Читать книгу Calcio: A History of Italian Football - John Foot - Страница 77

‘Catenaccio was not invented by Gianni Brera. If it was part of the Italian character, as is probable, it could not be invented. In the same way as the slums around Rome were not invented by those who put them in neo-realist films. They were already there’

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

Catenaccio! Even today the very word strikes fear into the hearts of football fans all over the world. This Italian word – it is generally thought to mean ‘padlock’² – has come to symbolize all that is bad about football; defensive play, aggressive fouling, cynicism. Nobody knows for sure when the Italian word was used for the first time as a footballing term, but by the 1950s, it was commonplace. Internationally, Italian football first became stigmatized in this way in the 1960s, when Italian clubs had huge success in Europe. This is also a word whose meaning has changed over time – from the description of a tactical system to the simple labels of boring and defensive.

The history of catenaccio can be divided into three distinct parts. First, there is catenaccio as a specific tactical system, whose history can be traced from Switzerland in the 1930s through to Salerno in the south of Italy in the 1940s and on to Trieste and Padua (in the north) in the same decade before moving to Milan and the two Milanese teams in the 1960s and to Turin and Juventus in the 1970s. Using this interpretation, we can talk about formations, actual players and team-sheets. We might call this real catenaccio (as in ‘real socialism’) or primitive catenaccio.

A second way of thinking about catenaccio, however, sees it above all as a state of mind, a way-of-being on and off the football field, quite apart from the actual set-up of any one team. The idea that the priority was not to give away goals, and then try and score, is still widespread in the Italian league, especially away from home and in the lower divisions. This mentality can be summed up very simply by this phrase: prima non prenderle: ‘our first priority is a clean sheet’. Very few teams actually play, nowadays, with an out-and-out sweeper or mark man-to-man. So catenaccio-type football is also a way of playing quite separate from 1950s-style tactics in the rigid sense of the word. This much looser definition of what catenaccio is applies to the way most smaller teams play in the Italian championship. They defend in depth, break up the play, and try to score on the break. If all goes well, the game ends 0–0. If all goes incredibly well, they win, scoring early and then using the space that opens up.

Not all minor teams approach games in this way, and in recent years some have even tried attacking from the start. In the lower divisions, however, nearly all teams play like this all the time, away from home. Just a glance at the goals scored and the number of draws in Serie B tells its own story, despite three points for a win. When American journalist Joe McGinniss followed lowly southern team Castel di Sangro for a season in Serie B, he found that, away from home, they invariably played with just one man up front. Sometimes, they sneaked a win, on other occasions they ground out a 0–0. Most of the time, they lost, and these tactics did not change over the whole season.³ We might call this kind of football ‘defensivist’, the word that Brera preferred to catenaccio. Brera’s defensivism was supported by strange evolutionary theories. The journalist was adamant that Italians were physically inferior to people from other countries, and therefore couldn’t play an all-out aggressive game.

Finally, catenaccio is also applied to other aspects of the game – to a kind of cynicism which is often seen as particularly Italian: psychological tussles amongst coaches, fouling, play-acting, complaining to the referee, gamesmanship of all kinds, systematic ‘tactical’ fouling. These ‘tactics’ are not part of the official canon, but are nonetheless a crucial part of winning the battle on the pitch, and have come to be seen as part of a catenaccio-type way of playing the game. Italians have a word for everything that surrounds the game off the pitch, before matches begin. They call these aspects of a game ‘pre-tactics’ – team selection, false injuries, rumours about formations. In Italian football, much of the battle is won off the pitch.