The Russians were on the move all the time. We could hardly keep up with them. They interchanged positions to the extent of the outside-left skating over to the right-wing and vice versa. I have never seen hockey played like it. It was a Chinese puzzle to try to follow the players in their positions as it was given in the programme. They simply wandered here and there at will, but the most remarkable feature of it all, they never got in each other's way. [1]
Is the above a verdict on Soviet hockey? Perhaps on a team coached by Anatoli Tarasov or Viktor Tikhonov? Or maybe on the Russian Five in Detroit?
No! These are remarks by English football observers on a Russian soccer squad touring Great Britain in autumn 1945. Only two words of the original statements have been altered by me: Where it said running, I substituted skating, and where it said football, I substituted hockey. But these are the only changes that have been made. So how come an early appraisal of Russian soccer sounds almost literally like evaluations of Soviet hockey would sound decades later?
When the Soviets picked up Canadian hockey after World War II, the first players were recruited from bandy, or “hockey with the ball” as it was called in Russia. Not only did bandy resemble soccer tactically (11 players a side on a big field of play) – those Soviet athletes who chased the small ball on the ice rink during the winter months were also the very same people who chased the big ball on the soccer pitch during the summer season.
Soccer was the paradigmatic team sport in the USSR. It was even more popular than bandy and it offered much more opportunities for international competition. In Europe alone, several different styles and schools of thought had developed in soccer. The English traditionally preferred to “kick and rush” after the ball (not entirely unlike the “dump and chase” game that appeared in Canadian hockey since the 1940s). The Scottish had countered with the attempt to control the ball with shorter passes. Continental countries added their own interpretations and variations. International exchange brought technical and tactical development. By the 1930s, the established tactical setup (2 defenders, 3 midfielders, 5 forwards) was in the process of being replaced by systems that offered more flexibility. It was exactly in this period that the political leadership of the USSR gave the green light for Soviet soccer to enter the international picture.
Young Anatoli Tarasov as player-coach of a soccer team from Zagorsk outside of Moscow
Source: Alexander Gorbunov, Trener Anatoliy Tarasov (2015)
Coaches and players were eager to embrace the opportunity and learn from foreign top teams. The experience gained in these international encounters became embroiled in the fabric of Soviet soccer. One man who emerged as both a particularly creative learner and a formative teacher was Boris Arkadyev, whom soccer historian Jonathan Wilson calls the “first great Soviet theorist of football” [2]. The flexible system that Arkadyev developed would go down in history as “organised disorder”:
We confused the opposition, leaving them without weaponry with our sudden movements. Our left-winger scored most of his goals from the centre-foward position, our right-winger from inside-left and our centre-forward from the flanks. [3]
Arkadyev insisted on intense physical training to foster high-speed movement and quick passing. Using this new system, Dinamo Moscow won the 1940 Soviet championship in dominant fashion.
Arkadi Chernyshov (center) as a member of the Dinamo Moscow soccer team
Source: Leonid Reizer, Arkadiy Chernyshov (2020)
Boris Arkadyev never coached hockey, but the first generation of great Soviet hockey minds all came up through the school of soccer coaches like him and others such as Mikhail Kozlov and Mikhail Tovarovsky. Their ideas about training, technique and tactics were shaped accordingly. Three examples:
Arkadi Chernyshov (head coach of the Soviet national team 1954-1957 and 1960-1972):
Career as professional soccer player. Central defender of the 1940 Dinamo Moscow championship team. As Russian soccer historian Alexander Soskin puts it, Arkadyev appreciated the tall and tactically literate Chernyshov for his “flair for accurate passing and his capability for work” [4]. The two were also close on a personal level: Arkadi Chernyshov's older sister Raisa was married with Boris Arkadyev's brother.
Anatoli Tarasov (head coach of the Soviet national team 1957-1960 and assistant coach 1962-1972):
Career as professional soccer player. He trained under Arkadyev with the Central Army soccer club (1944-1946) and called him a mentor. In the months immediately after World War II, Tarasov was sent to Hungary as a scout. Hungary had been a strong soccer country before the war and would soon make even more headlines with its tactically groundbreaking “Golden Team” in the early 1950s.
Vsevolod Bobrov (head coach of the Soviet national team 1972-1974):
Career as professional soccer player. One of the leading players of his time, he was a member of the squad touring Great Britain in 1945. Trained under Arkadyev with the Central Army soccer club (1945-1952). After his playing days, Bobrov served two terms as head coach of the Central Army soccer club (1967-1969, 1977-1978).
Vsevolod Bobrov (left) watches as Boris Arkadyev draws a tactical diagram in the ground
Source: Vladimir Pakhomov, Vsevolod Bobrov (2002)
It's no coincidence that when Anatoli Tarasov discussed his idea of a new basic setup for hockey (2 forwards + 2 midfielders + 1 defender instead of 3 forwards + 2 defenders) in his book Sovershennoletie (“Coming of Age”) in the second half of the 1960s, he pointed to the historic development of tactical setups in soccer: After all, this was the sport that had provided the frame of reference for him and his colleagues during their formative years. And when Tarasov's career as coach of the Central Army hockey club finally came to an end in 1974, he didn't miss the chance to try his luck as coach of the Central Army soccer squad, albeit without success.
Intense physical training, fast movement, quick passing and positional interchangeability – all these pillars of Soviet hockey were already promoted decades earlier in soccer by the very men who coached Chernyshov, Tarasov and Bobrov. It was 1930s and 1940s Soviet soccer that provided the blueprint for Soviet hockey.
[1] Quoted after Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics (2008), Chapter 5
[2] Wilson
[3] Wilson
[4] Alexander Soskin, Futbolny chelovek iz khokkeynoy legendy. In: Futbol 9, 2001
Posted on Behind the Boards (SIHR Blog)
