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Narrated by James Marriott
Football evolution is speeding up. Go back to the early days of the game and you see rushing hordes of players crowding the ball, focused almost exclusively on dribbling. Fast-forward a few decades and you glimpse “the passing game”, then Herbert Chapman’s famous WM (effectively 3-2-2-3) formation, then Hungary’s iconic victory over England at Wembley in 1953, built around the striker Nandor Hidegkuti dropping deep to open up space for the other forwards.
Move forward a little further and the defensive catenaccio comes into view, masterminded by Helenio Herrera at Inter Milan, then Rinus Michels’s Total Football, where players were coached to switch position to open up space, particularly down the vertical lines of the pitch. Then we had Barcelona’s tiki-taka in the new century,
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