DEFENCE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS
“All great changes are preceded by chaos”– Deepak Chopra
January 1990: the dawn of a decade that would completely transform football. Mandated by that month’s final Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster and bankrolled by a huge windfall from the Sky, the country’s Premier clubs would soon populate sparklingly renovated stadia with the planet’s finest players.
Things were rather different at fourth-tier Cambridge United’s Abbey Stadium – neither near an abbey (the club’s original name was Abbey United), nor nearly a modern stadium. But a very different football revolution was nevertheless afoot.
Just as you can’t safely judge a book by its cover, you can’t predict a managerial style from a playing career. Born in north London in 1954, John Beck (below right) was a skilful midfielder for two of the most technically lauded top-tier teams of the 1970s: first the QPR of Gordon Jago and Dave Sexton, then Gordon Milne’s exciting Coventry.
Drifting down the divisions to finally end up at the Abbey, Beck graduated from player-coach to assistant manager, then bagged Cambridge’s main job when the board took a low-cost gamble on making him caretaker manager. Rarely can any outside bet have gone so well…
GET ON OR GET OUT
Beck had a mission, a method and a mantra. Overnight, signs popped up everywhere at the Abbey, even on the back of toilet doors, proclaiming “Simplicity is Genius”.
In line with the current pressing orthodoxy, players would swarm the opposition to win possession, then counter-attack as quickly as possible – directly into the final third and bypassing the midfield. Instead of peppering the densely occupied box, those long passes were to be aimed towards the corners, where wingers provided what would now be called ‘high width’. Back then the terminology was altogether different, reveals Torquay gaffer
“I SPENT HALF MY TIME SAYING, ‘YOU CAN’T DO THAT, BECKY!’ HE WAS THE DARK ARTS MASTER”
Gary Johnson, whose time alongside Beck as his assistant prefaced a quarter-century (and counting) managerial career of his own.
“We used to call them ‘reachers’,” Johnson tells . “If you get something like 200 reachers into their final third, then the
