Herrera, the Magician
In a period of twelve years, between the World Cup of 1950 and the World Cup of 1962, Spain's national squad appointed sixteen coach/managers, none of whom had the talent, organisation or vision to draw on the best from club football and transform it into a competitive squad capable of winning titles. Perhaps the one that did, Helenio Herrera, who served as Spain's national coach between 1959 and 1962, proved too arrogant a personality and too divisive in his tactics to ensure a truly national enterprise. While individual clubs enriched the game they played with foreign imports and the lessons they learned from a variety of talented coaches, Spain as a football nation would only grasp belatedly the foreign tricks and spells with which it had been briefly dazzled during the tour of San Lorenzo de Almagro. Of Herrera's many claims to fame, few can be as negative as the fact that he alienated both Alfredo Di Stefano and Ladislav Kubala, two of of the greatest figures in the history of Spanish football. Herrera was a nomad who, at his best, brought a magician's touch along with a strong personality to the profession of football manager/coach. He was born in Argentina to Spanish immigrants — his father was an exiled anarchist. When he was aged four he immigrated with his parents to Casablanca where he adopted French citizenship. Herrera would later claim that he learned what he needed to know about football — his school of life as he called it — as a boy growing up in North Africa,
mixing and playing with Arabs, Jews, French and Spaniards. During his two-year stint at FC Barcelona (1958-60), he used his powers of psychology to motivate a team that all too often seemed overladen with its own self-conscious sense of history, and an underlying inferiority complex with respect to its rival Real Madrid. The way Barga emerged from one of its periodic doldrums and flourished under Herrera was so quick that it provoked conspiracy theories in Madrid of trickery, secret rituals, even illicit drugs, although much of the negative media coverage was fuelled by the coach's unashamed mercantilism. Nonetheless, he won the respect of his players, with the exception of the ageing Kubala, who he judged surplus to requirements. As Fuste, one of the younger Barga players (and future Spanish international) at the time, recalled, 'Herrera was football's psychologist ... he was very good at motivating his players ... he would convince them they were better than the opponent ... He got me into play when I was seventeen ... I looked up to much older players like Kubala and Evaristo and Ramallets as if they were gods. Herrera knew how to make the best use of the resources at his command.' Herrera brought Spanish and Italian club football into the modern era of coaches stamping a style and worldview on their players, in the process becoming the first manager to collect credit for his team's performance. Up to that time managers were more marginal, with the exception perhaps of the pre-war examples — eccentric Englishmen like Athletics Mr Pentland or fearless Irishmen like FC Barcelona's Patrick O'Connell. During the 1950s teams were better known for their players than their managers, such as Di Stefano's Real Madrid. And yet Catalans remember the Herrera era while Inter FC during the 1960s is still referred to as Herrera's Inter. He came to be popularly known as 'The Magician' on account of his innovative psychological motivating skills, which some of today's most successful coaches like Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho were destined to emulate. His pep talks would be punctuated with phrases like 'He who doesn't give it all doesn't give anything.' Herrera was disdainful of other managers in
Spain for their failure to engage with players and to bring about a real change in their attitude. His pre-match warm-ups, like his training sessions, were intense affairs, his press conferences usually controversial, as were his pre-match preparations. After providing his players with a cup of tea made up of spices and herbs only he knew the true identity of, Herrera would gather his players around him in a circle. Then, throwing the ball at each in turn, he would scream a question, looking each player directly in the eyes. 'What do you think of the match? How are we going to play? Why are we going to win?' he would demand. The questions gathered in speed and intensity as he went round the circle. Then, as a collective frenzy appeared to reach its climax, the circle would split and the players sprint before returning into the fold, at which point the team would shout, We are going to win.' Herrera encouraged superstition, which he believed complemented the traditional Virgin cults to which most Spanish clubs were linked because of the Catholicism of a majority of players and fans. He found a susceptible target of his own tricks in the case of the Galician-born Luis Suarez, the attacking midfielder nicknamed El Arquitecto (The Architect) for his visionary passing and explosive goal-scoring ability. Galicia has never boasted as many football stars as other major regions of Spain. After Suarez, only Real Madrid's Amancio would lay claim to enduring fame and they both chose at an early stage in their careers to move to bigger non-Galician clubs. Other Spaniards say that the Gallegos lack the strength of Basques, the imagination of Catalans, the courage of Castilians and the mischievous artfulness of Andalusians. So the popular football joke goes: 'An Andalusian kicks the ball out of play and smiles. The Gallego takes twenty minutes to recover it.' But Suarez was different. He was not only a fine and creative inside-forward, the first Spanish-born player to be voted European Footballer of the Year in 1960 — he was also deeply superstitious. Thus while looking on Suarez as Di Stefano's 'legitimate heir', Herrera played on his star player's belief that a glass of wine, accidently spilled during a pre-match meal
, augured well for his goal-scoring chances. When Suarez wasn't looking Herrera would give his wine glass a good tap and exclaim in a loud voice, 'What a pity we've ruined the tablecloth!' Suarez would then immediately run up, dip his finger in the spilled wine, and then with it touch first his forehead, then the tip of his shoe. Despite his tricks, Herrera had a genuine knowledge of the game and how it could best be played to entertain and secure victory. He experimented with some innovative attacking football, using full-backs as wing-backs defensively supported by the libero or centre-half stopper to launch faster counterattacks and turn some of the easier matches into goal sprees. But he also knew how to close down opponents by having the sweeper stay behind the defence, with the rest of the team marking man-to-man and counterattacking on the break. Herrera claimed that his tactics were slightly different to the catenaccio (or cult of defence) that came to be identified with Italian teams with a reputation for negative play He himself liked to use, among his options, a system whereby the centre-backs in front of the sweeper were markers, while the full-backs had to be able to run with the ball and attack. Herrera was full of praise for two foreign signings by Barca, the Hungarian Kocsis, the 'Golden Head' who also had a sure touch and strength of foot, and Czibor, fast on and off the ball and similarly skilled in goal-scoring. While Czibor liked to describe himself as the 'engineer among the workers', Herrera insisted on collective team effort. A competitive spirit, strength and speed, and good technique were what constituted a winning formula. In an era of foreign imports, arguably Herrera's greatest contribution to the health of the Spanish league was in following the example of Athletic Bilbao and encouraging Barca's youth system, which produced players like Olivella, Gensana, Gracia, Verges and Tejada. 'We owe them many of our victories,' he said. 'They played not just with class but with an absolute dedication to the club colours.' When some three years before he died in 1997, Herrera was visited at his Venice palazzo by the author Simon Kuper, and was asked to talk about his time in Spain, Herrera explained
image among his critics. The Times condemned what it described as Franco's arbitrary and blatantly political coercive act which had violated the founding principles of the IOC and FIFA. The newspaper suggested, not inaccurately, that Franco was making a point about Spain's credentials as an anti-communist Cold War warrior to impress his military and commercial ally, the United States. It certainly had very little to do with football per se. Herrera survived for another two years as manager of the Spanish squad, but he made as many enemies as friends and the former eventually caught up with him. The Argentine initially courted criticism for dropping Kubala, first from Barca and then from the national squad, justifying the move on loss of form and lack of discipline linked to the Hungarian's heavy drinking. Herrera not only forced out Kubala, but another legend of Spanish football — Pepe Samitier, the former star player turned technical director of FC Barcelona. After a row with Herrera, Samitier moved to Real Madrid where he had as many friends as in the Catalan capital, not least Franco himself, and where he harboured an enduring grudge against the Argentine. By the time Spain qualified for the World Cup in Chile in 1962, Herrera had become, as Alfredo Relario puts it, the teddy of the film . . . for many an innovator, for others a real anti-Christ of football.' On paper the Spanish squad that qualified for the 1962 World Cup, with Herrera as coach, could only impress, such was the talent and experience displayed. It included four naturalised foreigners — Di Stefano, the Uruguayan-born Real Madrid central defender Jose Santamaria, Puskes, and Barca's Paraguayan-born striker Eulogio Martinez — together with a coterie of home-grown stardom which included Gento, Collar, PeirO, Garay, Adelardo and Del Sol. Yet Spain did not get past the first round where it was grouped together with Mexico and the two eventual finalists, runners-up Czechoslovakia and Brazil who won the championship. As Brian Glanville has written, the component pieces of the Brazil team had 'sprung apart, then strangely and steadily come together again'. During the four years since they had last won the World Cup, two key Brazilian players had played at
club level in La Liga with contrasting fortunes. Vava, who scored twice in the 1958 final, went on to have two successful seasons with Atletico Madrid. The other was Didi, one of the few foreign stars brought in by Bernabeu who did not prove a success at Real Madrid, partly because he never seemed to be quite up to the energy and speed of his team-mates, and partly because of personal problems involving his wife. She was a journalist who claimed that Di Stefano was jealous of her husband and mistreated him. Di Stefano blamed Didi for not fighting enough for the ball, and losing it too easily. The Bernabeu stadium likes quality, but it also values effort, work, commitment — it wants a battle. It's a public that is used to winning and to win you have to fight,' Di Stefano said once. In other words, Didi was a lesser being. Arguably, bad luck rather than bad football conspired against Helenio Herrera's Spanish squad. It got off to a faltering start, losing 0-1 against the Czechs, their early pressure blocked by a solid defence, their flow of play increasingly interrupted by brutal tackles that crippled Herrera's stars and led one of them, Martinez, out of pure frustration, to lash out with a kick to an opponent's stomach. In the next match against Mexico, the Spaniards rediscovered their rhythm. Again a strong defence resisted the Spanish pressure but this time the gods were smiling, and PeirO scored the winner in the final minute. In their final match in the group, Spain faced Brazil. The Spaniards needed a draw at least to qualify. It was a game in which Didi had planned to take his revenge on Di Stefano but Di Stefano was left out of the Spanish team after pulling a muscle. Before the tournament got under way Di Stefano's father turned up with a 'magic' liniment, but to no avail. A conflict of egos had led to an enduring rift between Di Stefano and Herrera. As the then young Spanish international Fuste later recalled: 'Di Stefano was a guy who liked to lead, to be the boss and he wanted to go on being the boss. The problem was that Herrera wanted to be boss as well and there wasn't room for both of them.' For the match against Brazil, Herrera took a major gamble, which was also a questionable statement of self-belief, by
making no fewer than nine changes from his original eleven. He dropped two star forwards, Del Sol and Suarez, his goalkeeper Carmelo and his centre-half Santamaria. Instead he drew up a traditional attacking five with Puskas and Gento alongside three Atletico Madrid players led by Peir6. In what some commentators regarded as one of the best games of the competition, Spain played with commitment and flair. Those watching the game included the seasoned English journalist Brian Glanville, who noted for the first hour Spain playing a defensive game which had Brazil at full stretch. A swift counterattack led by Puskas helped create a Spanish goal ten minutes before half-time. Spain kept their composure and their lead until the 72nd minute, at which point Brazil equalised. Then, with four minutes of normal time left, Brazil scored the winner. As Glanville himself concluded, it was a very near thing, and arguably a 'manifest injustice to Spain', which he judged the better organised and more motivated team on the day. Nevertheless Spain's resulting elimination from the 1962 World Cup reignited a national debate about the future of Spanish football, which brought with it some nasty prejudices from Spain's darker past. Nationalist attacks focused on the foreign influence that had formed part of the Spanish expedition. The state-controlled Spanish sports daily Marca led the charge, claiming that Spain had underperformed as a result of not being sufficiently Spanish in selection and spirit. While conceding that naturalised foreign players like Di Stefano, Puskas and Kubala, and managers like Daucik — Kubala's Hungarian father-in-law —the Paraguayan Manuel Fleitas and Herrera himself had added 'colour and excitement', while also helping clubs like FC Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid win domestic and European competitions, the newspaper argued that the same foreigners were blocking the development of home-grown talent. 'Even worse, the national team is now so full of foreigners and so conditioned by foreign tactics that it no longer plays like a team of real Spaniards, with passion, with aggression, with courage, with virility, and above all with fury'
said Marca. Not even Spain's star international Luis Suarez, a Spaniard born and bred, escaped criticism. The fact that he had chosen to leave his country to play for a foreign club was held against him as anti-patriotic by his detractors. As for Herrera, he had made so many enemies along the way during his time in Spain that he, above all others, became the target of unbridled criticism painting him as a mercenary with no loyalty but to himself.
