Zonal Marking. Michael Cox

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СКАЧАТЬ midfielder: a dependable general capable of performing equally well in the centre or out wide. These players could seemingly be deployed anywhere within the defensive section of the side, which allowed their manager, Lippi, to become Europe’s most revered tactician, changing formations regularly, between games and within games. ‘If you have smart players who understand tactics and are comfortable in big systems, then making frequent changes can be a big plus,’ Lippi believed. So did his compatriots.

      Lippi was the most celebrated graduate from Coverciano, the Italian Football Federation’s technical headquarters. Based in Florence, just over a mile east of Fiorentina’s Stadio Artemio Franchi, Coverciano was different from Clairefontaine in France, for example, which was famous for its development of players. Instead, Coverciano focused primarily on the development of coaches, and was effectively football’s version of Oxford – Europe’s greatest university of football coaching.

      Coverciano’s highest coaching certificate was necessary to coach in Serie A, but entry requirements were strict, with only 20 places per year. You needed to be an Italian citizen or to have resided in the country for two years, you needed to have qualified from the second level of coaching course, and then you had to complete an assessment based upon your playing career (35 points), coaching career (40 points) and academic career (5 points), with 20 points on offer for your performance in an interview.

      Playing and coaching careers were assessed according to an absurdly complicated points system that awarded 0.02, 0.04 and 0.06 points for club appearances in Serie C, B and A respectively, with bonus points available for winning Serie A, playing internationally or appearing in the World Cup. The famous quote from Arrigo Sacchi, who never played football professionally, about how ‘a jockey doesn’t need to have been a horse’, becomes more significant when you realise the extent to which the Italian coaching school was predisposed to favour former players.

In all, graduating from Coverciano involved over 550 hours of study, and because it is mandatory for coaching in Serie A, Italian coaches were furious when Sampdoria circumvented the rules and appointed the underqualified David Platt, although technically he was only an assistant because he lacked the requisite certificates. ‘It’s like a student nurse conducting a heart operation,’ blasted Bari manager Eugenio Fascetti. There was widespread glee when Platt departed after an unsuccessful two-month tenure. Luciano Spalletti unexpectedly found himself as a manager in Serie A without the necessary qualifications after back-to-back promotions with Empoli and, after publicly questioning whether he was good enough for the top flight, juggled coaching with studying, regularly making the trip across Tuscany to Coverciano. The academic approach has proved invaluable to numerous Italian coaches. With modules on ‘Football technique’, ‘Training theory’, ‘Medicine’, ‘Communication’, ‘Psychology’ and ‘Data’, they are thoroughly prepared for the rigours of Serie A. Before graduation, students are obliged to write a dissertation. Carlo Ancelotti wrote about ‘Attacking Movements in the 4–4–2 Formation’, Alberto Zaccheroni’s was concisely titled ‘The Zone’ and Alberto Malesani offered ‘General Considerations from Euro 96’. These documents are stored in Coverciano’s library, which boasts 5,000 such papers.

      Lippi is among the greatest advocates of Coverciano. ‘I started to understand why, as players, you were asked to do certain things,’ he explained in Vialli’s book The Italian Job. ‘It was an eye-opener because it encouraged me to question and evaluate everything we take for granted in football. That’s what I truly found important about Coverciano, the exchange of ideas between myself and my colleagues. The more I think about it, what I hold dear is not just the course in itself, it’s the atmosphere around it, that challenging, thought-provoking environment … Coverciano does not give you truths, it gives you possibilities.’

That sense of openness was echoed by Gianni Leali, head of Coverciano during the mid-1990s. ‘We don’t teach one system,’ he said. ‘We teach them all, and then show the advantages and disadvantages of each one. There’s a variety here, and that makes Serie A a lot more interesting.’ Whereas Dutch football was fixated on 4–3–3 or 3–4–3, Italian football featured almost every possible formation, and just as Juventus’s versatile defensive players had no defined position, Lippi and other Italian coaches had no defined system. They reacted to the opposition’s tactics to a greater extent than coaches elsewhere, and they routinely substituted star forwards to introduce defensive reinforcements.

      Lippi’s Juventus defined Italian football during this period. They became European and World champions in 1996, won Lo Scudetto in the next two campaigns, while reaching the Champions League Final in both years too, being beaten by Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid in turn. Juve had long maintained a reputation for losing superstars yet continuing to prosper, sacrificing World Cup winners like Paolo Rossi and Marco Tardelli in the 1980s without suffering, while the players themselves declined after departing Turin. After the 1996 final it wasn’t just their defeated opponents Ajax who suffered because of the Bosman ruling; Juve lost Ravanelli and Vialli to newly monied Premier League clubs. Ravanelli had finished as Juventus’s top goalscorer that season, while Vialli had been named Player of the Year by World Soccer magazine, who commended him for being ‘equally at home on the right, the left or the centre of the attack – he defends like a tiger and attacks like a lion’. In other words, in keeping with the Juventus ethos, he could do whatever job Lippi demanded.

Juve still had Alessandro Del Piero, their golden boy, and replaced the outgoing duo with three players: Alen Bokšić, who led the line effectively but rarely scored; Christian Vieri, a complete striker who changed clubs every summer; and youngster Nicola Amoruso, who didn’t quite fulfil his potential, although his arrival was certainly appreciated by Del Piero, who married Amoruso’s sister. Veteran Michele Padovano was still around too, and proved a useful supersub.

      Lippi therefore had five good options up front, and the nature of Juventus’s goalscoring throughout their 1996/97 title-winning campaign underlined how he used different strikers in different situations. Bizarrely, for champions, none of the five strikers recorded more than eight goals: half as many as Sandro Tovalieri, who played half the season for Reggiana and half for Cagliari, both of whom were relegated. Lippi had fully embraced rotation, and his five centre-forwards all played a similar amount: Bokšić scored just three goals from 51 per cent of Serie A minutes, an injury-affected Del Piero managed eight from 48 per cent, Vieri eight from 43 per cent, Padovano eight from 39 per cent and Amoruso four from 36 per cent. There was no grand hierarchy, no divide between untouchable first-teamers and frustrated back-ups, and everyone provided different qualities. Bokšić offered hold-up play, Del Piero provided invention, Vieri lent his aerial power, Padovano was a good poacher and Amoroso brought speed.

Significantly, Bokšić was the least prolific striker and yet also the most used, because he consistently worked hard and brought the best out of others. ‘No prima donnas, no privileges,’ declared Lippi. ‘If a player doesn’t agree with that, he can walk. You might like the antics and the eccentricities of a champion, but I believe people appreciate things like humility and intelligence.’ Lippi’s tendency to rotate forwards by using them tactically remained one of his trademarks throughout a long coaching career. When leading Italy to World Cup success in 2006, Lippi named six forwards in his 23-man squad: Francesco Totti, Pippo Inzaghi, Luca Toni, Alberto Gilardino, Vincenzo Iaquinta and his old favourite Del Piero. All six found themselves on the scoresheet.

      When Ronaldo, the world’s most exciting striker, was destined to leave Barcelona and move to Serie A, Juventus declined to become involved in a bidding war, not because the sums of money were too vast, but because Umberto Agnelli, the club chairman, believed such an overt superstar would ruin the club’s spirit. Even Zinedine Zidane, who joined in 1996 and soon became Europe’s most celebrated player, was diligent, introverted and hard-working, a world away from the self-indulgent galáctico that he would later become at Real Madrid.

      Zidane was shocked by the intensity of Juventus’s fitness sessions, led by the notorious Giampiero Ventrone. ‘Didier Deschamps told me about the training sessions but I didn’t СКАЧАТЬ