Hiddink rekindles the dormant spirit of Russian total football

June 20, 2008 12:21 PM

Russia's thrilling commitment to fluidity represents a return to the fundamentals of their own footballing heritage.

In the 15 minutes after Roman Pavlyuchenko had come off the bench against England in Moscow last October, something very strange happened. It wasn't just that Russia scored twice to tip the game on its head - and England, we should not forget, had been very comfortable, and would have gone 2-0 up had Steven Gerrard put away what by his standards was a fairly simple volley; it was that they absolutely overwhelmed England.

When Pavlyuchenko finally tucked in a second, I remember looking at my watch with the thought that England had almost survived and being quite shocked to realise there were still 17 minutes remaining. That was, in the best possible way, the longest 15 minutes of football I've ever seen. Russia poured forwards in wave after wave, the ball rattling between them and, in the face of such an assault, England were helpless.

In the increasingly homogenised world of modern football, this was something palpably different. Suddenly it was possible to understand to a degree the thrill English crowds must have felt on seeing Dinamo Moscow on their "passovotchka" tour of 1945. The question then was whether Russia could reproduce that level of performance on the highest stage, without 80,000 fans roaring them on.

They gave their answer against Sweden on Wednesday: emphatically, yes. The Eurosport commentator Dave Farrar called their football "otherworldly", and that was precisely what it was. Of course it helped that Sweden were dully muscular, but still, given the inferiority complex that had habitually undermined Russia, this was an extraordinary performance. You just wonder how many they might have scored had they had Pavel Pogrebnyak rather than Pavlyuchenko leading the line.

Russian commentators, referring back to the great ice-hockey teams of the past, spoke of "clap-clap" football, mimicking the way the puck used to click from stick to stick. Others, noting the fact that both goals were laid on by full-backs on the charge, have given Hiddink credit for reawakening a form of total football in Russia, yet that style has always been implicit in the Lobanovskyi school.

One of the great fallacies of football history is the notion that the Ajax and Holland of the early Seventies was all about self-expression, while Lobanovskyi's Dynamo Kyiv was some kind of mechanistic monster. Yes, Lobanovskyi imposed his style of play upon his squad, while Rinus Michels watched his grow up almost organically among an extraordinary group of talented players who had played together for so long that they came to have an almost preternatural understanding of one another's games, but the central tenets of both were the same. Dynamo and Ajax both played a high offside line, both pressed the opposition in possession, both thrived on rapid passing and the interchange of positions. Most fundamentally, both were about the performance of the individual within the system.

Football has evolved since, but the fundamentals of the Dutch and Russian games have remained similar, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why the only two foreign coaches really to have succeeded in Russia - Hiddink and Dick Advocaat - are both Dutch.

Which raises the question of why that style of play grew up in two such seemingly different countries. The term "Total Football", which Michels never liked, was coined after the 1974 World Cup and was derived from the writings of the architectural theorist Jacob Bakema, who was a keen proponent of "Total Urbanisation" and "Total Regeneration".

"To understand things," he said in a lecture given in 1974, "you have to understand the relationship between things ... Once the highest image of interrelationship in society was indicated by the word 'God' and man was allowed to use earth and universal space under condition that he should care for what he used. But we have to actualise this kind of care and respect since man came by his awareness nearer the phenomenon of interrelationship called the relation of atoms. Man became aware of his being part of a total energy system." As in architecture, a similar structuralism took hold across a range of disciplines at the time - the semiological theory of Roland Barthes, the anthropological theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan - so in football.

Authority was no longer top-down, but was derived by individuals from their relationship within the system. Players, so long as they respected the needs of the system, had autonomy to construct their own meaning. Perhaps this is mischievous intellectual game-playing, but it is a beguiling coincidence that of the two countries in which the use of system as an attacking force was most advanced, one - the USSR - was overtly atheistical, and the other, the Netherlands, underwent a process of rapid secularisation in the aftermath of the upheavals of 1968. So next time you see a foreign team overlapping and interchanging at jaw-dropping speed and wonder why England never do that, blame the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Much has been made of Van Basten's Holland rediscovering the joys of total football, but that is misleading. Yes, they are fluid and good to watch, but they are a more direct, counter-attacking side than their forebears of 30 years ago. Russia, arguably, given their commitment to attack, are rather closer in ethos to Michels' side, but the resemblance is largely superficial. For one thing, neither side operates with a libero; for another, neither plays in the 4-3-3 (or, more accurately, 1-3-3-3) shape Johan Cruyff always insisted was essential for total football.

The context, equally, is very different. Part of the reason for the impact of Michels' and Lobaonvskyi's sides were that they were pressing and playing an aggressive offside trap in an era when nobody else was. Everybody presses now. In their commitment to fluidity Russia and the Netherlands can probably claim to play a form of the game as close to total football as is possible in the modern age, but it should not be forgotten that for Russia that means pursuing their own tradition as much as adapting their approach to suit the heritage of their manager.

Saturday's quarter-final could be a festival of flowing football, it may even determine which side plays the most attractive passing football in Europe, but it is not a struggle to be total football's torch-bearers. It is rather an encounter of the modern avatars of two similar but distinct traditions.

In de tot nu toe gespeelde kwartfinale heeft de favoriet altijd verloren.