Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics : Wilson, Jonathan by Jonathan Wilson

Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics : Wilson, Jonathan Reviews

• 
  Jape

  I really enjoyed this book. I wouldn't say I am a tactics geek but I am interested in knowing a bit than what the pundits say, mainly because they don't often say anything very insightful. I've also dabbled with tactics managing a Sunday league football team and wanted to deepen my knowledge.This book opened my eyes to a different way of thinking about tactics and helped me understand what has influenced different teams' style of play. The early history was a bit dull but there are some riveting stories in there, like the way the WW1 PoW team played and why, the background to the modern pressing game, the dysfunctional history of English tactical approaches and, of course, the story of total football and its modern incarnation in Barcelona. It is hard when you aren't old enough to know or remember some of the personalities and teams but I know where to look now.Buy it, stick with it through the first few chapters, and I doubt you'll regret it.
• 
  Ian Thumwood

  Without doubt this book is an amazing piece of research and extremely thought provoking. As has been stated elsewhere, this is a book that will most definitely change your perception of how the game is played and offers the most scientific assessment of "the beautiful game" that I have read. This book is very much a part of a new generation of writing about football with the analysis and insight being extremely fascinating. There was a time when books about football were notoriously badly written. "Inverting the pyramid" offers an assessment of the evolution of football formations from the Victorian era through to the 2000's. There is a logical progression in how the way the game has played with new formations coming into fruition to combat the challenges produced my earlier styles of play. The author is extremely knowledgeable in tracing the salient developments in football with the most significant developments being shown to have taken place outside the football mainstream. (British football seemed to lag behind from a vey early stage to the way the game was considered elsewhere.) So whilst there is reference to Britain, Brazil, Italy and Holland, other locations such as Austria and USSR are shown to have been equally important. Although I am a season ticket holder with Southampton, I am passionate about the history of football and "Inverting the pyramid" satisfied my curiousity in explaining how football tactics started and what prompted the change from the "forward charge" approach of 140 years ago. I'm not too interested in the period after the world war one and before I started to follow the sport in the 1970's yet Wilson's research makes this riveting. Some chapters are interesting than others and there are times when the complexity of the diagrams and the narrative become a bit baffling. The only problem with the book was that I sometimes find myself out of my depth trying to understand the logic of formations this is the kind of book that you really want to discuss with a professional footballer to get an angle on some of the points raised. Nice to see statistics used to destroy the logic behind the "long ball" style of football of the 1990's speaking as someone who watched Ian Branfoot's truly woeful Southamtpon team play in this fashion in the first half of this decade! In conclusion, this is an intelligent and well considered book which crackles with personal stories and is full of history. Sometimes it can be a bit too complex and there were moments when I wondered if another "expert" might choose an altogether different set of countries / teams as representatives of the changes in the way football is played. Upon reflection and as a layman, I did find myself sometimes questioning some of the reasoning put forward for developing formations and whether the changes were genuinely effective over the course of a season for a team. The coaches are allowed to speak through their own words and players are also quoted in explaining the logic behind the formations which does assist in making things a bit clearer. However, this book raises football to a science and it is unlikely is there has ever been a non coaching book aimed at a popular audience on this topic. This is by no means a dry and academic book and whilst sometimes being complex, I felt really opened a window on how football is played to make the sport seem like a science. A "must read" yet be prepared to have to re read some of the complex arguments that are presented. All in all, this is one of the most intelligent and fascinating books I have read about football.
• 
  Kindle Customer

  I feared the worst when at the start of The Prologue the author was eating tapas and drinking rioja in LisbonI think not. But my fears were misplaced, this is truly wonderful book. It's incredibly well researched, thought provoking and brilliantly entertaining and tells the story of a host of people I knew little or nothing about. He also (better than anyone) explains how English football ended up in its own little, backward, world.
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  Dr. Carlo N. Colacino

  This is a very good book about the evolution of football and its tactics. Very complete and easy to read. However the author has some personal biases that sometimes go against historical facts. I certainly appreciated reading about Eastern European teams and their often neglected contribution to the evolution of the beautiful game. But some other teams mentioned by the author, and some managers, do not deserve a place in the list of football wonders. 1954's Uruguay for example were clearly inferior to Hungary, yet they deserved a place too in this book, since they changed the way South American teams played. 1975's Dynamo Kiev were a fantastic team, but the inclusion of the very mediocre 1986's Dynamo team is unjustified, even though the manager was the same. In conclusion I enjoyed reading the book but I strongly disagree with many of the things Mr. Wilson writes.
• 
  Dervid

  Others have written good reviews about the detail in this book which I agree with. I just wanted to confirm that you can use this book when coaching amateur teams. I've read various other books on coaching, most of which are too simplistic and/or too thoerectical ie. they show no insight into tactical nuances, and no appreciation of the hard realities of a real match. This book describes real football played at the highest club and country levels over the past 100 years, in an in depth, incisive way, and yet is so crystal clear in its telling that you genuinely can apply what you learn when coaching your local team. Over the chapters it gives real examples of each formation working (or not!); why mobile ball playing centre backs replaced the purely hard men; how a sweeper can still operate effectively (how I love that one), but all told in easily accessible conversational form.And coaches if you're feeling insecure, the real life tales in this book are proof that you can be a saviour one season, then a has been the next, only to resurface elsewhere as a saviour again. But that's what we're in it for isn't it?