![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This led to measured, thoughtful assessments of how teams and their tactics worked in practice, as well as the recognition that the best teams tended to find that elusive mixture of defensive solidity and attacking fluidity. What was most attractive in Wilson’s writing was his insistence on looking again rather than accepting truisms about how teams and managers approached the game. Having been introduced to tactical thinking through the match analyses of Michael Cox’s zonalmarking, Wilson not only added a historical dimension to my understanding, but also clarified the tensions underlying tactical thought and the cyclical response and counter-response through which it develops. It is an authoritative and engaging work that holds up alongside the best of Wilson’s previous writing, such as his biography of Brian Clough or his history of tactics, Inverting the Pyramid.Īs for many others, Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid played an important role in developing my understanding of the beautiful game. While there are a number of popular accounts of Brazilian football (most recently David Goldblatt’s Futebol Nation) and of South American football more broadly (often written by Uruguayans, such as Eduardo Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow or Andreas Campomar’s ¡Golazo!), Wilson has provided the first English-language popular history of Argentine football. ![]() Jonathan Wilson’s most recent book fills a notable gap. xviii+411 pages with notes, bibliography, index. Jonathan Wilson, Angels with Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina (Orion, 2016). ![]()
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