Success and identity in Nereo Rocco, the first master of catenaccio
This article was published on the 4th print issue of FUTBOLISTA Magazine.
Enzo del Llano / @enzodelllano
¨You cannot be a good strategist unless you are also a philosopher. And you cannot be a good philosopher unless you are also something of a mystic¨ Alan Watts
On the 4th of July of 1948, when Atalanta beat Triestina 3–1 to reach the 5th place of that season’s table, the gestation of an epic season finished for the visitors. Having been promoted just the year before, that team defied all odds to raise its name next to the very best of Italian football, finishing the campaign with the same number of points as Juventus and Milan in a triple tie for the second spot.
It was in that exact moment where the legend of a man originally from the same city he was representing, who spoke mainly in a dialect and whose physical structure resembled more to a butcher than a football manager began to take shape. Using a particularly defensive tactical approach, that man guided his pupils to what remains to this day the best ever performance for Triestina, putting not only his team, but also his name atop of the world of calcio.
Born with the name of Rock, of Austrian origin, but having had to italianize the family name during the fascist regime of Mussolini, Nereo Rocco grew up in the multicultural city of Trieste at the northeast of Italy, just minutes away from what it is now Slovenia and Croatia, at a time where the town was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There, mainly among Slovenians, Germans and Italians, he spent his childhood watching his father work with the meat at the family´s butcherie, himself taking care of the shop while making his first apparitions for Triestina in his early professional years.
As a player, Rocco was a winger who played a total of 287 Serie A games dressed in the colours of his boyhood club, Napoli, and Padova, apart from another two temporary formations at the end of the Second World War. Having completed a career where he established himself as a hard working and reliable footballer, he started to make a name of himself as a coach at the commands of his first club, where he reached that outstanding result finishing behind the Grande Torino in 1948, before saving from relegation and promoting a surprisingly good Padova team that finished third in 1958 immediately after reaching the upper echelons of italian football. In his first decade as a coach, he managed to give both clubs their higher ever league finishes using catenaccio, a specific defensive philosophy employed by some smaller teams in search for results against the bigger teams.
After having accomplished such results, which gave him the nickname of Parón (Master in triestine dialect) in reference to his gruffness and high standards with which he managed the dressing room but also to the respect granted by his players due to his inextricable human values and honesty, one of the most important opportunities of his life came at the helms of the Italian Football Federation, who called in to offer Rocco the job of guiding the Olympic team in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome alongside Giuseppe Viani, the then AC Milan sports director.
¨Gipo¨ also happened to propose catenaccio as a coach of Serie B side Salernitana in the late forties, whom he took to promotion using the tactic that at the time was fittingly named after him as vianema. Lo Sceriffo (The Sheriff), as he was known thanks to his strict manners, would prove to be an inspiration for Rocco, even if the two did not get along so well.
The motive of Viani’s tactical approach as a manager of Salernitana was in fact a response to the famous WM system created by Arsenal´s Herbert Chapman in the 20´s, known in Italy as the sistema, and used at the time by Andras Kutik’s Grande Torino and many others. Viani realized that the difference on quality and resources between his team and the best teams was just too big to try to get results by mimicking the same tactical disposition, so he decided to drop his midfielder to the defensive line to mark the opponents forward and allowed the full-back to centralize his position and act behind a newly formed line of three defenders as a sweeper covering any empty space, creating the 1–3–3–3 formation. Often, he would also use the number 9 as a defender to pursue the other team’s forward and cover any empty spaces and errors as he could once the match began.
This “revolution” was the perfect antidote to the free flowing and man to man alternative that the WM system, itself a variation of the early century 2–3–5 disposition, offered in it’s offensive phase. This idea, often thought as being a suggestion from one of his players, proved to be an effective way of presenting opposition to the reigning system of the time and gave smaller teams a chance by defending behind the line of the ball and counter-attacking when possible. Nevertheless, the origins of that defensive disposition don’t lay in Italy, but elsewhere.
Way before the Viani´s and the Rocco´s, the 1930´s saw how the first migratory waves of players and managers coming from eastern European countries flooded the occidental side of the continent with a junction of different footballing cultures, many of them belonging to the Danubian school of thought.
The migration consisted mainly in Austrian, Hungarian and Czechoslovak players and managers who grew the thinking roots of the game at the feet of the Danubio, a river that crosses ten countries and was so important in history that it served as reference to delimitate the Roman Empire in the Classical Age. There, particularly at the coffee houses, the main encounter spots where people from any social class discussed passionately about politics, culture, literature and also football, the game started to evolve into a more aesthetic, dynamic and passing driven form, pushed by the ideas of intellectuals, managers and fans as well. Those were the places where society itself incubated a new way of playing the game, one that resembled the playfulness and free thinking way of living characteristic from those regions while tracing some similarity to the scottish passing game of the early century.
One of the most important persons that the migration brought to western Europe was a son of those coffee houses that went by the name of Karl Rappan, a Viena born footballer and later manager who instaured himself in Switzerland at the beginning of the 30´s as a player-manager for Servette before turning into the head of swiss football for the decades to come. He was the first manager to become known thanks to his early modification of the 2–3–5 reigning system (known often as the danubian pyramid) or the later modified WM (2–3–3–2) created by Chapman, a solution he came up with after realizing the same many would realize later, that his team, lower in quality and physicality, had to try something new in order to pursue more than just misfortunes on the pitch.
While the englishman´s system favoured the individualism of the attacking players often provoking one on one situations between the forwards and the defenders thanks to a high rhythm, the variation discovered by Rappan, called the verrou (door bolt in french), would see the two wingers drop back to act as full backs and the two middle strikers drop to occupy the empty spots left by those wingers, forming a 4–3–3 structure. Those two changes were extremely important because, for the very first time, they allowed the defensive line to have a higher number of players in front of the usual three central strikers.
But the main characteristic of this system, apart from it being the first one that used a 4-man back line, was that the two centre backs would now play in a vertical line, one positioning behind the other, therefore forming a defensive structure of 1–3 in front of the goalkeeper, welcoming the inception of the verrouiller (later known as libero or sweeper), as Rappan called it. Here, the first 1–3 line was seen in an attempt to reinforce the defense to a point where zonal and man marking styles could coexist, the former employed by the verrouiller, and the latter performed by the other defenders.
The system had its great stage debut in the 1938 World Cup in France, where Rappan showed a team which based its game in coordinated efforts, reaching the quarterfinals only to lose with the locals, playing in total contrast with the reality of the rest of the world at the time, still basing their game mainly on an attacking-minded way. While the globe saw teams relying on individual inspiration accompanied with some offensive tactics that were introducing themselves with the time´s passing, it was still nothing like the idea presented by Rappan, one never seen before. This was the direct influence on that Viani´s team of the late forties, and the one Rocco would also use.
It was inevitable, then, that after such display of a proven winning philosophy and the capacity to guide supposedly smaller teams to higher coats as his epics with Triestina and Padova showed, Rocco’s next team came in the name of one of the most historic and important clubs of the country, and in 1961, the mighty AC Milan called in and tasked him with keeping with the steady harvest of titles the club achieved in the 50’s and inject some of his previous success to the red and black.
But the start of his tenure as the leader of the club was not an easy one, contrary to what one might think. When he arrived, the new coach found out by the worst of ways that his defensive style wasn’t welcomed with open arms by the rossoneri faithful. The situation was such, that at the beginning of the pre-season, the fiery screams that often came from the surroundings of the training fields expressed one common view: ¨Go back to Padova, catenacciaro!¨
Those sentiments extended themselves until the first part of the season, where the imponent San Siro received his new manager with deafening whistles every time he stepped into that sacred field. And Rocco wasn ‘t exempt from problems inside the dressing room either. After having signed with the idea of forming a technical duo with Viani, his second hand at the bench had to step away for a long time due to a health issue, leaving Rocco alone with the mission of guiding an entirely new team that wasn’t formed by him.
As the head of the San Siro giants, he quickly established his catenaccio philosophy on the big stage by making his Milan side play a pragmatic, hard-working and defensive-focused style of game that saw Cesare Maldini in the heart of the defense, playing as a libero behind a three-man line to provide the defense with more containment power, serving as a solid block, while the three midfielders and the three forwards took care of the creative side of the business following the lead of the young and magnificent Gianni Rivera.
Precisely, his relationship with Rivera was perhaps the most important asset he could have asked for. Having started at the 1960 Summer Olympics, where Rocco selected the Alessandria born for the first time for the National Team, the “Bambino D’Oro” quickly became one of his favourites, since the young magician allowed for Rocco to make use of the youngster’s quality and ability and entrusted him with the organizational responsibilities in a more free way than the rest of his teammates while the manager focused on molding the perfect defensive block.
That it’s not to say Rocco´s approach had influence only on the back side of the pitch, but he did allow his forward players to improvise and find different connections once they went past the centre line of the pitch, giving way to big scoring numbers, as the 83 goals scored in his first full season at the bench of Milan show. Rocco´s Milan was certainly a two-headed dog, one on the defensive side, and one completely different on the offensive side, and it worked wonders.
As the Rossoneri manager, his first important decision was to send the prolific English scorer Jimmy Greaves home. Brought in by Viani from Chelsea having scored 124 times in 157 matches, Rocco and Greaves never managed to understand each other, and after realizing that the tactically-oriented calcio wasn’t going to be of the englishman´s liking, who was even feeling homesick and suffered to adapt to the italian culture, he showed him the exit door after only 12 games.
By autumn, Brazilian Dino Sani arrived as a replacement from Boca Juniors and the rest of that very first season is history. Even after losing his greatest signing and having to work with a team that was essentially formed by Viani, Rocco´s Milan grabbed the Scudetto at the end of that campaign with an estellar production of the 19 year old Gianni Rivera and scoring 22 goals more than the second-best team in that category, returning the side to the European Cup after 3 seasons.
A year later, Milan became the first Italian team to win the biggest club competition in the world in Wembley against Eusebio’s Benfica after trashing the competition, scoring 31 goals and receiving only 5 in a total of eight games played before the final. Rocco finally had turned the whistles for shouts of joy, leading the way for a decade of glory in the red and black colours.
But Milan was not the only club of the city prepared for a decade of success. That first spell would also see Rocco take on the other mastodons of Lombardía, Internazionale, with Helenio Herrera in charge. The Buenos Aires born was also a pragmatist and was happy to play a variation of catenaccio. In Spain, during the 1940s and especially the 1950s, Helenio Herrera developed an early version of the defensive tactics he would employ with such success at Inter in the 60´s.
With the red and white colours of Atlético Madrid he won two consecutive league titles using a system often known as the Iron Curtain; it was there then that he planted the seeds of what would later become his trademark approach of the 5–3–2 formation, which sometimes used a four-man line and a fifth one in behind playing as a libero, a structure that fittingly made its way to his starting eleven after an embarrassing nerazzurri defeat in Herrera’s fourth game in charge against Padova, a team trained at the time by, yes, Nereo Rocco, as Sandro Mazzola himself told Diario As in 2010.
Herrera’s difference in regards to Rocco was that his line had four men in it instead of just three; the extra man allowed for more freedom on counterattacks, especially for the full backs like Giacinto Facchetti, who regularly scored more than ten goals per season as a defender. The rest of the team relied, as Rocco´s Milan, on quick and direct attacks after recovering possession.
That rivalry, founded in the roots of two defensivisti managers, would go on to dominate the Serie A and conquer Europe in consecutive seasons in the 1960s while disputing Italy’s and European crown to the other side of the city, making Milan the epicenter of the footballing world during that decade, with both sides lifting the European Cup trophy in four occasions.
During his time In Milan, Rocco spent his days between the training ground and the restaurants, where he, apart from enjoying the finest plates and drinking the most refined wines, found the perfect place to develop his tactics and establish relationships with many of his players that would prove to be capital for the interest of his teams, always with a good meal in between.
After a magnificent first spell that saw the club take one Serie A title and the first European success, Rocco left Milan after a disagreement with Viani, their relationship making it impossible to continue as manager and sports director respectively. He arrived at Turin and succeeded to take the club to their highest league position finish since the horrific tragedy of Superga, where the rests of the Grande Torino, one of the best teams in the history of the game, laid to rest forever. Eventually though, he wasn’t able to bring any piece of silverware to the claret side of the city and four years after his arrival, Rocco was on the way to become the AC Milan manager for the second time in his career.
At the time of the reunion, what he found in Milanello was a team full of new faces and some known names such as defensive midfielder Giovanni Trapattoni and the now skipper Gianni Rivera, upon whom he formed the base of the new and revitalized Milan. Back at the bench of San Siro, Rocco would win another Scudetto and a Cup Winners Cup in 1968, apart from two cup trophies, but none of those being more important of course that the second European Cup that the rossoneri lifted in Madrid in 1969 against a Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff led Ajax, of all teams.
The italians were regarded as the clear favourites to take it all after defeating Celtic and Manchester United and having kept a clean sheet in three of their last four games, adding to that dazzling record the distinction of being the only undefeated team in Italy that season, conceding only twelve goals in the domestic championship.
In one of the most contrasted duels in football history, Rocco´s Milan played the perfect game and the Santiago Bernabéu hosted a masterclass which was raised to historic levels after the exhibitions provided by the superb organizational skills of the future winner of the Golden Ball award that summer Gianni Rivera, who served his teammates with many deadly passes and the hat trick scored by a 22 year old Pierino Prati, the first goal being truly a thing of beauty.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t only the goals and the offensive quality of the rossoneri that shone that night. After hearing the pre-match talk where Rocco famously invited his players to “mark their midfielders from the dressing room to the toilet”, it wasn’t difficult for Angelo Anquilletti to find the motivation with which the right side stopper that night served himself to execute the perfect man-marking display to a young but already decisive Johan Cruyff, something that ended up being one of the keys of the game.
In a match where the dutch side controlled much of the possession, specially in the second half, both Cruyff and his teammates found themselves crushing to a wall of red and black-shirted players almost every time they tried to penetrate it, and the italian back line succeeded to hold Ajax´s number 14 to a discrete performance.
Labelled by the Gazzetta delIo Sport as Rocco’s “masterpiece” and “complete work” the match played that night was a one sided game, one similar to the kind of match that would take place a few years later when a more experienced Ajax team would go on to demolish Bayern Munich under the guidance of Ştefan Kovács, marking the beginning of the realm of Total Football and choking the germans with their high pressing. But time gives each and every one its opportunity to shine, and that Madrid summer night belonged to Rocco. It was the summit of a tactical approach that conquered the world of European football against the team that was just a few years away from their own domination period.
The magical second spell culminated with a brutal two-legged Intercontinental Cup tie against reigning South American champions Estudiantes de La Plata, a team that boasted the likes of Carlos Bilardo and Juan Sebastián Verón, the father of the former Manchester United player who led the team to win that same cup in yet another cruel and remembered series against the Reds the year prior. In the second leg played at La Bombonera, in Buenos Aires, AC Milan lost 2–1 but managed to win the cup on aggregate and became the best team in the world for the first time in their history.
We could say, then, that Rocco -in contrast to Herrera´s approach which later in his first year as the Inter coach took the libero and deployed it alongside four other defenders-, popularized the original system created by Rappan by taking the innovative 1–3 defensive structure to the pinnacle of italian and European football once he got to showcase it at Milan, and it was him, along with the help of his argentinian neighbour, the one that gave place to the golden era of defensive football in Italy, where football became a sociological and a moral matter for most.
It all started just after the War, in 1947. From the modest pitches of Switzerland, to the early employments in the Luigi Ferraris in Genoa and finally at the top of the world, the verrou, now renamed catenaccio for all to see, took two decades until it placed itself at the top of the footballing world.
In the end, history says that to this day no one won more cups than him at San Siro. Even after time has blessed the red and black side of Milan with the revolutionary ideas of Arrigho Sacchi, the effectiveness of Fabio Capello and the later glory days of Ancelotti, the winningest name of all remains to be Nereo Rocco´s.
A carrier of the flag of the ¨football of the poor¨, as it was described then, he died at the Maggiore Hospital in his natal Trieste, where at the very end he would call his youngest son, Tito, and ask him to give him the ¨tempo¨, as if he were still coaching from the bench. That day, the whole city paid its respects to a legend, and up there in the first row was Gianni Rivera and many others whose lives were touched by the Parón.
Rocco´s legacy is one that is still seen today. The paternal way in which he related to his players, something rare at the time he managed, are a common feature of today´s football. From the meetings at the restaurants to the training fields and to the matches, his humanity and tough but kind manners elevated him upon everyone at the club he managed. It was his ability to select the right ¨dressing room¨ players and to keep them together and fighting towards the common goal that made of Rocco such a patriarchal figure, one that now watches over everyone´s doings from his deserved statue in Milanello.
But Rocco´s heritage is better explained if we see the names that have come after him to grace the game with different notes. The legendary Giovanni Trapattoni, who made catenaccio a thing again with his Juventus side in the 70s, is one of them. Graced by the unquestionable quality of number ten’s like the Irish Liam Brady, who preceded Platini in the task, who was later followed by Roberto Baggio, those early Trapattoni teams would sit back and enjoy the devilries of those allowed to play freely with a Total Football esque offense, winning thirteen titles on the way to become the major force in italian football during the 70’s and 80’s and showing a very identifiable influence from the man who managed him at Milan.
Rocco was pragmatism, defensiveness, kindness and toughness; he was the representation of success accompanied with certain details of his philosophy as a man of the land that saw him born and as a football manager that, definitely, helped form a whole new identity of what it is to be italian around a football. As Gianni Brera, the legendary journalist from the Gazzetta dello Sport, La Reppublica and many other publications points in his posthumous book Il più bel gioco del mondo (The Most Beautiful Game in the World): ¨Football, therefore, is played according to the climate, the racial and social status of the practitioners: nor is there an absolute football style: instead there are modules and styles that are similar or different to each other due to the primary impact of the environment.¨.
From Switzerland to Genoa, and then from Trieste to Milan, the system found him, and he elevated it not only to a tactical disposition simulated by many, but in a complete philosophical and sociological representation of Italy through calcio, transforming it into the footballing module of a nation.
Before Rocco, Milan had 8 Serie A titles and one Coppa Italia. After El Parón, the rossoneri counted ten Serie A crowns, four Cups, two Cup Winner’s Cups, one Intercontinental Cup and two European Cups. 9 titles before Rocco, and 19 after him. The numbers speak for themselves, but it would be wrong to limit what he meant to a mere number, when in fact the main reason why people still remember him lay away from football itself.
