BATTLE OF WITS
50 YEARS ON... How high-flying Inter boss Herrera met his match in Stein
THREE weeks before stepping into the heat of Lisbon, the phoney war between Jock Stein and Helenio Herrera began. The manager of Inter Milan had travelled by private jet to watch Celtic play Rangers at Ibrox and extended an invitation for his rival to return with him to watch the Italians take on Juventus the following day in Turin.
At the last minute, though, Herrera reneged — claiming there were insufficient seats on the plane. Sensing this was always a possibility, Stein had kept his original booking and made it to the match after exhausting scheduled flights via Rome.
When the match tickets Herrera had promised also failed to materialise, the Celtic manager had to bluff his way into the stadium by using the press card of a travelling Scottish journalist.
As much as the European Cup final was a duel between the champions of Scotland and Italy, it was also a battle of wits between two men who had created teams in their own images.
Both possessed auras that were detectable from outer space. In their own way, each was a trailblazer for football management as we know it today.
Yet their views of the game and their craft were distinct. Stein may have been a disciplinarian who, like Herrera, knew well the worth of psychology.
Whereas individualism and acts of expression were encouraged within his side, Herrera’s brainwashing of his Inter players turned them into browbeaten automatons who knew nothing other than dour, functional — if highly successful — football.
Lisbon wasn’t just a victory for Celtic over Inter Milan. It vindicated one man’s philosophy while simultaneously obliterating another’s.
Born in the islands of the Tigre Delta near Buenos Aires, the son of an exiled Spanish anarchist trade unionist and a cleaner, Herrera moved as a young boy to Casablanca in Morocco, where he lived in poverty.
His displays as a central defender for RC Casablanca caught the eye of a number of French clubs and he eked out a career playing for the likes of CASG Paris, Stade Francais and Puteaux.
He moved into management with the latter and then Stade Francais but, after three years, moved to Spain. He spent the next six years with Real Valladolid, Atletico Madrid — where he won La Liga in 1950 and 1951 — Malaga, Deportivo de la Coruna and Sevilla before crossing the border to Belenenses in Lisbon.
He returned to Spain with Barcelona, winning La Liga on another two occasions, but problems, most notably a fall-out with star player Ladislao Kubala, ended his tenure in 1960.
Fluent in Spanish, Arabic, French, English and Italian (he often spoke several languages in the same sentence), Herrera was a proven winner and a citizen of the world.
He thought nothing of moving to Milan and turning Inter into the team which would become renowned as the Grande Inter.
Contrary to common perception, he did not invent the famous
catenaccio (door-bolt) system. That ‘honour’ belongs to Austrian Karl Rappan, who coached Servette and the Swiss national team in the 1930s.
Whereas Rappan’s version used a zonal marking mixed with man-to-man marking, Herrera’s more cautious variation used man-to-man marking with a sweeper.
With the legendary Armando Picchi cast in that role and supreme full-backs like Giacinto Facchetti and Tarcisio Burgnich either side of him, Herrera’s team played a devastating brand of counter-attacking football.
ITS success knew no bounds. Inter won Serie A in 1963, 1965 and 1966, plus the European Cup in 1964 and 1965 and the Intercontinental Cup in those same years. The Italian press nicknamed him
Il Mago —‘The Wizard’ — for his ability to predict results.
He intensely disliked this moniker. ‘The word wizard doesn’t belong to football,’ he declared.
‘Passion and strength are football words. The greatest compliment I have ever had was someone saying I worked 30 hours a day.’
Whether he possessed mystic powers or not, Herrera was an extraordinary character.
Bold, brazen, intelligent, singleminded and utterly unpredictable, the Argentine was a hypnotically complicated figure.
‘Go ahead and judge him as the mood takes you,’ Gianni Brera, the Italian football columnist, wrote in 1966. ‘Clown and genius, buffoon and ascetic, rogue and model father, sultan and faithful husband, swaggering fool and quiet achiever, delinquent and competent, megalomaniac and health fanatic. Herrera is all of the above and more.’
The methodology he used to transform Inter into a side capable of usurping Real Madrid and Benfica as being the most feared team in Europe formed a huge part of the Herrera legend.
He invented the ritiro (withdrawal) — four days of near monastic existence in a remote hotel where the players would do nothing other than train, eat, sleep and talk about their forthcoming match. Inter would take over the entire hotel, meaning there was no contact with the outside world.
Herrera pinned notices on the walls in the belief the messages would sink into his players’ subconscious. They were forced to chant them as they trained.
‘Class and preparation, intelligence and athleticism equals titles,’ read one. ‘He who plays for himself plays for the opposition,’ was another.
Some happenings were akin to satanic rituals. The ball was to be worshipped, its talismanic qualities so powerful that touching it even briefly was good for the mind.
Training drills were interspersed with yoga. In team meetings, Herrera referenced the lives of saints. Smoking and alcohol were forbidden and the players received individual diets.
Away from the camps, he obsessed about his players’ behaviour. Spies were deployed to ensure they were getting enough sleep. Anyone who deviated from his instructions was finished.
In these times, managers and coaches were not the central figures they are today.
Real Madrid were referred to as (Alfredo) Di Stefano’s side. Likewise, Benfica were seen to belong to Eusebio.
Herrera changed all that. Inter were his private property. So imperious did they become that no one could question the modus
operandi of their manager. And nothing was allowed to come before the team.
When the father of one of his players, Aristide Guarneri, died on the eve of a match, Herrera withheld the news so as not to distract him from the task at hand.
Rumours of skulduggery and bribery followed his every step, but nothing was ever proven.
He is credited as being the first man to recognise the influence a partisan crowd can have on a game. He coined the phrase ‘twelfth man’ and is said to have led to the creation of ultras.
Celtic, then, faced not just the pre-eminent force in European football on May 25 but an empire that had been built by one man.
Unknown to the Scots, however, the cracks in Herrera’s regime were beginning to show. Every man has his breaking point and after almost seven years under Herrera’s intense glare, the Inter players were nearing theirs.
The beginning of the end came on April 19 when they drew 1-1 away to CSKA Sofia in the first leg of the European Cup semi-final.
Four days later, Lazio held them to a scoreless draw and the following midweek, in the return
against the Bulgarians, another 1-1 draw meant a replay.
A subsequent 1-1 draw away to Cagliari meant Inter had failed to win in four games for the first time since Herrera took charge.
They won the replay with CSKA to progress to Lisbon but a loss to Juventus in the league when a win would have sealed the title, then a draw against Fiorentina left them just one point clear of Juve, with the deciding game against Mantova taking place after the Celtic game. They lost this, too.
While Inter fans heading to Lisbon still believed winning the top prizes in Europe and Italy was a formality, behind the scenes it was evident their heroes could no longer cope with their boss’s mad, mad world.
Four Inter players vomited through stress on the morning of the final, with another four doing so in the dressing room of the Estadio Nacional.
The game itself was less of a football match and more a re-enactment of an ancient battle between swashbuckling revolutionaries and the guardians of a crumbling empire.
Despite going a goal down inside seven minutes, Celtic’s offensive assaults were relentless. When Tommy Gemmell equalised on 63 minutes, the only thing that stood between Inter and annihilation was the resistance of their brilliant goalkeeper Giuliano Sarti.
Years later came an astonishing revelation from Burgnich, which confirmed the role Stein’s men had played in reducing Herrera’s
Grande Inter to rubble. ‘I remember that, at one point, Armando Picchi, our captain, turned to the goalkeeper and said: ‘Giuliano, let it go, just let it go. It’s pointless. Sooner or later, they will get the winner.
‘I never thought I’d hear those words. But it shows how destroyed we were at that point, as if we did not want to prolong the agony.’
With six minutes left, Stevie Chalmers duly obliged. Herrera’s
Grande Inter were no more.