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Authors: Dennis Bergkamp
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and
catenaccio
had proved time and again that it worked. Only now it didn’t.
As a young man, Arrigo Sacchi had worked as a salesman for his father’s shoe factory but his real passion was football. Despite the prevailing orthodoxies, he was instinctively drawn to
attacking teams like Pele’s Brazil and the great Hungarian and Real Madrid sides of the 1950s. But the style with which he fell most deeply in love was Dutch Total Football. In the early
1970s, as the golden Ajax of Cruyff and Johan Neeskens approached perfection and won the European Cup three years in a row, Sacchi found himself visiting Amsterdam with his father on business.
While his dad attended trade fairs, Sacchi headed to the Middenweg to watch and learn from the great Ajax team’s training sessions.
Sacchi was not the only Italian to be enchanted by the Dutch. In 1972, Ternana, a small team from Umbria, reached Serie A with an Italianate version of Total Football dubbed the
gioco
corto
(short game). Ternana’s coach Corrado Viciani recited Camus to his players and drilled them to previously unimaginable levels of fitness. And when Ajax played Inter in the 1972
European Cup final, Viciani appeared on TV to declare that, for the good of Italy, Inter should lose by three or four goals: ‘The Dutch play real football, but in Italy managers are
interested in playing defensively, in playing horrible and un-aesthetic football.’ In the event, Ajax outclassed Inter, but only won 2-0, and the defeat, like Ajax’s 1-0 victory over
Juventus in the following year’s final, failed to shake fundamental Italian faith in their ‘horrible’ – but still rather successful – style.
Meanwhile, Sacchi had turned his back on the shoe business and gone into coaching, starting with his local team and working his way up to Parma. Central to his vision was the abolition of
man-markers and
liberos
. Instead, he deployed ‘The Zone’, a flexible four-man defence moulded to play as part of a fluid, compact Dutch-style formation which pressed high up
the field. His defenders, midfielders and attackers were required to move as one unit and concentrate on offence. At a time when most Italian teams trained only once a day, Sacchi insisted on two
sessions, so his players ran further and faster than anyone else. Silvio Berlusconi recognised the potential of this kind of entertaining football and in 1987, after Parma had beaten Milan in two
Cup games, he recruited Sacchi. To help him, he went on to buy the three greatest Cruyff protégés of the day: Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard became the three most
important players in the Italian league. Thus was born ‘Il Grande Milan’, one of the great teams of history. Sacchi’s Italo-Dutch fusion swept all before it, and in the process
thoroughly eclipsed neighbours Inter, which remained a bastion of the old ways under coach Giovanni Trapattoni, a veteran of the glory days of
catenaccio
.
In the six years leading up to Dennis’s arrival in the city, then, the two Milan football clubs were locked in a theological as well as tribal conflict. And the contest became
embarrassingly one-sided. Pellizzari, a lifelong Inter fan, recalls the shock of witnessing Milan’s era-defining destruction of a great Real Madrid side in 1989. ‘People remember the
second leg, when Milan won five-nil, but the one-one away draw was more astonishing to us. For the first time we saw an Italian team go to Madrid and play as if they were in the San Siro. Milan
went to Madrid and attacked! Traditionalists said, “No, we cannot play this way because we are Italians.” It was even seen as a betrayal of our identity. Trapattoni and Inter
represented this view.’ Even when dour Inter won the
scudetto
in 1989, they were promptly overshadowed by Milan’s dazzling 4-0 victory in the European Cup final.
In light of what happened to Dennis at Inter, it’s worth stressing that even Sacchi’s revolution almost failed
catenaccio
had proved time and again that it worked. Only now it didn’t.
As a young man, Arrigo Sacchi had worked as a salesman for his father’s shoe factory but his real passion was football. Despite the prevailing orthodoxies, he was instinctively drawn to
attacking teams like Pele’s Brazil and the great Hungarian and Real Madrid sides of the 1950s. But the style with which he fell most deeply in love was Dutch Total Football. In the early
1970s, as the golden Ajax of Cruyff and Johan Neeskens approached perfection and won the European Cup three years in a row, Sacchi found himself visiting Amsterdam with his father on business.
While his dad attended trade fairs, Sacchi headed to the Middenweg to watch and learn from the great Ajax team’s training sessions.
Sacchi was not the only Italian to be enchanted by the Dutch. In 1972, Ternana, a small team from Umbria, reached Serie A with an Italianate version of Total Football dubbed the
gioco
corto
(short game). Ternana’s coach Corrado Viciani recited Camus to his players and drilled them to previously unimaginable levels of fitness. And when Ajax played Inter in the 1972
European Cup final, Viciani appeared on TV to declare that, for the good of Italy, Inter should lose by three or four goals: ‘The Dutch play real football, but in Italy managers are
interested in playing defensively, in playing horrible and un-aesthetic football.’ In the event, Ajax outclassed Inter, but only won 2-0, and the defeat, like Ajax’s 1-0 victory over
Juventus in the following year’s final, failed to shake fundamental Italian faith in their ‘horrible’ – but still rather successful – style.
Meanwhile, Sacchi had turned his back on the shoe business and gone into coaching, starting with his local team and working his way up to Parma. Central to his vision was the abolition of
man-markers and
liberos
. Instead, he deployed ‘The Zone’, a flexible four-man defence moulded to play as part of a fluid, compact Dutch-style formation which pressed high up
the field. His defenders, midfielders and attackers were required to move as one unit and concentrate on offence. At a time when most Italian teams trained only once a day, Sacchi insisted on two
sessions, so his players ran further and faster than anyone else. Silvio Berlusconi recognised the potential of this kind of entertaining football and in 1987, after Parma had beaten Milan in two
Cup games, he recruited Sacchi. To help him, he went on to buy the three greatest Cruyff protégés of the day: Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard became the three most
important players in the Italian league. Thus was born ‘Il Grande Milan’, one of the great teams of history. Sacchi’s Italo-Dutch fusion swept all before it, and in the process
thoroughly eclipsed neighbours Inter, which remained a bastion of the old ways under coach Giovanni Trapattoni, a veteran of the glory days of
catenaccio
.
In the six years leading up to Dennis’s arrival in the city, then, the two Milan football clubs were locked in a theological as well as tribal conflict. And the contest became
embarrassingly one-sided. Pellizzari, a lifelong Inter fan, recalls the shock of witnessing Milan’s era-defining destruction of a great Real Madrid side in 1989. ‘People remember the
second leg, when Milan won five-nil, but the one-one away draw was more astonishing to us. For the first time we saw an Italian team go to Madrid and play as if they were in the San Siro. Milan
went to Madrid and attacked! Traditionalists said, “No, we cannot play this way because we are Italians.” It was even seen as a betrayal of our identity. Trapattoni and Inter
represented this view.’ Even when dour Inter won the
scudetto
in 1989, they were promptly overshadowed by Milan’s dazzling 4-0 victory in the European Cup final.
In light of what happened to Dennis at Inter, it’s worth stressing that even Sacchi’s revolution almost failed
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