosses.

As much as the SAS, Blackburn’s football was defined by their two wingers. Right-sided Stuart Ripley and left-sided Jason Wilcox were classic, touchline-hugging dribblers who sprinted to the byline and hung crosses into the box. As Dalglish put it, they were ‘proper wingers, not wide midfielders’. Nor were they goalscorers like Manchester United’s pairing of Ryan Giggs and Andrei Kanchelskis, who were capable of reaching double figures in a season, but rather facilitators, assisters and, unlike many wingers, extremely hard workers without the ball. Blackburn’s central midfielders, Sherwood and Mark Atkins (who played the majority of the season before being replaced by Batty, who returned from injury for the final five games), pushed forward in turn, the other protecting the defence. Sherwood was better in possession, Atkins cool in front of goal – the best finisher at the club, according to Dalglish – but they seldom played through-balls and instead passed calmly out wide. It was a system ‘designed for a centre-forward to score goals’, as Shearer said.

Critics claimed Blackburn’s approach play was too predictable, but opponents found it difficult to stop, partly because of the cohesive interplay stemming from the training sessions directed by Harford, whose favourite phrase was simply ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Blackburn’s training ground, incidentally, was astonishingly basic: a patch of land covered in dog mess, with no changing facilities. The players drove to Ewood Park, got changed, then drove to training. Most problematically, the training ground was adjacent to a cemetery, so sessions were frequently interrupted out of respect when a hearse slowly crept up the driveway. Harford’s ‘pattern of play’ sessions involved Blackburn lining up in their 4–4–2 formation on the training pitch, and practising their build-up play. Their passing and movement was very structured and always ended with Blackburn working the ball into crossing positions.

There were three major approaches. Ideally, Blackburn found a winger in a position to dribble forward, their most obvious route to goal. If not, the wingers were instructed to come short, bringing the opposition full-back up the pitch and allowing Shearer or Sutton to drift wide into space. Shearer implored Sutton to do the majority of the running so he could remain in the penalty box, but actually became an excellent crosser himself, ending the campaign as Blackburn’s most prolific assister as well as their top scorer. Finally, Dalglish and Harford recognised that full-backs were the players with the most time on the ball when 4–4–2 played 4–4–2, invariably the battle of formations during this period. Right-back Henning Berg was more of a converted centre-back, so there was a huge emphasis on left-back Le Saux to push forward, and he had a fine relationship with Wilcox and Shearer, supplying many key assists, most notably hanging a cross up for Shearer to nod home in Blackburn’s penultimate match of the campaign, a 1–0 victory over Newcastle.

Crucially, Harford demanded that crosses were played from what he termed ‘the magic box’, the space in the final 18 yards, as if the penalty area extended across the entire width of the pitch. Shearer disagreed with this concept and was confident he could convert crosses played from deeper – the type of ball David Beckham would later supply him with at international level – but Harford believed crosses from advanced positions created better chances, and Wilcox and Ripley depended upon getting into this ‘magic box’ to a staggering extent. Midway through the title-winning season, Dalglish called Ripley aside in training and attempted to devise a plan B. Eventually, he reasoned, opposition full-backs would work out Blackburn’s plan and usher Ripley and Wilcox inside. In that situation, 40 yards from goal, in a narrower position and forced onto his weaker foot, Dalglish asked where Ripley wanted the strikers to position themselves to be a target for crosses. Ripley looked at him blankly. ‘Are you taking the piss?’ he asked. No, insisted Dalglish. Ripley thought about it some more. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. The thought had never occurred to him; Blackburn’s wingers literally only knew how to play one way.

Blackburn’s tactical naivety was highlighted when they encountered continental opposition. In the opening round of the UEFA Cup, the club’s first-ever game in European competition, they were drawn against Swedish part-timers Trelleborg. The nature of Trelleborg read like a stereotypical ‘European minnow’ checklist; they boasted just one full-time professional footballer, alongside a carpenter, a shopkeeper and an insurance salesman. They’d recently lost a domestic cup tie to third-division opposition, and had progressed through the UEFA Cup qualifying round with an unspectacular victory over the champions of the Faroe Islands. They arrived at Ewood Park to discover their kit clashed with Blackburn’s, so were forced to borrow Rovers’ red away shorts. Journalists had researched Blackburn’s record victory, suspecting it could be surpassed, while the Swedes later claimed they would have considered a 2–0 defeat a decent result. Instead, Trelleborg’s Frederik Sandell latched onto strike partner Joachim Karlsson’s flick-on to score the game’s only goal. Trelleborg defended deeper than anyone Blackburn faced in the Premier League and focused on doubling up against Blackburn’s wingers. ‘If you were organised you could stop them,’ said captain Jonas Brorsson.

‘There was potentially a bit of naivety in the way we played,’ Ripley later recalled. ‘We were steamrollering teams in England and I think we tried to do the same, but they came with a defensive formation and nicked the win.’ Le Saux, meanwhile, admitted Blackburn’s style didn’t suit European competition. The second leg finished 2–2 – the SAS both scored close-range efforts in the aftermath of set-pieces – and ten-man Trelleborg progressed 3–2 on aggregate. The early exit emphasised English clubs’ tactical inadequacy, but allowed Blackburn to concentrate on domestic football.

There were no defining victories during Blackburn’s title campaign – they lost home and away to their closest challengers, Manchester United, and stuttered badly during the run-in, but their simple approach proved enough to consistently defeat run-of-the-mill Premier League sides. Blackburn weren’t doing anything different, they were simply doing it in an extremely cohesive manner, with excellent players. Six of their starting XI (goalkeeper Tim Flowers, commanding centre-back Colin Hendry plus Le Saux, Sherwood, Sutton and Shearer) featured in the PFA Team of the Year, which was announced before Blackburn sealed their title.

Manchester United had clinched the first two Premier League titles anticlimactically when rivals slipped up, but 14 May 1995 was truly memorable, as the Premier League’s first final-day decider. Blackburn went 1–0 up at Liverpool when Shearer typically converted Ripley’s right-wing cross, and had Rovers maintained that scoreline, they were champions regardless of United’s result. But Liverpool produced an unlikely turnaround, with Jamie Redknapp’s superb late free-kick confirming a 2–1 home victory. Dalglish spent much of the second half watching a TV close to the dugouts, showing the action from Manchester United’s game at Upton Park: Sir Alex Ferguson’s decision to play a lone striker backfired, and West Ham’s Ludĕk Mikloško provided one of the Premier League’s all-time great goalkeeping displays. United could only draw 1–1, which meant Blackburn’s defeat was irrelevant – they were champions. Dalglish was congratulated by old friends from Liverpool’s backroom staff, Shearer and Sutton warmly embraced, Sherwood lifted the trophy.

For all this incredible drama, Blackburn’s previous visit to Merseyside was more significant stylistically. On April Fools’ Day, Blackburn stormed into an early 2–0 lead at Everton; the first goal came inside 13 seconds, then the quickest to date in the Premier League, when Berg’s long ball was headed on by Sutton, then by Shearer, and Sutton fired home. The second came after a free-kick found Sutton, who stumbled and allowed Shearer to fire home. It was textbook Blackburn. But then, after Graham Stuart got Everton back into the game with a stupendous chip, Blackburn embarked upon a remarkably blatant display of cynical football, concentrating upon breaking up play and time wasting. It was an incredibly fierce, frantic contest, with the highlight an incredible goalmouth scramble in front of Tim Flowers, which featured no fewer than 14 players inside Blackburn’s six-yard box. The climax saw Shearer thumping a clearance so far that he nearly sent the ball out of Goodison Park entirely. At full-time, Everton’s fans booed Blackburn off. Dalglish couldn’t care less about whether opposition supporters appreciated his side’s style of play. To him it was three points, and job done.

In stark contrast, when Kevin Keegan was asked for his favourite memory from Newcastle’s ‘nearly’ campaign of 1995/96, he recalled his players being applauded onto the pitch by opposition fans during the final few days of the season, away at Leeds and Nottingham Forest. Dalglish called his Blackburn side the ‘people’s champions’, playing on their underdog status, but Newcastle were the true neutral’s favourite, a team who played enthralling, attack-minded football. Keegan’s impact during this period was incredible; he took the club from the bottom-half of the second tier to the top of the Premier League, galvanising a whole city. Newcastle’s shirts displayed the blue star of the Newcastle Brown Ale logo, their goalkeeper’s shirt during 1995/96 depicted the city’s skyline, while Keegan spoke about the club’s cultural importance to the city in a manner that recalled Barcelona. At times their football was comparable too, and Newcastle were referred to as, simply, The Entertainers.

Newcastle earned that nickname a couple of seasons earlier, with a 4–2 victory over Sheffield Wednesday, but 1995/96 took things to a new level, and Newcastle’s title challenge was somehow befitting of British pop culture at the time. 1996 was the year of England hosting, and threatening to win, Euro 96, soundtracked by Baddiel and Skinner’s ‘Three Lions’. 1996 was when Britpop still reigned supreme. 1996 saw the launch of Chris Evans’s TFI Friday, a programme based largely around wackiness, and the debut of the loud, extroverted Spice Girls. 1996 was the year of Trainspotting, a film about a group of heroin addicts that managed to become a feelgood story. Somehow 1997 felt very different, a melancholy year dominated by the film Titanic, Radiohead’s OK Computer and the death of Princess Diana. 1996 was about mad-for-it extravagance, and here were Keegan’s Newcastle, The Entertainers, playing all-out-attack football with no regard for the consequences.

Newcastle started the season, like Blackburn the previous year, with tactics based around crossing. Left-winger David Ginola was signed from Paris Saint-Germain and bamboozled opposition right-backs with his pace and ambidexterity, able to receive the ball with his back to goal, before spinning either way, cutting inside or going down the touchline. He won Player of the Month immediately. On the opposite flank Keith Gillespie was a typical winger of that period, always reaching the byline. Keegan’s instructions to his wingers were simple: new signing Les Ferdinand was the best target man in the business, and he was to be supplied with constant crosses. ‘The way the side was playing, with Ginola on the left and Gillespie on the right, was ideal for a striker like me,’ Ferdinand recalled. ‘Both David and Keith were raining balls into the penalty area from all over the place.’

Surprisingly for such an aerial threat, Ferdinand was only five foot 11, but was blessed with a prodigious leap. He hit 21 league goals by mid-February, while Keegan encouraged him to develop his game and bring teammates into play, having become frustrated with his predecessor Andy Cole’s single-mindedness. Whereas Blackburn used two target men up front, Keegan played Peter Beardsley in a deep-lying forward role, linking attacks. With Rob Lee bursting forward from central midfield, this was the most complete attacking force the Premier League had witnessed. Newcastle started at an incredible pace, attempting to win matches within the opening half hour, and weren’t involved in a single goalless draw all season. ‘The Entertainers’ tag, however, also underlined Newcastle’s defensive frailties. Keegan had openly preached a ‘you score two, we’ll score three’ philosophy, although the defining game in Newcastle’s season – and the most memorable in the Premier League era – was the defeat at Liverpool in April, which was ‘we’ll score three, you score four’. Many attributed Newcastle’s title failure to their leaky defence, although the truth is more complex.

Keegan made no attempt to hide his attacking approach. He was determined to satisfy the Geordies’ thirst for positive football, and considered himself part of a wider movement to make football more exciting, at a time when managers frequently highlighted the fact their team had ‘put on a show’ when matches were live on Sky. ‘A lot of forwards are coming into management,’ he said at the time. ‘You look at Brian Little, Glenn Hoddle, myself. We are all forwards who wouldn’t really know enough about defending to coach it.’ It was a selective argument, though. Arsenal boss George Graham had been a forward, then later an attacking midfielder so languid he was nicknamed ‘Stroller’, but he had assembled the most disciplined defence in English football.

Keegan’s defenders were, originally, midfielders and attackers. It’s common for players to be shifted into a different position as they develop, but Newcastle’s situation was quite remarkable, particularly with their three main centre-backs. Darren Peacock had been a centre-forward in the Bristol Rovers youth team. Steve Howey had risen through Newcastle’s ranks as an attacking midfielder, occasionally used in defence during training – but when Keegan arrived, he told Howey he was either a centre-back or he was leaving. Belgian Philippe Albert, meanwhile, started his career as a midfielder and was recruited on the strength of his displays at the 1994 World Cup, where he continually brought the ball forward from the back. Keegan, working as a TV pundit for the tournament, witnessed him score against both the Netherlands and Germany, and snapped him up.

First-choice full-backs Warren Barton and John Beresford were encouraged to push forward simultaneously and, by the end of the campaign, were replaced by hometown lads Steve Watson and Robbie Elliott, both forwards when rising through the ranks at Newcastle. Another Geordie, holding midfielder Lee Clark, had played an attacking midfield role the previous season, hence his number 10 shirt. It was, more or less, a team of forwards, as Keegan acknowledges in an admirably honest passage from his autobiography. ‘Were my full-backs too adventurous? Yes! Were my centre-backs too skilful, better going forward than going back? Yes! But that is what we built.’ That was that, and Keegan wasn’t going to change. Towards the end of the campaign, his back four – Watson, Howey, Peacock and Beresford – approached him, suggesting they were being overrun and Newcastle should play more cautiously. Keegan’s response to the critique was simple – ‘Do you wanna play on Saturday?’

He ignored defending to a remarkable extent. Newcastle had a rare defensive training session ahead of the long trip down to Southampton in September, lost 1–0, and Keegan never bothered with defensive drills again. Later, after Newcastle failed to win the Premier League, Keegan appointed former Liverpool defender and BBC pundit Mark Lawrenson as a defensive coach. Lawrenson, however, spent his time merely observing training and didn’t take a single coaching session under Keegan, at one point confessing to him that he wasn’t sure what he was being paid for. His appointment was Keegan’s attempt to fight the criticism rather than a genuine attempt to fix the problem.

But, amazingly, Newcastle’s defensive record in 1995/96 was actually reasonably good, and that famous 4–3 defeat at Anfield has exaggerated their weakness at the back. They conceded 37 goals in 38 matches, only two more than Manchester United, and considering the subsequent four title winners conceded 44, 33, 37 and 45 goals, Newcastle’s defensive record wasn’t a barrier to success. Instead, their problem was that they didn’t score enough, managing only 66 goals – lower than every single Premier League title winner. The ‘Entertainers’ tag wasn’t entirely true, and for all their individual brilliance, Newcastle lacked cohesion. It wasn’t simply that they ignored defensive work in training, more that they didn’t do any tactical work whatsoever. No work on shape, no work on build-up play, no work on set-pieces. Nothing that makes a group of players into a team.

Training was extremely simple, and the players loved it – as did the supporters. Newcastle used the facilities at Durham University, which meant training was essentially public and often watched by thousands of people during the title run-in. The players would arrive early and play head tennis, with Keegan and McDermott among the most feared doubles partnerships. They’d then play high-intensity, match-speed, small-sided games, the teams often determined by playground-style ‘pick teams’. They would end with skills and shooting drills, and some players would stay behind to work on individual technical aspects. But Newcastle never discussed team shape.

Keegan had a similarly relaxed attitude towards opponents. Alex Ferguson was increasingly adjusting small details to counter an opponent’s strengths and provided specific information on their weaknesses. But Keegan wouldn’t mention Newcastle’s upcoming opponents in training and would simply read out the opposition’s team sheet in the dressing room shortly before the warm-up. He’d add a couple of words to rubbish his opponents – ‘wouldn’t have any of them’, or, if he’d recently signed one of their players, ‘I’ve got the one I wanted.’ It was all about individuals. Ignoring the opposition proved particularly problematic in away matches, where Newcastle were literally only half as good as at St James’ Park – they won 52 points at home, just 26 away.

Keegan’s team talks rarely included specific instructions for coping with the opposition, although there was one notable exception. Ahead of a mid-April meeting with Aston Villa, Keegan realised Brian Little was using three centre-forwards – Dwight Yorke, Savo Milošević and Tommy Johnson – and therefore instructed left-back Beresford to defend narrower, helping Newcastle’s two central defenders. Beresford, however, complained that Keegan was ignoring the knock-on effect; Villa’s right-back, Gary Charles, would overlap into his left-back zone because Ginola wouldn’t track back. Keegan wasn’t interested. When the inevitable repeatedly happened – Charles found space on the right – Keegan shouted instructions to Beresford rather than Ginola. This infuriated Beresford, and the two had a blazing row by the St James’ Park touchline, which ended when Beresford told Keegan to ‘fuck off’, prompting his immediate substitution. ‘You can’t have players saying what he said to me,’ said Keegan afterwards. Beresford had started 32 of the 34 games until that point, but was dropped entirely for the final four games.

The cause of Newcastle’s decline, however, was related to the addition of two signings in the New Year. Unpredictable Colombian forward Faustino Asprilla was signed on a snowy Friday in February, the day before Newcastle made the short trip to Middlesbrough. On matchday Keegan assured Asprilla he wouldn’t be playing, and at lunchtime poured him a glass of wine. But incredibly, the Colombian was introduced as a second-half substitute just hours later and created the equaliser for Watson almost immediately, bamboozling opposition centre-back Steve Vickers with a wonderful Cruyff turn before crossing. Watson pointed to Asprilla in celebration, and his teammates instinctively congratulated the assister rather than the goalscorer. Asprilla had provided Newcastle with a spark.

While his signing is sometimes blamed for Newcastle’s collapse, in the second half of the season Asprilla was Newcastle’s best player. He was fantastic in the unfortunate, and fatal, defeat to Manchester United, when the combination of Peter Schmeichel’s saves and Eric Cantona’s finish resulted in a barely deserved 1–0 win for the eventual champions. He was pivotal in the 3–0 victory over West Ham and was Newcastle’s best player in that 4–3 defeat to Liverpool, grabbing a goal and an assist. The problem, though, was that his arrival changed Newcastle’s shape entirely – and Keegan didn’t explain how he wanted his players to adjust. Asprilla was very different to Beardsley, who switched to an unfamiliar right-sided midfield role, and Ferdinand was left perplexed by the change, especially as Asprilla was immediately the main man. ‘I haven’t bought Asprilla to play with you, I’ve bought him for you to play with him,’ Keegan somewhat bluntly told Ferdinand. There were no attempts to get them on the same wavelength in training, and Keegan later told Ferdinand he simply needed to ‘expect the unexpected’ from Asprilla – a reasonable summary of his style, but hardly useful advice. Ferdinand, having been scoring at roughly a goal per game beforehand, now scored one in three.

The Colombian’s full debut coincided with Keegan’s surprise decision to switch from Newcastle’s usual 4–4–2 to a more flexible system often appearing like a 3–5–2 for a 2–0 defeat to West Ham and a hugely entertaining 3–3 draw at Manchester City. The biggest beneficiary was Albert, as the moustachioed Belgian centre-back was deployed as a sweeper with licence to burst forward. Against City he scored twice and created the other for Asprilla, all from open play, a perfect demonstration of how he was a footballing centre-back ahead of his time. Asprilla was Newcastle’s most dangerous attacking weapon in both games, but got away lightly with a one-match ban for elbowing and headbutting City centre-back Keith Curle. ‘He’s from Latin America, that’s the way they are,’ offered Keegan. That dominated the headlines, but the greater issue was that Newcastle’s lack of shape had never been more obvious. Newcastle won 43 per cent of matches with Asprilla, compared with 75 per cent without him.

For the next game, a 1–0 defeat to Manchester United, Newcastle returned to 4–4–2 but boasted another new signing: David Batty, the circumstances of whose arrival were peculiar. Sir John Hall, Newcastle’s chairman, wanted to sign a centre-back to improve Newcastle’s defence. Keegan was having none of that, however, so they compromised and bought a defensive midfielder, which doesn’t seem a particularly logical approach to recruitment. Even Batty was surprised. ‘They were flying at the top of the table and I couldn’t imagine why they’d want to change things,’ he admitted. Batty, a pure defensive midfielder, replaced the forward-thinking Clark, and once again, Newcastle attempted to play similar football with an entirely different player in a key position – the problem, of course, was the system rather than individuals. Batty slowed Newcastle’s passing and didn’t perform his defensive midfield role perfectly either – in the late-season 1–1 draw with Nottingham Forest, for example, Ian Woan dribbled past him easily before smashing into the top corner from 25 yards. Keegan considered Batty an excellent signing – although, typically, believed his long-term future was as a forward-thinking centre-back, bringing the ball forward from deep. Keegan’s logic was that this would allow him to play yet another attacking player in midfield. He simply couldn’t get enough.

Newcastle’s gung-ho approach was epitomised by that 4–3 defeat to Liverpool at Anfield in early April 1996, a game widely considered the Premier League’s greatest. It was an action-packed, end-to-end thriller, the goals starting in the 2nd minute and not ending until the 92nd. Newcastle led for the majority of the contest, both 2–1 and 3–2, but somehow conceded a late-minute winner to Stan Collymore, to leave Keegan slumped over the advertising hoardings.

Newcastle entered the game in disastrous form, having collected just seven points from their previous six matches. Keegan made one change, with Watson replacing Barton at right-back, probably linked to the fact Watson had already scored two winners that season against Liverpool, in the reverse league fixture and the League Cup.

The ludicrously open nature of the contest was summarised by the positioning of Ginola. Newcastle played a 4–4–2 system while Roy Evans’ Liverpool played 3–5–2, which meant an inevitable question about whether or not Ginola would track Liverpool’s right-wingback Jason McAteer. The answer was simple – he didn’t. This had both positive and negative consequences; after Robbie Fowler had opened the scoring and Les Ferdinand equalised, Ginola’s advanced positioning behind McAteer meant he streaked away on a counter-attack. Liverpool’s centre-backs played very narrow, and Ginola had the entire left flank to himself, finishing coolly.

In the second half, however, Liverpool exploited the space behind Ginola, in particular with Steve McManaman’s constant drifts to that flank. He crossed for Fowler to equalise and had another dangerous cross sliced just wide of the far post by Steve Howey. Newcastle raced down the other end and scored again through Asprilla, in part because Liverpool centre-back John Scales had dropped very deep to cope with Ginola’s advanced positioning, playing the Colombian onside. Liverpool soon equalised again with a right-wing cross – this time a beautiful curled ball by McAteer, with Ginola nowhere to be seen. 3–3, and arguably two goals at either end came from Ginola’s positioning. The final five minutes were even more open, after Evans boldly introduced veteran striker Ian Rush for left-wing-back Rob Jones, with Collymore moving left. After interplay between Rush and John Barnes in the centre, the ball was switched wide to Collymore, who smashed home the winner. Liverpool had won the game with the type of attacking gamble that Keegan greatly admired. Keegan loved contributing to such a legendary, attack-minded game. ‘After the match I turned to Terry Mac and said, “I know I should be disappointed, but I’m elated,”’ he later recalled.

Newcastle’s players gave various tactical explanations for their decline. Ferdinand was frustrated the attack was now built around Asprilla. Gillespie believed his omission meant Newcastle weren’t stretching the play properly, something Lee agreed with, as Beardsley wasn’t at home on the right. Goalkeeper Pavel Srníček suggested Batty upset the rhythm of the side, and also accepted that Newcastle were simply found out by better sides in the second half of the campaign. The experiment with Albert as a sweeper in a rough 3–5–2, meanwhile, lasted two games, cost Newcastle five points and was immediately abandoned. Ginola’s decline in the second half of the season was also significant; his defensive sluggishness was criticised, but it wouldn’t have been problematic had he contributed the attacking efficiency of earlier in the season.

More than anything else, however, Newcastle’s problem was their overall lack of cohesion, surely due to omitting any collective work on the training ground. Keegan’s threw together talented individuals and let them run free, which largely worked with a simple, old-fashioned 4–4–2 that everyone knew how to play. But this laissez-faire style proved problematic when Keegan suddenly switched shape, when he signed a different type of centre-forward and a different type of deep midfielder. Newcastle simply didn’t have any tactics; their approach was a consequence of the 11 players Keegan assembled on any particular day.

But while Newcastle ultimately fell short of winning the Premier League, it was unquestionably a glorious failure; the players remain heroes in the city, the team still admired across the country. Keegan’s achievement in taking Newcastle from the second tier to the brink of the title shouldn’t be underestimated, and while naivety may have cost Newcastle the title, the most pertinent story is that they came so close with such basic tactics, highlighting the primitive approach of most Premier League sides at this point.

The title was presented in the north-east – but at Middlesbrough, where Manchester United ended the season with a 3–0 victory. Keegan was magnanimous in defeat, immediately congratulating Manchester United and predicting they would be ‘fantastic representatives of the Premier League in the Champions League’ the following season. It recalled the way he’d referred to Asprilla, upon the Colombian’s arrival, as ‘a real asset to the Premier League – and Newcastle United, I hope’. Perhaps it was just semantics, but it’s difficult to imagine Ferguson, who cultivated an ‘us against the world’ approach, caring about the benefits to the league as a whole.

Newcastle responded to their failure in dramatic fashion, breaking the world transfer record to sign hometown boy Shearer from Blackburn. Keegan lasted just half of the following campaign before suddenly resigning, to be replaced by, inevitably, Dalglish. With Batty, Shearer and Dalglish, it was clear Newcastle were trying to be Blackburn – but tactically, the Premier League was already moving in a different direction.

Part Two

Technical Progress

4

Between the Lines

‘Cantona’s supporters loved him, and so did the media. He was this foreign fella, different. Everyone wanted one like him, but it didn’t mean players like that grew on trees.’

Roy Evans

As Eric Cantona’s influence ensured Manchester United became the Premier League’s dominant force, other clubs desperately searched for their Cantona equivalent. A wave of talented, mercurial but often inconsistent number 10s joined the Premier League during the mid-1990s, with mixed success. England wasn’t producing players in that mould, so clubs looked abroad – often to relatively obscure footballing nations. Supporters of unglamorous, mid-table Premier League sides could now get excited by exotic, mysterious foreign deep-lying forwards whose presence was meant to inspire more aesthetically pleasing football.

Ipswich Town, for example, had Bulgarian Boncho Genchev, who opened his goalscoring account with a wonderful bicycle kick against Blackburn. He positioned himself between the lines to encourage passing football, but struggled to exert a consistent impact upon Premier League games. After a brief spell back home, he ended his career with a couple of spells at non-league Hendon, taking a break in between to run a short-lived Bulgarian café in Kensington called ‘Strikers’. Genchev himself wasn’t actually a striker, of course, although he was presumably comfortable in the serving role.

Southampton found the diminutive, extraordinarily gifted Israeli Eyal Berkovic, who featured decisively in the Saints’ famous 6–3 victory over Manchester United in 1996, his second league start. Berkovic enjoyed a successful Premier League career, although he is probably most famous for being booted in the head during a West Ham training session by teammate John Hartson.

Derby County signed Aljoša Asanović, a wonderful left-footed creator who played a significant part in Croatia’s journey to the Euro 96 quarter-finals and the 1998 World Cup semi-finals, and who is quite possibly the most underrated Premier League player. Unsurprisingly, he insisted on taking the number 10 shirt. Coventry City signed Moroccan Mustapha Hadji, a direct dribbler with a fine passing range, and he also took number 10. At West Ham, Harry Redknapp signed the Premier League’s first two Portuguese players – first Dani, then Paulo Futre. To Futre’s disgust, he wasn’t handed the number 10 shirt.

Ahead of his first game against Arsenal, West Ham’s kitman Eddie Gillam handed Futre the number 16 shirt, and promptly had it thrown back in his face. Not understanding that the Premier League had switched to permanent squad numbers that were consistent throughout the season and that number 10 had already been allocated to John Moncur, Futre shouted at Redknapp, ‘Futre 10, not 16! Eusebio 10! Maradona 10! Pelé 10! Futre 10! Not fucking 16!’ Redknapp told Futre to either wear the number 16 shirt or go home. So Futre went home. He later insisted the number 10 shirt was written into his contract, and when Redknapp pretended West Ham’s club shop had shifted so many shirts with Futre’s name and ‘16’ on the back that they couldn’t change it, Futre offered to refund any disappointed supporters up to a total cost of £100,000. Eventually West Ham sought permission from the Premier League for Moncur to change numbers, allowing Futre to wear 10; he thanked Moncur by allowing him a fortnight’s stay in his holiday villa on the Algarve. It’s surprising something similar didn’t happen at Sheffield Wednesday a couple of years later – two brilliant Italians, Benito Carbone and Paolo Di Canio, had serious claims to the number 10 shirt, but were forced to wear 8 and 11 respectively, with their favoured number taken by the somewhat less spectacular Andy Booth.

During this period, a relatively limited number of games were broadcast live on TV, while Match of the Day showed extended highlights from only a couple of big matches, screening just goals and major incidents from others. These players’ subtle, constant influence upon matches was therefore not overwhelmingly obvious to the majority of supporters, so they needed to provide concise summaries of their quality with outstanding individual moments.

Between November 1996 and August 1997 the BBC’s Goal of the Month competition was won by Dennis Bergkamp, Eric Cantona, Trevor Sinclair, Gianfranco Zola, Juninho, Zola again, Juninho again, then Bergkamp again – who, ludicrously, finished 1st, 2nd and 3rd that month. Sinclair’s famous bicycle kick aside, the Premier League’s greatest moments were being provided almost exclusively by four magical foreign playmakers: Cantona, Bergkamp, Zola and Juninho. These players fundamentally changed their clubs’ footballing style, but required their sides to be built entirely around them. This proved problematic. Depending upon a newcomer to English football was risky, especially when foreign imports were still a relatively recent phenomenon and clubs did extremely little to help them settle.

If Cantona was the trailblazer, Bergkamp and Zola followed closely behind in his slipstream. They weren’t, however, joining title challengers; Arsenal had finished in the bottom half of the Premier League immediately before signing Bergkamp in the summer of 1995, as had Chelsea just before their purchase of Zola the following year. Like Cantona, both players had an immediately positive effect on their teams, and the fact that Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea have been the three most successful clubs in the Premier League era can, in part, be traced back to the arrival of these three brilliant deep-lying forwards.

Bergkamp and Zola were unquestionably top-class footballers. Bergkamp had finished second in the 1993 Ballon d’Or, one place ahead of Cantona and behind only Roberto Baggio, the greatest number 10 of this generation. Meanwhile, Zola finished sixth in 1995. They were revered across Europe because of their creativity, their selflessness and the spatial awareness that allowed them to thrive between the lines. Both arrived from Serie A, with Bergkamp – whose influence upon Arsenal would become clear later on – outlining why he discovered the Premier League suited him. ‘English defences always played a back four, with one line, which meant they had to defend the space behind. In Italy they had the libero [a sweeper who would cover behind his fellow defenders], but the English had two central defenders against two strikers, so they couldn’t really cover each other. As an attacker I liked that because it meant you could play in between the lines. They couldn’t come off their line. So I used that.’

Zola discovered something similar. ‘At the beginning, the open English football really helped me, as I was coming from tighter marking in Serie A,’ he explained. Zola only arrived in England because his former club, Parma, had an inflexible coach who was unwilling to deviate from 4–4–2. Surprisingly, this was Carlo Ancelotti, who would later become the go-to manager for continental giants awash with superstars – including Chelsea – precisely because he was flexible enough to build teams around star individuals. Back then, however, Ancelotti – who had been Italy’s assistant coach under legendary manager Arrigo Sacchi, the man who popularised a pressing 4–4–2 system – simply wouldn’t accommodate a number 10, turning down Baggio for similar reasons, and attempted to play Zola out wide. ‘I will be able to play my proper role in England,’ Zola declared upon his arrival in London.

Zola had served his apprenticeship at Napoli under the best possible mentor. ‘I learned everything from Diego Maradona,’ he admitted. While famous for his ego, Maradona was also renowned for being extremely generous with his praise of his Napoli teammates, and he loved Zola so much that, ahead of a Coppa Italia tie against Pisa, he handed the Sardinian his famous number 10 shirt, and wore number 9 instead. Zola was forced to settle for 25 at Chelsea, with Mark Hughes in his favoured 10 shirt, but it became an iconic number. Although not officially retired by Chelsea, no one has dared to wear Zola’s number 25 since his departure in 2003.

Zola’s technical ability was outstanding. His first goal was a magnificent free-kick in a 2–2 draw with Everton, and only David Beckham has scored more Premier League free-kicks. Zola confirmed his status as Chelsea’s dead-ball specialist after a training-ground competition with Dennis Wise. A sock was tied to the crossbar – both were five foot six, so this presumably involved one sitting on the other’s shoulders – and they stood outside the box and attempted to curl the ball against the sock. Zola won 10–1, and the matter was settled. Dismayed by the lack of equipment at Chelsea’s old training ground near Heathrow Airport, Zola purchased his own mock defensive wall and spent hours practising.

While Cantona was tall and physically commanding, Zola was small, slight and wore size 5 boots. He was strong for his size, however, and used his body excellently. Chelsea teammate Graeme Le Saux considered him the joint best forward he’d ever seen, along with Kenny Dalglish, at the art of shielding the ball from defenders. But more than anyone else of this era, Zola thrived upon space, a classic example being his winner in the 1997 FA Cup semi-final against Wimbledon at Highbury. Initially positioned high up against the opposition defence, Zola watched teammate Roberto Di Matteo moving between the lines, dragging Wimbledon’s right-sided centre-back Chris Perry up the pitch. Zola then sprinted into the space Perry had vacated, pulling Wimbledon’s left-sided centre-back Dean Blackwell across to cover. Di Matteo played the ball into Zola’s feet, and Chelsea’s number 25 immediately backheeled it into the zone Blackwell had vacated, changed direction, collected the ball and fired home. In a few seconds, he’d seen space, exploited it, created more space, exploited that, and scored. For a player in his mould, it was the perfect goal.

Crucially, Zola was allowed a ‘free role’ behind the main striker, in a Chelsea side formatted specifically to bring out his qualities. Centre-back Steve Clarke remembers a team talk in which the message was simply ‘get the ball to Zola’, while Wise referred to Zola as a ‘showhorse’ and labelled himself a ‘donkey’. The donkey’s job, he said, was simply to do the hard work and pass to the showhorse. ‘Historically [English sides] have been set up with two strong strikers, two sitting midfielders and two wingers,’ Zola said after his retirement. ‘You never used to play the ball through the middle. What you used to do was play the ball down the sides and cross the ball to the tall player.’ Zola, like Cantona and Bergkamp, helped to change that.

‘He’s a clever little bugger … a better player than I thought he was,’ Alex Ferguson had conceded two months earlier, after Zola scored a fine second-minute goal against Manchester United, dribbling inside from the right before finishing with his left foot. ‘I thought we could push my full-backs forward, but he was smart enough to go and play wide. He has got a good head on him.’ Later, Ryan Giggs claimed that such was Zola’s ability to find space that he was the only Premier League player United man-marked, although this often proved unsuccessful. For Chelsea’s 5–0 thrashing of United in October 1999, Ferguson was without Giggs and played Phil Neville in his place, but instructed him to play centrally, man-marking Zola. United largely nullified the Italian but left a gaping hole on their left, which meant Chelsea’s Albert Ferrer and Dan Petrescu, two right-backs in tandem, assisted the opening two goals with deep crosses.

While Premier League observers marvelled at these majestic, game-changing foreign number 10s, there was nevertheless an acknowledgement that many arrived in Britain because they had limited options elsewhere. Cantona had effectively been run out of France, Bergkamp struggled in Italy with Inter Milan, while Zola had recently turned 30, then considered the cut-off for forwards’ peak years, and admitted he only expected to play for a couple more seasons. There was a sense that the Premier League was gaining top-class players when they were on the way down. Therefore, in one respect the most significant arrival during this period was another foreign number 10: Juninho. Newly promoted Middlesbrough’s purchase of the diminutive Brazilian in 1995 was a truly remarkable transfer coup, because he was unquestionably on the way up.

Juninho had impressed on English soil that summer, when world champions Brazil competed alongside England, Sweden and Japan in the Umbro Cup, a tournament held as preparation for the following summer’s European Championships. Juninho wore Brazil’s number 10, the most iconic shirt in world football, played in a 4–3–1–2 system based around him and was inspirational in the 3–1 victory over England. He opened the scoring with a classic Brazilian ‘folha seca’ (dry leaf) free-kick, played with topspin, which surprised goalkeeper Tim Flowers with its sudden dip. Simply being allowed to take free-kicks ahead of Roberto Carlos was an achievement in itself. Brazil’s second goal, meanwhile, showcased Juninho’s playmaking skills perfectly; he received the ball between the lines, glanced up and sidefooted a through-ball into the path of another promising youngster, Brazil’s number 9, who finished confidently by rounding Flowers and converting into an empty net. It was English football’s introduction to Ronaldo, and yet everyone was talking about Juninho.

In the home dugout at Wembley that sunny afternoon was Bryan Robson, then acting as assistant to England manager Terry Venables in addition to his role as player-manager of Middlesbrough. Mesmerised by the opposition number 10’s performance, Robson convinced Middlesbrough’s board to sign Juninho, beating the likes of Arsenal, Inter and Porto to the Brazilian’s signature. Middlesbrough chief executive Keith Lamb referred to his new recruit as ‘the most sought-after player in the world’. Hyperbole, certainly, and somewhat undermined by the fact that Juninho cost less than Middlesbrough’s other major arrival that summer, Nicky Barmby, but this was a landmark purchase, a rising player joining a rising team in a rising league.

His unveiling was a huge event in Middlesbrough. Fans greeted him at the airport with Brazilian flags, more cheered as he arrived at the new Riverside Stadium in scenes reminiscent of a papal visit, then 6,000 moved inside to watch him play keepy-uppies with Robson. His first press conference didn’t pass without one inevitable question. ‘Does he know how cold it gets in Middlesbrough in January?’ asked one journalist. Juninho, through a translator, insisted it wouldn’t be that bad, although he was often criticised by pundits for playing in gloves, and during his first winter stuffed newspaper inside his boots in an attempt to keep his feet warm. Robson responded by describing Juninho as a ‘tough character’ – and most top-class Brazilian attackers are. The cliché about Brazil suggests it’s non-stop samba football, played by technical players who learn their trade playing on the Copacabana. Realistically, the Brazilian top flight is extremely aggressive: it’s not simply that defenders kick attackers ferociously, it’s that referees allow it, and so Juninho’s transition from Brazilian to English football wasn’t as tough as many anticipated.

Immediately afforded a free role by Robson, Juninho used that licence fully on his debut against Leeds, starting on the right flank before quickly drifting across to the left. He played two killer through-balls inside the first half, setting up Jan Åge Fjørtoft for the opener. Inevitably, Leeds’s response was to kick him, and both Carlton Palmer and John Pemberton were booked for fouling the Brazilian. The Independent’s match report remarked upon his ‘surprising courage’ and ended with an acknowledgement that ‘perhaps he is tougher than anyone thought.’ Indeed, his final significant contribution before being substituted was a thundering tackle on legendary crossbar-botherer Tony Yeboah, one of the Premier League’s most powerful players, which earned a booking. That went down well, as fans wanted proof he would get stuck in.

A fresh-faced, slender creator whose name meant ‘Little Junior’ – so small they named him twice – the Brazilian wasn’t expected to thrive in English conditions, but Juninho loved the north-east and loved English football. The club found him a house in Ingleby Barwick, a large housing estate, and he moved in with his entire family, which helped him settle. Juninho’s house became something of a local landmark, with children queuing outside for his autograph. His mum made them cookies, and Juninho wasn’t averse to the occasional kickabout in the street.

Juninho was tricky but direct in possession, efficient with the ball rather than a showboater. He was an instant hit, and unquestionably in the class of the aforementioned number 10s, later playing a significant role in Brazil’s 2002 World Cup triumph. In Juninho’s second season, Alex Ferguson described him as the Premier League’s best player and later considered signing him. His finest moment in English football arrived during that campaign, a 1–0 home victory over Chelsea in March. He outshone Zola and created a succession of chances, wasted by Craig Hignett and Mikkel Beck. Eventually, he settled things himself. Receiving the ball wide on the left, he slalomed between Wise and Di Matteo and evaded a desperate lunge from Chelsea’s third central midfielder, Craig Burley, before slipping the ball into the left-hand channel for Beck. The Danish striker paused, and then chipped the ball into the box for a perfect diving header from – of all people – five-foot-six Juninho. The Brazilian magician wasn’t simply performing the duties expected of a Brazilian number 10, outwitting the entire opposition midfield, but also the duties of an English number 9, beating Chelsea’s centre-backs to score a header. ‘I don’t know what Juninho’s running on at the moment,’ Robson said afterwards. ‘He isn’t looking tired, he’s keeping pace with the game – and he’s tackling back!’ Make that the qualities of an English number 4, too.

In his second season Juninho was handed Middlesbrough’s number 10 shirt, having worn 25 in his debut campaign, and was also named the Premier League’s Player of the Season. Admittedly not as prestigious an award as the PFA or FWA Player of the Year, it was nevertheless an acknowledgement of his great influence. And yet, staggeringly for one of the league’s most revered players, Juninho ended the campaign sobbing on the pitch as Middlesbrough were relegated.

Basing the side around Juninho didn’t pay dividends. When Juninho made his debut for Middlesbrough in November 1995, the Teesiders were sixth, having lost to only the two title challengers, Manchester United and Newcastle. Despite Juninho’s impact, their form nosedived dramatically. They were atrocious in the second half of the season, winning just two of 19 matches. They finished 12th, but in points terms, were closer to relegation than 11th.

The 1996/97 relegation campaign was also strange for Middlesbrough. They reached both the League Cup and FA Cup finals, losing to Leicester City and Chelsea respectively – a devastating double blow for a club that had never won a major honour (although Juninho would later help them to League Cup success seven years later, then into his third spell on Teeside – he simply couldn’t stay away). Granted, Middlesbrough’s relegation was partly because they were deducted three points for withdrawing from a December fixture at Blackburn when half their squad had been wiped out by flu, but you can’t ignore the fact that they had the division’s worst defensive record. There were also major problems in the dressing room, particularly involving star striker Fabrizio Ravanelli, a divisive influence. He once interrupted a team meeting with a lengthy rant in Italian about wanting to leave, and had a fight with Neil Cox before the FA Cup Final after the right-back suggested Ravanelli wasn’t fit enough to start. ‘Half the squad hated him and the other half loved him,’ said Hignett. ‘He was one of the best finishers I’ve seen, but he rubbed people up the wrong way. He was selfish in everything he did.’

Meanwhile Juninho, while individually brilliant and very popular with teammates, caused Middlesbrough problems. Like Cantona, Bergkamp and Zola, he thrived in space between the lines, but was a different type of footballer. An advanced midfielder rather than a withdrawn forward, he ventured into deeper positions to collect possession. He therefore wasn’t suited to a deep-lying forward role in a 4–4–1–1 like the aforementioned players, and Robson constantly changed his shape in an attempt to base the side around both Juninho and Barmby, deploying 4–3–2–1 or 3–4–2–1 in his first season. It didn’t quite work defensively, and getting the best from two players between the lines was difficult. Both Juninho and Barmby had a better relationship with the underrated Hignett, and Barmby departed after 18 months for Everton, leaving Juninho as the sole creator. His form improved, and a 6–1 thrashing of Derby demonstrated Middlesbrough’s potential. ‘I am now playing as well as I ever did in Brazil, but I think that is because I have found my best position,’ Juninho said. In other words, the system was based around him.

In that second season Juninho suffered from fatigue, not helped by Middlesbrough’s double cup run – or by international trips to South America, then an unprecedented problem for Premier League clubs. His biggest problem, though, was man-marking – Middlesbrough didn’t have a Plan B when Juninho was nullified. The most famous example came during the 1997 League Cup Final defeat to Leicester. Two weeks beforehand in the league, Juninho had torn apart the Foxes in a 3–1 victory, so for the trip to Wembley, Leicester boss Martin O’Neill deployed Pontus Kåmark to follow the Brazilian everywhere across the pitch. In a 2011 interview discussing nearly 25 years in management, O’Neill said he’d never sent his teams out to be anything other than positive – apart from that final, when he knew he needed to concentrate on stopping Juninho. ‘If you had seen him a fortnight before running riot at Filbert Street, only a fool would have chosen not to man-mark him,’ he said. Many other managers thought the same; stop Juninho, and you stopped Middlesbrough. Ultimately, it ended with their relegation.

This became a familiar pattern among bottom-half clubs – brilliant individuals who weren’t necessarily conducive to Premier League success. Bolton spent a club record £1.5m on Yugoslav playmaker Saša Ćurčić, who scored one of the goals of 1995/96 against Chelsea, ghosting past five challenges and playing a one-two with Alan Thompson before firing home. Bolton finished bottom that season. ‘I was a crowd pleaser, everywhere the fans loved me,’ Ćurčić recalled. ‘But I wasn’t very good for the team because I wasn’t a team player.’

Another inventive playmaker who scored a memorable solo goal that season was Manchester City’s Georgi Kinkladze – the epitome of a frustrating genius – who demonstrated the dangers of building your side around a number 10. Like Juninho, Kinkladze was recruited after a sensational performance against British opposition, at a time when Premier League scouts rarely looked abroad for new players. Kinkladze was inspirational in Georgia’s 5–0 thrashing of Wales in November 1994, a seismic result; just three years after Georgia had gained independence, it was their first-ever competitive victory. Deployed behind Temuri Ketsbaia and Shota Arveladze in a 4–3–1–2, Kinkladze ran the game and grabbed his first international goal. ‘They murdered us,’ Wales goalkeeper Neville Southall later recalled. ‘Kinkladze was different class and the best player on the pitch by a mile.’ In the return fixture the following summer – four days before Juninho’s performance at Wembley captured Middlesbrough’s attention – Kinkladze again dominated. This time he scored the game’s only goal, an incredible 25-yard, left-footed chip over Southall.

The Georgian was tracked by other clubs, and had unsuccessful trials at both Real and Atlético Madrid – and, intriguingly, a month-long loan at Boca Juniors, who revere the number 10 role more than any club in world football, where Kinakladze met his idol Maradona. None of them signed Kinkladze permanently, however, and instead he joined Manchester City as Alan Ball’s first signing. Ball and Kinkladze’s City experience started disastrously. City collected two points from their first 11 games, scoring just three goals, while Kinkladze struggled; homesick, unable to speak English and living in a Manchester hotel on his own for three months. Juninho was happy in Middlesbrough partly because he’d emigrated with his parents, and Kinkladze’s improvement coincided with the arrival of two Georgian friends and his mother, Khatuna, who brought some home comforts: Georgian cognac and walnuts, and spices to make Kinkladze his favourite dishes.

Kinkladze scored his first goal in November, a late winner in the 1–0 victory over Aston Villa at Maine Road. ‘He was bewildered to start with,’ Ball said afterwards. ‘He spoke very little English and it was foreign to him to tackle and scrap and fight like you do in England. But the boy’s got an immense talent.’ His Premier League spell is best remembered for a couple of truly magnificent goals. The first opened the scoring against Middlesbrough in December 1995, when he collected the ball on the right and dribbled into an inside-left position, before suddenly cutting back inside Phil Stamp and sidefooting the ball firmly into the far corner. Middlesbrough eventually won 4–1, however, with Juninho completing the scoring.

Kinkladze’s other superb strike, later voted March’s goal of the month, came at Southampton. Having already scored the first with a close-range tap-in, and hit the crossbar from outside the box, Kinkladze collected the ball on the right, dribbled directly towards goal while evading four increasingly desperate challenges, dummied to put goalkeeper Dave Beasant on the ground, then lifted the ball over Beasant’s head and into the net. ‘It was the closest thing I have seen to Maradona’s goal against England!’ Ball raved, before somewhat unnecessarily clarifying: ‘Not the one with his hand, the one where he did everyone and put it away. People ask why we are bringing this type of player to this country. If that wasn’t the answer today, nothing is.’

City supporters were already tired of United’s dominance and Cantona’s cult-like status, and they absolutely worshipped Kinkladze – the best Georgi in Manchester since Best. The love was reciprocated; after his initial alienation in Manchester, Kinkladze grew to love the city and married a Mancunian. ‘If he’d been playing with a successful team,’ said striker Niall Quinn at the time, ‘then he would have won Player’s Player of the Year because it’s quite breathtaking what he’s done in English football. He’s a lovely guy as well – I think, because he doesn’t speak a word of English – but he seems nice.’

This was at the height of Britpop, and Kinkladze was rewarded for his fine form with a chant to the tune of Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’. ‘All the runs that Kinky makes are blinding,’ it ran, before ending with a brilliant: ‘And after all … we’ve got Alan Ball.’ The composer of the original song, City fan Noel Gallagher, also offered a wonderful Kinkladze summary. Describing him as ‘either the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen or the best thing I’ve ever seen’, Gallagher predicted Kinkladze would either lead City to the European Cup, or take them down to the Fourth Division. He was nearly right; when Kinkladze left City in 1998, they were in the third tier.

City were relegated because Ball built the entire team around Kinkladze, as winger Nicky Summerbee outlined. ‘Bally loved him. Georgi could do no wrong – I got on very well with him and we weren’t jealous because we could all see how talented he was, but some hated Alan Ball for doing that – except Georgi, because he loved all the praise … the problem with Georgi was that you couldn’t play 4–4–2 because to get the best out of him you wouldn’t want him playing a conventional running midfield game, and if there are two men wide, that leaves only one in midfield. Ball changed formation all the time, a sure sign he didn’t know what he was doing.’

Keith Curle, then City’s captain, later recalled the extent of the free role Ball afforded Kinkladze. ‘I remember losing away to Arsenal that season and one of the goals we conceded came because Georgi hadn’t tracked a runner. The lads were not happy and some said as much to the manager after the game. In reply, he told them that if they were as talented as Georgi, they wouldn’t have to track back either.’

After City’s relegation, Ball lasted just three games before he was replaced by Frank Clark, who tried a similar approach. ‘I wanted to build the team around Kinkladze because that’s the ideal way to get the best out of him. He’s an incredible talent … [but] he certainly didn’t like running if he didn’t have the ball at his feet and I thought there was a certain amount of resentment towards him from some of the squad.’ Like Ball, Clark ended up changing formation to change Kinkladze’s role. He initially played a 4–4–2 with the Georgian as a deep-lying forward, then switched to 4–3–1–2, fielding him behind a strike duo. ‘We tied ourselves up in knots trying to accommodate Kinkladze,’ Clark continued. ‘The [4–3–1–2] system suited Kinkladze perfectly because it gave him great freedom, but it didn’t suit the other players and it didn’t work.’ Incidentally, Kinkladze switched to number 10 after City’s relegation, having previously worn number 7.

Clarke was replaced by Joe Royle, less of a footballing romantic, whose first words to the board about footballing matters were simple: ‘We have to sell Kinkladze.’ He would no longer be indulged. ‘Kinkladze was not a team player, and had a disturbing habit of disappearing for long periods during games,’ Royle said. ‘To the supporters he was the only positive in all that time. To me he was a big negative.’ The Georgian was sold to European giants Ajax, a club who love technical players but play 4–3–3, so manager Jan Wouters had no space for a number 10. ‘I could have been Maradona and he wouldn’t have changed the system to accommodate me,’ he complained. By this point, managers had tired of basing the side around Kinkladze, who needed a manager like Ball.

Chiefly remembered for his high-pitched voice, his red hair, his flat cap and for being the standout player in the 1966 World Cup Final, Ball was also the first footballer in England to wear white boots – the ultimate sign of a flair player – and clearly wanted like-minded footballers in his sides. Before Kinkladze, Ball had also adored England’s truest number 10 during this period, Southampton’s Matt Le Tissier.

Avoiding the hatred that comes with playing for a title challenger, Le Tissier was the most popular player in the country and a regular winner of Goal of the Month competitions. He scored a wide variety of incredible strikes: there was a chip-up-and-volley from a free-kick against Wimbledon and a legendary strike against Newcastle that involved backheeling the ball over his own head, before flicking the ball over two defenders in a row and volleying in. He lobbed Blackburn’s Tim Flowers from 35 yards and chipped Manchester United’s Peter Schmeichel from 25. He had enough natural ability to be an England regular but, fittingly for a man born in Guernsey, was distinctly un-English. His name added to the foreign feel, and in his younger days his father was contacted by France assistant manager Gérard Houllier, a keen fan of players in Cantona’s mould, who unsuccessfully enquired whether Le Tissier had any French relatives.

Ball declared his love for Le Tissier immediately upon arrival at Southampton, with the south-coast club languishing in the relegation zone. In their first training session Ball and assistant manager Lawrie McMenemy pulled ten players onto the training pitch and assembled them in a defensive shape, leaving Le Tissier wondering if he’d be omitted, as had often happened under previous coach Ian Branfoot. Instead, Ball then dragged Le Tissier into the centre of the group and announced to the other ten players, ‘This is the best player you’ve got on your team. Get the ball to him as often as you can, and he’ll win games for you.’ Le Tissier, a humble man, felt slightly uncomfortable being elevated to this status, but it provided an enormous confidence boost and he scored six goals in his first four appearances under Ball.

Just as Ferguson made allowances off the pitch for Cantona, Le Tissier’s free role extended to socialising. On a rest day midway through a pre-season trip to Northern Ireland, Southampton’s squad had planned a round of golf, but Ball suggested they went to a local pub instead. This was a bad move. After Ball retired to the hotel it turned into an all-day drinking session, capped by the players venturing out to a nightclub. They arrived back at 2 am, blind drunk, with training the following morning. Ball was furious, screaming at Beasant, Iain Dowie and Jim Magilton before sending them to bed. He then took Le Tissier aside and told him, ‘Look, our senior players are setting a bad example … but the way you’re playing, you can do what you like!’ Le Tissier, incidentally, was routinely mocked by teammates for his drinking habits. He didn’t drink beer, preferring Malibu and Coke, although this wasn’t because of a revolutionary, forward-thinking diet – he admits consuming sausage and egg McMuffins ahead of training sessions, and fish and chips the evening before a game. Le Tissier wasn’t the fittest or the hardest-working, and recalls an incident later in his career when then-Southampton manager Gordon Strachan shouted from the technical area to a particularly languid Le Tissier, walking back from an attacking move, ‘Matt! Get yourself warmed up, I’m bringing you off!’

‘Those 18 months Ball was there were the best of my career,’ Le Tissier recalled. ‘Ball built the team around me, instead of trying to fit me into the team.’ Despite playing as an attacking midfielder rather than a forward, Le Tissier hit 45 goals in 64 games in all competitions under Ball, many of them spectacular. Southampton avoided relegation at the end of Ball’s first season, and finished in the top half in his second.

Unfortunately, England managers didn’t share Ball’s enthusiasm for Le Tissier. There was still a suspicion of number 10s in his mould, even among managers like Terry Venables and Glenn Hoddle, who appreciated flair players. English football now adored foreign number 10s but didn’t trust its own, and Le Tissier made the familiar complaint of the 1990s number 10: ‘I think maybe England managers weren’t brave enough to change their formation to accommodate me.’ That said, Hoddle – who was Le Tissier’s boyhood hero – used both him and Liverpool’s Steve McManaman behind Alan Shearer in a fluid 3–4–2–1 shape for a 1–0 defeat to Italy in 1997, England’s first-ever World Cup qualifying defeat at Wembley. It was a performance that encapsulated such an enigmatic footballer; Le Tissier was constantly second to loose balls, conceded possession regularly, and his lack of energy was juxtaposed by the constant running of the wonderful Zola, who played the same role for Italy and fired in the only goal when sprinting in advance of his strike partner. Nevertheless, Le Tissier came closest to scoring for England.

‘It is not a gamble [to play Le Tissier] when you feel the game is going to be tight and the door might need to be unlocked,’ said Hoddle afterwards. ‘Le Tissier, with his talent, could do that.’ Nevertheless, he lost faith in his most creative talent – presumably his faith-healer Eileen Drewery hadn’t been able to help – and failed to include Le Tissier in his 30-man provisional 1998 World Cup squad, a blow Le Tissier admits he never recovered from. The ultimate 1990s Premier League player discovered the devastating news in a brilliantly 1990s way: by reading Teletext.

English football had learned to appreciate the quality provided by number 10s, but was still largely fixated on variations on 4–4–2. Therefore, while the entire definition of a number 10 is that he’s neither a forward nor a midfielder and instead is somewhere in between, realistically almost every number 10 is one or the other. And while withdrawn forwards like Cantona, Bergkamp and Zola thrived by dropping deep and turning their side into a 4–4–1–1, attacking midfielders like Juninho, Kinkladze and Le Tissier caused problems, because they generally needed more unusual formations that their English teammates simply weren’t accustomed to. The Premier League was evolving in terms of personnel, but not yet in terms of tactics.

5

Arsènal

‘Wenger doesn’t know anything about English football. He’s at a big club – well, Arsenal used to be a big club – he’s a novice and should keep his opinions to Japanese football.’

Alex Ferguson

The sheer scale of revolution during the Premier League’s formative years is best summarised by Arsenal. When the division was formed, Arsenal were the most traditional, conservative club in English football; the chairman was an Old Etonian from a family of cricketers, while the beautiful old marble halls at Highbury underlined the old-fashioned, if unquestionably grand, nature of the club. In footballing terms, Arsenal’s players were old-school and British, the team most famous for its offside trap and for winning 1–0. ‘Boring, boring Arsenal’ was the standard jeer from opposition fans.

After just six years of the Premier League, however, Arsenal had become the model for futuristic football. They were the division’s most attractive side, the most forward-thinking club in terms of physiology, they recruited footballers from untapped markets across Europe and were the first team in English top-flight history to win the league with a foreign manager. The revolution, however, was not solely about Arsène Wenger.

Arsenal had enjoyed tremendous success in their eight seasons under George Graham, who won six major honours, including two league titles and the European Cup Winners’ Cup. When Graham was suddenly sacked midway through 1994/95 after accepting an illegal payment from an agent, Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein wanted to appoint former Monaco manager Wenger, who he’d encountered by chance at Highbury six years earlier. Dein realised the need for revolution; whereas most directors of English clubs surrounded themselves with like-minded figures and lived in a rather small world, Dein also had a prominent role at the Football Association, which meant he was frequently travelling abroad, moving in international circles and discovering how antiquated English football had become. The move didn’t happen this time. Wenger went to Japan – at this stage a complete footballing backwater, having never qualified for the World Cup – to coach Nagoya Grampus Eight. Japan had recently launched an extraordinary 100-year football plan with the intention of winning the World Cup by 2092, the type of long-term thinking Wenger would become closely associated with.

Instead, Arsenal appointed Bruce Rioch. He was a considerably safer choice, and somewhat reminiscent of Graham, both being ex-Scottish international midfielders and strict disciplinarians. Rioch’s reign was troubled, as he ostracised senior players, but during his sole season in charge, 1995/96, he recorded a respectable fifth-place finish – and more crucially set the wheels in motion for the Wenger revolution, introducing a passing game that was distinctly different from the direct style Graham had favoured towards the end of his reign. He had two major objectives: encouraging Arsenal to play out from the back and ensuring there was less dependence upon Ian Wright in terms of goalscoring. ‘Bruce encouraged us to pass the ball through midfield more,’ goalkeeper David Seaman said. ‘Had he stayed longer, I am sure he would have gradually changed the whole way we played – as was to happen later with Arsène Wenger.’

England captain David Platt, who arrived at Arsenal shortly after Bergkamp, had been playing in Serie A under revered coaches like Giovanni Trapattoni and Sven-Göran Eriksson, yet said that Rioch ‘deeply impressed me with his vision of how the game should be played’. Martin Keown underlined the difference between Graham and Rioch: ‘Under George the emphasis was to win the ball back, press as a team, deny the opposition space and have lots of offsides … Bruce began by introducing the passing game. We would work on keeping the ball, whereas with George we worked on winning it back.’ Rioch was a huge admirer of flair players, and the board provided him with the transformative footballer Arsenal desperately needed: Dennis Bergkamp.

In terms of stylistic impact upon the Premier League, Bergkamp is second only to Eric Cantona. They could, in slightly different circumstances, have ended up at one another’s clubs; Alex Ferguson had explored the possibility of recruiting Bergkamp before eventually signing Cantona, who, upon leaving Leeds, supposedly wanted to join one of Manchester United, Liverpool or Arsenal. When Cantona finished third in the 1993 Ballon d’Or, he made a particular point of paying tribute to Ajax’s Bergkamp, who had finished second behind Roberto Baggio. He recognised a kindred spirit.

When Bergkamp left Ajax for Inter Milan that year, he was signed specifically because Inter were desperate to evolve from a defensive, unattractive side to a more aesthetically pleasing outfit. They were tired of the plaudits showered upon city rivals AC Milan, who had become Europe’s most celebrated side courtesy of Arrigo Sacchi’s revolutionary coaching and the efforts of three brilliant Dutchmen: Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard and Ruud Gullit. Inter had challenged them with a team featuring three Germans: Jürgen Klinsmann, Andreas Brehme and Lothar Matthäus. But at this stage there was a huge difference in the perceptions of Dutch footballers (intelligent, creative, dynamic) and German footballers (efficient, ruthless, boring) and Inter attempted to becoming more stylish by signing two Dutchmen of their own, Bergkamp and his Ajax teammate Wim Jonk.

But Inter’s revolution never occurred. After poor initial results, they became more defensive and sacked their manager, leaving Bergkamp playing in a more direct side and unable to link attacking moves. He managed just 11 goals in two Serie A campaigns combined. It’s fascinating, therefore, that Bergkamp put that frustrating experience aside and made a second transfer to a club who required a catalyst for technical football. After retirement, Bergkamp outlined his determination to be a revolutionary: ‘Like when I chose Inter instead of Milan or Barcelona, I thought: “I’m the sort of player you don’t see at Arsenal, so maybe I can show people this is my way of playing.”’

Arsenal, who had generally been reluctant to pay large fees and therefore missed out on top talent during the Premier League’s first three seasons, broke their club record fee three times over to sign Bergkamp and immediately reallocated Paul Merson’s number 10 shirt to their new technical leader. The Independent’s headline read, ‘Rioch signs Bergkamp to signal new era’. That would prove particularly prescient, but there were sceptics – England left-back Stuart Pearce said it was a ‘massive gamble’, pundits questioned his value when he took seven games to score, while Tottenham chairman Alan Sugar said his arrival amounted to ‘cosmetic surgery’. Instead, it was more like a brain transplant. ‘He was the one that changed our whole attitude towards training,’ said Ray Parlour. ‘Just watching the way he handled himself from day one was an eye-opener. It made you think: hold on a second, I need to up my effort here.’

Rioch, in particular, offered tremendous support, defending him staunchly from the early criticism and encouraging Bergkamp’s teammates to supply him frequently between the lines, although Arsenal were sometimes crowded in that zone, with Bergkamp, David Platt and Paul Merson broadly playing similar roles. It was a notable shift, however, from Arsenal’s previous approach of incessantly knocking long balls over the top for Wright. Bergkamp’s first campaign was patchy – and he endured more quiet seasons at Highbury than his reputation might suggest – but he was unquestionably Arsenal’s game-changer, someone who brought the best out of others. Bergkamp had finished as Eredivisie top goalscorer three times, but said his role changed upon arriving in the Premier League, becoming an assister more than a goalscorer, as shown by the fact that he collected 93 Premier League assists compared with 87 goals. Tellingly, the only other players to have scored 50+ Premier League goals but been more prolific assisters are all midfielders: Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Damien Duff, Gareth Barry and Danny Murphy.

There were many similarities to Cantona; Bergkamp was also a perfectionist who worked upon his game tirelessly after training, practising seemingly simple passes repeatedly, setting the standard in terms of technique and professionalism. Supporters instantly recognised his ability, but teammates raved about the things you can’t fully appreciate from the stands: the weight of his passes, the spin on the ball. Similar to Cantona, his pace was often overlooked – before the 2003/04 season, when Bergkamp was 33, he recorded the third-fastest 60m sprint time at Arsenal, behind Thierry Henry and Jermaine Pennant, but ahead of Ashley Cole, Robert Pirès, Gaël Clichy and Sylvain Wiltord. And as with both Cantona and Zola, opponents often remarked upon his surprising strength for a primarily creative player, enabling him to compete with aggressive centre-backs. ‘People don’t think that Dennis had such strength,’ said Sol Campbell, a future teammate, ‘but believe me, he was one of the strongest I played with or against.’ Early in 1997/98, he scored a brilliant long-range strike having shoved aside Southampton left-back Francis Benali, considered the dirtiest defender in the Premier League. For all his technical quality, Bergkamp also had a petulant streak. He was dismissed four times throughout his Arsenal career, all straight red cards: an elbow, a push and two wild tackles, so ‘the Iceman’ always seemed a peculiarly inappropriate moniker. Besides, as nicknames go, considering Bergkamp’s famous refusal to board an aeroplane, ‘the Non-Flying Dutchman’ was difficult to beat.

Bergkamp was, aesthetically, among the Premier League’s greatest players and scored some wonderful goals during his 11 years at Arsenal. His classic strike was receiving the ball just outside the box in an inside-left position, before opening up his body and curling the ball into the far corner, a goal he scored four times in the space of 18 months, against Sunderland, Leicester and both home and away against Barnsley in 1997/98. Bergkamp also netted two of the Premier League’s most famous goals. The first was against Leicester in 1997, where he brilliantly brought down a long ball, turned inside and finished coolly – a goal which foreshadowed his similar World Cup winner against Argentina the following summer – and there was also the astonishing, extravagant opener against Newcastle in 2002, where he flicked the ball one way around Nikos Dabizas with the inside of his left foot, then spun in the opposite direction before collecting the ball and converting with his right. It prompted years of debate about whether it was intentional, and when Arsenal commissioned a statue of Bergkamp outside their Emirates Stadium, the sculptor complained that goal was simply impossible to depict.

Bergkamp only played for a year under the manager who brought him to Arsenal, and the circumstances of Rioch’s departure were peculiar. He was dismissed shortly before the start of 1996/97, a fortnight after signing a new contract. This time around, Dein got his wish and Wenger was appointed. But as Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood admitted, both he and Dein had already been in regular dialogue with Wenger, who later accidentally revealed that he’d been consulted about Bergkamp’s arrival. It seems Rioch was unwittingly a caretaker manager, a short-term stopgap between two very different eras of Arsenal, but he nevertheless deserves great credit for starting the revolution.

Back in 1996 hiring a foreign coach was considered extremely dangerous. There was one other in the Premier League, as Ruud Gullit had recently been appointed Chelsea player-manager, but the Dutchman was a world-renowned footballer who had already played in the Premier League. Wenger was understandably unheard of in England, at a time when there was minimal coverage of foreign football aside from Channel 4’s Football Italia, and before the internet was widespread. Six years earlier Aston Villa had appointed the first-ever overseas manager of a top-flight side: the mysterious Dr Jozef Vengloš. It was a disastrous experiment. Villa had finished second the previous campaign, but under the Slovakian (he was then considered Czechoslovakian) they finished two places above relegation. He appeared incompatible with the English approach, but the man with a doctorate in physical education was essentially a forerunner of Wenger, and not simply because he was foreign – he attempted to professionalise English football. ‘Never had I imagined it was possible for human beings to drink so much beer,’ he gasped shortly after his arrival. Years later he took a more considered view. ‘A few things in those days were a bit different to what we had been doing in central Europe – the methodology of training, the analysing of nutrition, and the recuperation, regeneration and physiological approach to the game.’ The Premier League desperately needed a foreign coach like Wenger to successfully implement modern methods. As Dein said, ‘The combination of Arsène and Dennis changed the culture of Arsenal.’

Wenger was completely different from anyone else in the Premier League, frequently described as looking more like a teacher than a football manager; he spoke five languages, had a degree in economics and had briefly studied medicine. More than anything, he appeared extraordinarily calm, a quality he’s occasionally lost in recent years. Football managers were supposed to be ranters, ravers, eternally angry people; Alex Ferguson famously dished out the ‘hairdryer treatment’. A year before Wenger’s appointment, Leyton Orient manager John Sitton had been the subject of a Channel 4 documentary that recorded him threatening to fight his own players in a famously bizarre dressing-room outburst. ‘When I tell you to do something, do it, and if you come back at me, we’ll have a fucking right sort-out in here,’ he roared at two players. ‘All right? And you can pair up if you like, and you can fucking pick someone else to help you, and you can bring your fucking dinner, ’coz by the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll fucking need it.’ That was the 1990s football manager. Wenger was the opposite, stunning his players by demanding a period of complete silence at half-time. More to the point, he certainly wasn’t asking players to bring their dinner.

Wenger’s major impact upon English football was revolutionising his players’ diet. Before the Frenchman’s arrival, Arsenal’s squad – in common with the majority of Premier League teams – had the culinary preferences of a pub team. They’d enjoy a full English breakfast before training, and their pre-match menu included fish and chips, steak, scrambled eggs and beans on toast. Post-match, things became even worse. On the long coach journey back from Newcastle, for example, some players held an eating competition, with no one capable of matching the impressive nine dinners consumed by centre-back Steve Bould. When Tony Adams and Ray Parlour were given a police caution for spraying a fire extinguisher at abusive Tottenham supporters, the incredible thing wasn’t that the incident had taken place at a Pizza Hut, but that when the police pulled up outside Adams’s house later that night, the pair had recently taken delivery of a Chinese takeaway, too.

Wenger, meanwhile, had been impressed by the healthiness of Japanese cuisine, noticing the low level of obesity throughout the country. He quickly overhauled the dietary options at Arsenal’s training ground, banning sweets, chocolate and Coca-Cola, and encouraging his players to eat steamed fish, boiled chicken, pasta and plenty of vegetables. Whenever Arsenal stayed in a hotel before an away match, Wenger banned room service and insisted that the mini-bars were emptied before the team’s arrival. Crucially, he introduced dieticians who educated the players about good nutrition, and concentrated heavily upon the benefit of chewing slowly to digest food properly. Wenger knew there would be a backlash, and intelligently ensured that meals were particularly bland and flavourless in the opening weeks. Then, when the players complained, Wenger made concessions – allowing them tomato ketchup, for example – so the new arrangement appeared a compromise. Wenger set the example, always eating exactly the same meals as his players.

The previous innovator in this respect was Australian Craig Johnston, who played for Liverpool in the 1980s and was one of football’s most intelligent, innovative characters, designing the Adidas Predator boot after his retirement. He was inspired by a book called Eat to Win by Robert Haas, and eschewed Liverpool’s steaks in favour of rice, soy bacon and egg, initially prompting mockery from teammates. But when they noticed his tremendous stamina, they gradually switched to his diet. Intriguingly, Adams says he and a couple of Arsenal teammates read the book in 1987, nearly a decade before Wenger’s arrival, but if it provoked them to eat some healthy food they were clearly cancelling out any benefits by also consuming pizzas and Chinese takeaways.

It wasn’t all about food, however. Wenger also encouraged his players to take supplements, an unorthodox concept at this stage. Vitamin tablets were placed on tables ahead of training, and many players started taking Creatine to build muscle and improve stamina. Again, everything was explained by experts, and while an improved diet was mandatory, the supplements were optional. Bergkamp was sceptical and didn’t take anything, while goalkeeper David Seaman started off without them, then noticed how his teammates were improving physically, so changed his mind. Ray Parlour admitted he simply took whatever was given to him without a second thought. Arsenal’s physical improvement was obvious, and on international duty, England teammates asked the Gunners contingent what they’d been taking, and quickly copied, which annoyed Wenger, who was understandably determined to maintain Arsenal’s competitive advantage. Unintentionally, the Frenchman was revolutionising the whole of the Premier League, not simply his own club.

The arrival of Wenger, who had grown up in his parents’ pub near Strasbourg, also coincided with the end of the drinking culture at Arsenal. Regular boozing was a widespread practice at Premier League clubs, but appeared particularly prevalent at Arsenal, with captain Adams the ringleader of the famous ‘Tuesday club’, when a group of players would follow a heavy training session with a heavy drinking session, safe in the knowledge that Wednesday was a rest day. Even then, however, drinking the night before training was common, and turning up hungover wasn’t frowned upon by teammates if the player got through training properly. On Bergkamp’s first pre-season tour of Sweden, he was dismayed when, midway through an evening stroll with his wife, he spotted the rest of the team drinking at a local pub.

But everything changed a fortnight before Wenger’s arrival, when Adams shocked his teammates by announcing he was an alcoholic. Two of his teammates immediately wondered, if Adams was an alcoholic, whether they had a drinking problem too. This worked out perfectly for Wenger, who would have encountered serious problems overhauling the drinking culture himself. When Ferguson had attempted to solve this problem at Manchester United, he was forced to sell the two chief culprits, Paul McGrath and Norman Whiteside, who were among United’s star players and fan favourites, and he initially struggled. Wenger, luckily, found his captain did the job for him, and Parlour admitted Adams quitting drinking was the best thing that could have happened for his own football career, never mind Adams’s.

Similarly, Wenger was fortunate that Arsenal had signed Platt the previous summer, shortly after Bergkamp’s arrival. The midfielder had spent the previous four seasons in Italy and introduced new practices to the Arsenal dressing room: the use of a masseur, for example. Again, the introduction of foreign concepts was more likely to be accepted coming from Platt, who had captained England 19 times, rather than from an unknown Frenchman who had been working in Japan. Bergkamp’s professionalism, Adams’s new lifestyle and Platt’s Italian innovations were a series of happy coincidences that prepared Arsenal for Wenger’s new regime. Even Platt, however, hated one of Wenger’s ideas: stretching sessions. Ahead of Wenger’s first game, away at Blackburn, Wenger called an early-morning meeting in the hotel ballroom and instructed his players to go through a mixture of yoga and Pilates routines. Eventually, stretching became an accepted, regular part of training – albeit not on matchdays – and Arsenal’s veteran defenders credit this practice for extending their careers.

All these physiological innovations were crucial tactically, because while Wenger’s Arsenal would later become renowned for their technical football, his 1997/98 double winners were more celebrated for their physical power, especially in the centre of the pitch. While the defence and strike partnerships from Rioch’s reign remained in place, Wenger overhauled the midfield almost completely, recruiting French defensive midfielders Emmanuel Petit and Patrick Vieira, plus left-winger Marc Overmars from Ajax, while Parlour improved and played on the right. This quartet epitomised Wenger’s Arsenal at this stage; while boasting technical quality, there was no outright playmaker – that was Bergkamp’s role. Vieira and Petit were renowned for their tenacity, Overmars for his acceleration, Parlour for his energy. Strength, speed and stamina.

Vieira, who arrived at Arsenal upon Wenger’s request while serving his notice in Japan, later outlined the difference. ‘It wasn’t based on technique or on an attacking strategy,’ he says of the 1998 title winners. ‘The quality came from individual players such as Bergkamp or sometimes Overmars.’ In stark contrast, he describes the Arsenal’s 2001/02 champions by saying, ‘The way in which we won this second double had been very different from the way we had done it in 1998 … gone was the long-ball game, in came quick, accurate passing to players’ feet.’ Vieira is exaggerating the difference – the 1997/98 side were noticeably keen to keep the ball on the ground compared with other sides of that era – but Arsenal took time to become renowned as a truly beautiful side.

For example, Wenger’s Arsenal were heavily criticised in the early days because of their atrocious disciplinary record, with Vieira and Petit frequently in trouble with referees. Only three clubs received more bookings during 1997/98, and Arsenal’s red card tally under Wenger became a running feature in newspapers. Indeed, Arsenal’s shift from primarily physical football to primarily technical football is best summarised by Wenger’s attitude towards referees – initially he complained they were too strict, later he’d complain they were too lenient. Many ex-players, like Arsenal’s Parlour and Lee Dixon, plus regular opponents Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs of Manchester United, insist the 1997/98 side was the best incarnation of Wenger’s Arsenal because they were physically powerful and refused to be bullied.

Wenger has never been a particularly keen tactician, rarely attempting to change matches by making a surprise selection decision or switching formation regularly. In his early days he preferred a 4–4–2, however, and angered Arsenal’s players by interfering with team shape before he’d officially taken charge. For a UEFA Cup tie at Borussia Monchengladbach, Wenger travelled with the team but was supposed to be merely observing before officially starting the following week. However, with the half-time score at 1–1, Wenger decided to take charge in the dressing room and ordered Arsenal to switch from the 3–5–2 system they’d played for the last year to 4–4–2. It backfired badly – Arsenal lost 3–2, and Adams was furious with the sudden intervention. He persuaded Wenger that Arsenal were comfortable with a back three, and they remained in that shape for the majority of 1996/97.

Although it was unusual to see Arsenal playing with a three-man defence, they were suited to that system because they had three top-class centre-backs, with Adams alongside Bould and Martin Keown. Indeed, the 3–5–2 enjoyed a sudden wave of popularity during the mid-1990s, with the likes of Liverpool, Newcastle, Tottenham, Aston Villa, Leicester and Coventry all using the system regularly, with varying levels of success. As a general rule, utilising a 3–5–2 worked effectively against opponents playing 4–4–2, which remained the dominant system, as it offered a spare man in defence against two centre-forwards, and an extra midfielder to overload the centre. The wing-backs were forced to cover a huge amount of ground, providing attacking width yet retreating to form a five-man defence. Although that allowed the opposition full-backs freedom, this wasn’t a significant problem during the mid-90s, before most full-backs had become speedy attacking weapons.

Contests between two sides playing 3–5–2 were often hopelessly dull, however – both teams had a spare man at the back, while the midfield was congested and the wing-backs simply chased one another up and down the touchlines. Arsenal’s consecutive goalless draws in February 1997 against Leeds and Tottenham, for example, were both matches between two 3–5–2s. ‘It’s quite ironic,’ said Wenger, ‘that while the rest of Europe are moving to the flat back four, more and more sides in England are adopting the old continental approach using sweepers and wing-backs.’ England was, as ever, out of step tactically, and Arsenal’s evolution into title winners came after Wenger switched to 4–4–2 for 1997/98.

He started the season asking his players to press in advanced positions, which wasn’t particularly effective, and it’s interesting that the crucial tactical change came at the request of the players rather than the manager. In the first half of the season Arsenal defended poorly by their exceptionally high standards, and after a 1–0 home defeat by Liverpool a team meeting was called. Wenger suggested that the problem was a lack of desire, with players not working hard enough. But Adams, Bould and Platt intervened with a more specific suggestion, saying that Petit and Vieira needed to position themselves deeper in order to shield the defence properly. It didn’t work immediately – there was to be a 3–1 defeat at home to Blackburn, which convinced Wenger that Adams required six weeks’ rest to recover from an ankle injury – but Arsenal’s defence was superb in the second half of the campaign, at one stage going 13 hours without conceding, which included a run of 1–0, 0–0, 1–0, 1–0, 1–0, 1–0. ‘1–0 to the Arsenal’ still applied, although they hit 12 goals in the next three games, prompting Arsenal fans to ironically adopt opposition fans’ ‘boring, boring Arsenal’. They became the first Premier League side to win ten consecutive matches.

Vieira and Petit were outstanding in the second half of the 1997/98 title-winning campaign as a tight partnership that concentrated on ball-winning, although Vieira surged forward sporadically and Petit offered a wonderful passing range with his left foot. With Bergkamp and Wright often injured in the second half of the campaign, Arsenal would depend upon crucial contributions from young reserve strikers Christopher Wreh and Nicolas Anelka, the latter becoming a significant player in the Premier League’s tactical evolution. But the crucial attacker throughout the title run-in was Overmars. Although Arsenal’s formation was 4–4–2, Overmars was allowed freedom to push forward down the left, while Parlour played a narrower, shuttling role on the right. In later days it would be termed a 4–2–3–1, although at the time it was considered a lopsided 4–3–3 in the attacking phase, with Petit shifting across slightly to cover and Parlour tucking inside. Overmars was happy on either foot but primarily right-footed, a goal-scoring threat more than a creator.

Overmars’s attack-minded positioning helped him provide a truly magnificent performance in the 1–0 victory over Manchester United in mid-March that swung the title race in Arsenal’s favour. Almost all Arsenal’s attacking play went through the Dutchman, who handed young United right-back John Curtis, then a promising prospect, an afternoon so difficult that his career never really recovered. In the early stages Overmars collected a through-ball from Bergkamp, rounded Peter Schmeichel and fired narrowly wide from a difficult angle. Shortly afterwards he made another run in behind, and was astonished not to be awarded a penalty after Curtis clearly tripped him. Next he stabbed the ball into the side netting having evaded Curtis and Gary Neville, who started as a right-sided centre-back. Finally, Overmars provided the decisive moment ten minutes from time, when both Bergkamp and Anelka flicked on a long ball, allowing the winger to race through and slip the ball between Schmeichel’s legs.

Considering this was the decisive game of Arsenal’s title-winning campaign, Overmars’s one-man show is among the greatest individual performances that the Premier League has seen. He followed this by scoring two brilliant solo goals in the title-clinching 4–0 victory over Everton at Highbury, then opened the scoring in the 2–0 FA Cup Final win over Newcastle, as Arsenal clinched the double in Wenger’s first full campaign. That victory at Wembley also showed how Wenger was not remotely a reactive manager – he didn’t mention the opposition once before the game, an approach he maintained throughout the majority of the Premier League era.

Such tactical naivety would cost Arsenal in European competition over the following seasons – they didn’t qualify from the group stage during their first two Champions League attempts, and Wenger’s side would later struggle in the Premier League against more tactically astute opposition. Like so many other revolutionaries in the Premier League, the Frenchman was something of a victim of his own success. Other managers soon replicated his approach, particularly in the three areas where he significantly changed English football: improved physical conditioning, recruiting players from abroad and greater emphasis upon technical football. Gradually Wenger’s uniqueness was diminished, but his initial impact was hugely influential, and he summarised it best himself. ‘I felt like I was opening the door to the rest of the world,’ he said. This was the start of the Premier League becoming the world’s most international division.

6

Speed

‘Owen was doing things that made me think, “Hang on, if so-and-so was in that position, would he have done that?” And the answer was, “No, he wouldn’t have had the pace.”’

Glenn Hoddle

Number 9s during the Premier League’s formative years were stereotypically tall, strong target men who stationed themselves inside the penalty box and thrived on crosses. Dion Dublin, Duncan Ferguson and Chris Sutton were the classic examples; they could out-muscle and out-jump opposition centre-backs, but rarely threatened to outrun them.

The Premier League’s newfound love of technical football, and its new breed of deep-lying, creative forwards, necessitated a different mould of striker. Increasingly, managers wanted strikers who could sprint in behind the opposition defence to reach clever through-balls between opponents. Gradually, speed replaced aerial power as the most revered attribute up front.

Two of the most memorable Premier League goals in 1997 were solo runs by quick strikers dribbling through the Manchester United defence: Derby County’s Paulo Wanchope in April and Coventry’s Darren Huckerby in December, both in surprise 3–2 wins for the underdogs over the Premier League champions. These goals epitomised the change in the nature of centre-forwards, but the most revolutionary individuals were two teenage prodigies: Arsenal’s Nicolas Anelka and Liverpool’s Michael Owen.

The similarities between Anelka and Owen are striking. Both were born in 1979, made their debuts in the second half of 1996/97, before making a serious impact in 1997/98. That season Anelka lifted the title with Arsenal, while Owen won the Premier League Golden Boot and the PFA Young Player of the Year. The following season Owen retained the Golden Boot, while Anelka finished just one goal behind and succeeded Owen as the Young Player winner – although he courted controversy by going nightclubbing rather than attending the awards ceremony.

When both strikers left the Premier League it was for Real Madrid; Anelka in 1999, Owen five years later, although both lasted just a season in the Spanish capital and played the majority of their career in England. Anelka eventually hit 125 Premier League goals, Owen 150. Both were rather distant, aloof characters, and despite all their achievements, neither are remembered as a legend at any one particular club. The main similarity, though, is simple: they were astonishingly quick. Pace had always been a dangerous weapon in a striker’s armoury. The likes of Andy Cole and Ian Wright – 187 and 113 Premier League goals respectively – were prolific in the Premier League’s first half-decade, and clearly weren’t traditional target men. However, they were primarily finishers who happened to boast a turn of speed. Anelka and Owen were essentially sprinters also capable of scoring, and in an era where centre-backs were built for battles in the air, scored easy goals by exploiting their sluggishness on the ground.

Anelka was a wonderful talent, boasting a sensational mix of speed, trickery and coolness when one-on-one with the goalkeeper. In Premier League terms the Frenchman was a forerunner of compatriot Thierry Henry, a more celebrated player who became an inspiration for the likes of Theo Walcott, Daniel Sturridge, Danny Welbeck and Anthony Martial. That mould of athletic, lightning-quick striker can essentially be traced back to Anelka’s initial impact for Arsenal.

Anelka started his first full season, 1997/98, behind Wright in Arsène Wenger’s pecking order, but had a crucial impact in Arsenal’s double-winning campaign. His first Arsenal goal was the opener against title rivals Manchester United in November 1997, a crucial 3–2 victory, and he ended the season by scoring the second in the 2–0 FA Cup Final triumph over Newcastle. His most typical goal came in a 4–1 victory away at Blackburn Rovers on Easter Monday, when he collected a long chip from Nigel Winterburn, streaked away from the opposition defence, then dummied a shot to put goalkeeper Alan Fettis on the ground, took the ball around him and lifted it past the despairing lunge of a defender into the net. That made it 4–0 before half-time, a typical example of Arsenal’s ability to blitz opponents through speed in the opening stages, and produced a round of applause from mesmerised Blackburn supporters.

Signed for just £500,000 from Paris Saint-Germain when Wenger exploited a loophole in France’s system of contracting youngsters, Anelka impressed on the pitch but struggled to make friends. Despite his sensational speed he possessed a curious running style in his early years: head down, shoulders slumped awkwardly, barely aware of anything around him. It reflected his introverted nature and his inability to communicate with teammates, who struggled to understand him. He wasn’t an entertainer and suggested he’d happily play matches in deserted stadiums. ‘I’m bored in London – I don’t know anyone here and I don’t want to,’ he once said. Anelka never smiled, even after scoring or when lifting a trophy, and lasted just two complete seasons with Arsenal before leaving for £23m, a sensational return on Wenger’s investment two years earlier.

Arsenal effectively spent the proceeds of Anelka’s sale on Henry – and a new training ground. Anelka’s transfer was the culmination of a summer-long story that arguably set the tone for long-running transfer sagas of later years, with Anelka pledging allegiance to Lazio, Juventus and Real Madrid at various points. Some aspects were ludicrous; one of his brothers, also acting as his agent, once claimed that Anelka had settled on Lazio because their shirt colour was a perfect blend of the white of Real Madrid, his ideal destination, and the blue of France. He eventually ended up at Real anyway, with Sven-Göran Eriksson’s Lazio unsuccessfully switching their attentions to Owen, showing how the two teenage sensations were viewed almost interchangeably.

Meanwhile, Anelka’s brothers became pantomime villains for their determination to move him around Europe regularly, collecting signing-on fees in the process. Anelka eventually made 12 transfers, his globetrotting career taking in France, Spain, Italy, Turkey, China and India. Despite his initial dislike of England, however, Anelka always returned, subsequently representing Liverpool, Manchester City, Bolton, Chelsea and West Bromwich Albion. His final Premier League goal was scored 16 years after his first, and was his most infamous – he celebrated with the ‘quenelle’ gesture, described by experts as an ‘inverted Nazi salute’. The FA banned him for five games, Anelka promptly declaring that he was leaving West Brom, who announced they were sacking him anyway. It was a fitting end to an incredibly strange Premier League career.

In his early days, one of Anelka’s most impressive displays came for France in a 2–0 victory over England at Wembley in February 1999. He scored both goals, and had another shot hit the bar and cross the goal line, not spotted by the linesman. Bizarrely, Anelka wore goalkeeper gloves throughout that game on a bitterly cold February evening in London, and thrived on playing ahead of World Player of the Year Zinedine Zidane, running in behind to reach his through-balls. It was also significant that Anelka outplayed an England defence featuring Lee Dixon, Tony Adams and Martin Keown ahead of David Seaman, with Chelsea’s Graeme Le Saux the only man breaking up the Arsenal connection at the back. Even when his opponents knew his game perfectly, they simply couldn’t stop him. ‘We’ve found our Ronaldo,’ said France captain Didier Deschamps – a significant remark. France had won the World Cup the previous year despite their lack of a clinical striker, while the rest of the world despaired at Ronaldo’s pre-final breakdown, which evidently affected his Brazilian teammates. Anelka was so good that he had improved the world champions.

At club level, Anelka proved the ideal partner for Dennis Bergkamp. Although the Dutchman formed fine relationships with both Wright and Henry either side of Anelka, he considered the young Frenchman ideal for his style. ‘As a strike partner, Nicolas was probably the best I’ve had at Highbury in terms of understanding,’ Bergkamp once said, even when playing up front alongside Henry. ‘The way Nicolas played suited me perfectly because he was always looking to run forward on goal. That made it easy for me to predict what he wanted and to know instinctively where he would be on the pitch. That directness was just right. Thierry tends to want the ball to come to him or to drift towards the flanks more. Nicolas was focused on heading for goal and scoring. He loved having the ball played for him to run on to and going one-on-one with the keeper.’

The best example of their combination play came in a 5–0 victory over Leicester City in February 1999, which featured an Anelka hat-trick before half-time. Leicester’s defence, and in particular towering, old-school centre-back Matt Elliott, were completely unable to cope with his speed. Martin O’Neill’s changes at the interval involved switching Elliott to a centre-forward role, underlining both his struggles at the back and the fact that many Premier League sides still based attacking play around a tall, strong aerial threat. Bergkamp collected four assists at Highbury that day: two for Anelka, and two for the onrushing Ray Parlour. Anelka’s opener demonstrated how easily Bergkamp and Anelka linked by stretching the defence in different directions. Bergkamp collected a bouncing ball 15 yards inside his own half, glanced over his shoulder to check Anelka was making a run into the inside-right channel before casually lobbing a 40-yard pass in the Frenchman’s general direction. Anelka roared past the Leicester defence, chested the ball onto his right foot and finished into the far corner.

It looked so simple. At this stage many defences still concentrated on pushing up the pitch to keep strikers away from goal, a logical approach when dealing with aerial threats. In later years they would learn to defend deeper against quick strikers, while goalkeepers would sweep up proactively to intercept passes in behind when the defence took a more aggressive starting position. On that day, however, Arsenal simply had so much behind Leicester’s back line, which was ideal for Anelka. His second was similar, albeit from a neater, toe-poked Bergkamp through-ball. Anelka instinctively celebrated by throwing his arm out to point at Bergkamp, acknowledging the assist, although there would be no such celebration when Marc Overmars teed him up for his hat-trick goal. There was little acknowledgement between them, and only a half-hearted group hug between the two and Bergkamp, who was fittingly playing the link role in the celebration. Overmars and Anelka weren’t on good terms.

Earlier in the season, Anelka had complained his teammates weren’t passing to him, believing Overmars exclusively looked for his fellow Dutchman Bergkamp. ‘I’m not getting enough of the ball,’ he muttered to the French press. ‘I’m going to see the manager soon because Overmars is too selfish.’ Wenger resolved the dispute in a fantastically cunning manner, calling both players into his office for showdown talks. The complication, however, was that Anelka barely spoke English and Overmars didn’t understand French, so Wenger was not only moderator but also interpreter, and played the situation beautifully. He asked the two players to spell out their issues; Anelka repeated his complaint to Wenger in their native tongue, while in English, Overmars claimed he always looked out for Anelka’s runs and didn’t understand his problem. Rather than translating their comments accurately, Wenger simply told Overmars that Anelka had said he no longer had a problem, then told Anelka that Overmars was promising to pass more. Both were lies, but it temporarily resolved the situation.

But Anelka had another major issue with Arsenal’s system, which wasn’t apparent at the time – he didn’t actually like playing up front. ‘I played as a centre-forward at Arsenal and scored lots of goals, so people think that’s my best position, but I don’t,’ he complained later in his career. ‘I feel more comfortable playing a deeper role, like Bergkamp.’ He described France manager Raymond Domenech’s decision to play him as an out-and-out striker ‘a casting mistake’, while on another occasion he outlined his thoughts in blunter terms – ‘My main aim is to play well, which is where I differ from real strikers.’ Anelka’s understanding of a ‘real striker’, presumably, was a player who concentrated solely upon scoring goals – the likes of Cole and Wright.

Just as Anelka didn’t consider himself a ‘real striker’, Owen was once described by then-England manager Hoddle as ‘not a natural goalscorer’, a remark that was greeted with astonishment across the country. Hoddle, in typically clumsy fashion, had actually been attempting to compliment Owen. He phoned Owen and clarified his comment, explaining that to him, a ‘natural goalscorer’ was someone who simply stands in the box and waits for the ball. Owen, however, could pounce from deeper positions, usually by running in behind the opposition defence onto through-balls. It was true. He was a sprinter first, a finisher second.

There was an air of revolution around Britain in early May 1997, as Tony Blair entered Number 10 for the first time. Three days later, English football supporters watched their future number 10 for the first time, as Owen made his professional debut, netting the consolation in Liverpool’s 2–1 defeat at Wimbledon.

The goal was typical Owen. Stig Inge Bjørnebye played a through-ball into the inside-left channel, Owen raced onto it, opened up his body then finished into the far corner. It was a run – and a finish – we would witness repeatedly over coming seasons. ‘He started making decent runs off people, getting in behind them,’ said Liverpool manager Roy Evans, who had begun the match using Patrik Berger behind Stan Collymore, with Fowler suspended. Astonishingly, just 18 months after his professional debut, Owen would finish fourth in the World Player of the Year vote, behind Zinedine Zidane, Davor Šuker and Ronaldo, largely because of his famous goal against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup, when he sprinted past two flat-footed defenders before lifting the ball into the far corner. At this stage, with TV coverage of foreign football relatively rare across the world, one massive moment at a major tournament could elevate your reputation significantly.

There was a youthful exuberance about Owen’s early Liverpool performances because he essentially played Premier League matches like they were U11s games. He recalled that, during his schoolboy days, ‘all my goals at that time were virtually identical: a ball over the top, followed by a sprint and a finish. I was quicker than everyone else at that time, so it was always a one-on-one with a finish to the side. You don’t get many crosses or diving headers in Under-11 football, you’re always running onto through-balls.’ Little had changed by the time Owen reached Liverpool’s first team. The best example of his terrifying pace was the equaliser in a 1–1 draw away at Old Trafford in 1997/98, when he latched onto a hopeful flick-on to poke the ball past Peter Schmeichel. At one stage he appeared third favourite to reach the loose ball, behind Schmeichel and centre-back Gary Pallister (whom Alex Ferguson once surprisingly named the quickest player he’d ever worked with at Manchester United), but Owen’s pace was electric. Shortly afterwards, however, he was dismissed for a terrible tackle on Ronny Johnsen, and it’s often forgotten that Owen’s ill-discipline was considered a serious problem in his early days. He’d already been sent off for England U18s after headbutting a Yugoslavian defender.

In that first complete season, 1997/98, Owen converted a penalty on the opening day and eventually won the Premier League’s Golden Boot jointly with Dion Dublin and Chris Sutton, on 18 goals. Owen couldn’t have been a more different player; Dublin and Sutton started their careers as centre-backs – both with Norwich, coincidentally – before becoming centre-forwards, and they could play either role because of their aerial power. But Owen was all about speed, and 50 per cent of his 1997/98 non-penalty goals came from him darting in behind the opposition defence. At this point Owen was, understandably for a 17-year-old, somewhat simple in a technical sense. In his autobiography, in a passage about Manchester United’s rivalry with Liverpool, Sir Alex Ferguson observes that being forced to play so many matches so early didn’t simply harm Owen’s physical condition but also his technical development. ‘There was no opportunity to take him aside and work on him from a technical point of view,’ Ferguson claims.

In 1997/98 Owen scored only once with his left foot, sliding in at the far post to convert into an empty net against Coventry, and only once with his head, a rebound from two yards out against Southampton. 16 of the 18 were scored with his right. Noticeably, Owen generally attempted to work the ball onto his favoured side, even if it meant making the goalscoring opportunity more difficult, and when forced to go left, would still shoot with his right. His first hat-trick, on Valentine’s Day 1998 away at Sheffield Wednesday, featured two goals stabbed unconventionally with the outside of his right foot. Gradually, defenders deduced his limitations – Manchester United’s Jaap Stam openly admitted his primary approach was to force him onto his left – so Owen was forced to improve his all-round game.

Over the next couple of years, Owen spent hours concentrating on improving his finishing with his left foot and his head. The improvement was drastic. By 2000/01, Owen was an all-round finisher and determined to let everyone know it when celebrating goals. He scored two left-footed goals in a 3–3 draw at Southampton in August, and following the second, ran away with two fingers showing on one hand, the other pointing at his left foot. A month later against Sunderland, Owen beat six-foot-four Niall Quinn to Christian Ziege’s whipped left-footed free-kick and powered home a bullet header. This time, he slapped his head in celebration. He almost single-handedly won the FA Cup with two late goals after Liverpool had been outplayed by Arsenal, the winner a fantastic demonstration of his astonishing pace, before yet another left-footed finish into the far corner.

Liverpool also won the League Cup and UEFA Cup that season, then lifted the Charity Shield and European Super Cup at the start of 2001/02. These successes, and Owen’s hat-trick in England’s famous 5–1 victory over Germany that autumn, helped him win the Ballon d’Or in 2001, one of only two Premier League-based recipients of the award, alongside Cristiano Ronaldo in 2008. Owen, however, says he had played better in the couple of years before 2001.

It’s peculiar that Owen wore the number 10 shirt throughout his Liverpool and England career when he was really a number 9, although it’s obvious why when one considers who his strike partners were. He broke into the Liverpool side when Fowler dominated; when Owen was rising through the ranks Fowler had been his idol, but they were too similar to function together properly. Owen later offered an Anelka-esque complaint that Steve McManaman, Liverpool’s chief creator, always looked to pass to his best mate Fowler. At international level, Alan Shearer was the captain, the main man and the number 9. As Sutton had discovered at Blackburn Rovers, Shearer didn’t like playing alongside a fellow goalscorer, and preferred working ahead of a link man. Shearer’s relationship with Teddy Sheringham was excellent, which is partly why Hoddle initially ignored Owen in favour of a tried-and-tested combination at the 1998 World Cup.

Hoddle’s successor, Kevin Keegan, was also a huge Shearer fan, having broken the world transfer record to take him to Newcastle, and asked Owen to play a deeper role while Shearer remained on the shoulder of the last defender. It didn’t suit him, and Owen later said that the Keegan era ‘made me question my footballing ability for the first time’. Owen became more consistent for England after 2000, when Shearer retired from international football and Keegan resigned, replaced by Sven-Göran Eriksson.

That year Liverpool signed Emile Heskey, who became Owen’s most famous strike partner, a classic little-and-large relationship. ‘When he’s firing, he’s special, and when we fired together it was a really powerful partnership,’ Owen once said. ‘But Emile’s form tended to be in peaks and troughs, and I had the odd injury, so I wouldn’t call ours a massively successful or consistent combination.’ Intriguingly, though, Owen says he preferred playing alongside a proper striker, rather than with a withdrawn, deep-lying forward. That’s a surprising revelation, because what Owen surely lacked at Liverpool, compared with Anelka at Arsenal, was the luxury of playing ahead of a genius deep-lying forward in the mould of Bergkamp. Indeed, his Liverpool teammates found the absence of a number 10 a source of frustration.

Fowler, Owen’s forerunner at Liverpool, complained that he never played alongside a creative forward and speaks of his disappointment that Liverpool didn’t push for the signing of Sheringham in the late 1990s or offer Ajax’s Jari Litmanen better terms at that stage, which meant that the wonderful Finnish forward joined Barcelona instead, despite growing up as a Liverpool fan. The Finn eventually joined Liverpool in 2001. ‘Jari was the type of player we’d been crying out for, slotting in behind a more advanced striker,’ said Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher. ‘All the greatest sides have such players. United began to win titles when they bought Eric Cantona, Arsenal had Dennis Bergkamp. Every summer I hoped Liverpool were going to be in the market for a similar forward.’ By this stage, however, injury problems meant Litmanen wasn’t able replicate their impact. Had he joined Liverpool four years earlier, things might have been very different.

Owen’s best relationship was with Steven Gerrard, who was capable of playing pinpoint through-balls. Owen’s last goal for Liverpool, in a 1–1 draw against Newcastle on the final day of 2003/04, was assisted by a brilliant curled Gerrard pass, acknowledged immediately by Owen in his celebration. But at this point Gerrard played relatively deep in midfield and was unable to form a direct partnership with Owen, and wouldn’t be pushed up the pitch behind the striker for a couple of years. If Owen had stuck around at Liverpool or had Gerrard moved forward earlier, they might have formed the perfect combination. Owen briefly linked effectively with Wayne Rooney for England, albeit in the days when Rooney’s directness made him the greater goal threat.

But Owen’s most intriguing strike partner for Liverpool was the forward you would least expect – Anelka. Although the two emerged simultaneously and seemingly played the same role, Anelka’s aforementioned dislike of playing up front meant that he was happier in a withdrawn position during a brief, half-season loan spell with Liverpool in 2001/02. ‘I played my best football at Liverpool, because I played in my best position there,’ said Anelka. ‘Owen was the main scorer and you knew he was going to score no matter what. He allowed me to play my best.’

Owen remembers Anelka fondly, too. ‘He didn’t score a lot of goals for us … but you could see he was a class act with great ability; in training he showed that he had a lovely touch, he could drop deep and link play, and had pace as well.’ Anelka would be particularly delighted that Owen mentioned his link play before his pace. The Frenchman wasn’t signed permanently, however, and Gérard Houllier replaced him with El-Hadji Diouf, a player with all Anelka’s bad habits and few of his qualities. You could say the same about Owen’s replacement at Liverpool in 2004, Djibril Cissé, who was the purest speedster of all.

By the time he moved to Real Madrid, Owen had already peaked. He spent much of his career on the sidelines, with fitness problems dating back to a serious hamstring injury sustained in April 1999 at just 19 – typically, when sprinting in behind the Leeds defence onto a through-ball. He returned too quickly, partly through Houllier’s insistence, against the wishes of Liverpool physio Mark Leather. When Owen announced his retirement in 2013, his statement felt particularly sad. ‘An emotion that lives with me is a sense of “what might have been” had injuries not robbed me of my most lethal weapon – speed. Many of my highlights were early on in my career and I can only wonder what more I would have achieved had my body been able to withstand the demands that I was making of it. I was almost too quick. My hamstring gave way at Leeds at the age of 19 and from that moment on my career as a professional footballer was compromised … I have no doubt that, had I not suffered those “pace-depriving” injuries, I would be sat here now with a sack full of awards and a long list of records.’

Later, Owen adjusted to his diminished mobility by playing a withdrawn role, and impressed during a spell behind Mark Viduka and Obafemi Martins for Newcastle in 2007/08, managed by the returning Keegan – who, as we know, was never afraid to play forwards in deeper roles. Owen was always unable to replicate those early heights, however. Upon leaving Newcastle on a free transfer his management company sent a 34-page brochure outlining Owen’s virtues to potentially interested clubs, using statistics to deny he was injury-prone and dedicating a section to debunk tabloid myths. Who knows whether the brochure helped, but he eventually earned a move to champions Manchester United, replacing Cristiano Ronaldo in the famous number 7 shirt. He finally won a league title in 2010/11, although he described the feeling as ‘a bit hollow’ because of his minimal contribution. He subsequently spent a single season at Stoke City, where he didn’t start or win a league game all season, scoring just once, a 91st-minute headed consolation in a 3–1 defeat at Swansea. It’s tough to imagine a less fitting final goal.

It wasn’t simply that Owen was now slower, it was that opponents – particularly smaller teams fighting relegation – defended deep. During the 1990s defences were accustomed to pushing up to keep aerially dominant strikers away from the box. Increasingly, strikers’ key weapon was pace, and at the start of the century it wasn’t unusual to see top teams playing two speedsters up front: Henry alongside Sylvain Wiltord at Arsenal, Owen alongside Diouf at Liverpool. That would have been very unusual earlier, when aerial power was key, or later, when defenders retreated towards their own goal. The defenders who continued to play in a high defensive line, meanwhile, became increasingly fast, which was disastrous for Owen. ‘Speed is the key to my battles with the game’s best defenders,’ he said. ‘The tough ones were the quick ones. Size doesn’t bother me, because my main weapon is pace, it’s the fast ones who negate some of my natural swiftness.’

But defenders had become faster precisely because of players like Owen, as Arsène Wenger outlined much later. ‘Football always progresses. The attack creates a new problem, the defence responds. What has happened in the last ten years is that the strikers have become quicker and quicker. What’s happened? The defence have responded by creating quicker and quicker defenders.’ In that respect, Owen was another victim of his own success.

Part Three

Expansion

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