Just read "inverting the pyramid" by Jonathan Wilson
Interesting history of football tactics
He raises the point that total football as practised by Ajax in the 70s was built on the need for extra energy to keep pressing gor 90 minutes
This was achieved, he argues, by doping.
Of course the modern Barcelona way came from that Ajax team via Michels and Cruyff taking their philosophy to Spain.
Here's a quote from the book
"We could play sixty minutes of pressing,’ Swart said. ‘I’ve never seen any other club anywhere who could do that.’ Within a few years, Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo certainly could, but there was no one else, which raises the question of how they were able to maintain that intensity for so long. Both Ajax and Dynamo invested significantly in the science of preparation, working on nutrition and training schema, but both also looked to pharmaceutical means.
In an interview he game to the magazine Vrij Nederland in 1973, Hulshoff spoke of having been given drugs ahead of a match against Real Madrid six years earlier: ‘We took the pills in combination with what we always called chocolate sprinkles,’ he said. ‘What it was I don’t know, but you felt as strong as iron and suffered no breathlessness. One disadvantage was you lost all saliva, so after thirty-five minutes of the game I was retching.’
Salo Müller, who was Ajax’s masseur between 1959 and 1972, admitted as much in his autobiography, published in 2006, and revealed that Hulshoff and Johnny Rep had both come to him with concerns over pills given them by John Rollink, the club doctor. Over time, Müller collected pills Rollink had distributed from other sportsmen and had them analysed. ‘The results were not a surprise to me,’ he wrote. ‘They ranged from painkillers, muscle relaxants and tranquilising pills to amphetamine capsules.’
Even before joining Ajax, Rollink had form. The first drugs scandal to hit Dutch sport came at the 1960 Rome Olympics, when a female swimmer took two prescriptions from a team-mate’s bag and gave them to the press. A doctor said one was indicative of doping, pure and simple, and that the other was likely to be part of a programme of drug use: Rollink’s signature was on one of the prescriptions. He later left the Dutch Cycling Union when doping controls were instituted, and said that Ajax would have refused to comply had doping controls been brought in to Dutch football. He even admitted to taking amphetamines himself if he was working late. It may have been the systematic drugs programmes of the Soviet bloc that attracted the greatest attention, but they were certainly not the only ones at it.
Michels was the father of Total Football, and he carried it on at Barcelona"
Interesting history of football tactics
He raises the point that total football as practised by Ajax in the 70s was built on the need for extra energy to keep pressing gor 90 minutes
This was achieved, he argues, by doping.
Of course the modern Barcelona way came from that Ajax team via Michels and Cruyff taking their philosophy to Spain.
Here's a quote from the book
"We could play sixty minutes of pressing,’ Swart said. ‘I’ve never seen any other club anywhere who could do that.’ Within a few years, Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo certainly could, but there was no one else, which raises the question of how they were able to maintain that intensity for so long. Both Ajax and Dynamo invested significantly in the science of preparation, working on nutrition and training schema, but both also looked to pharmaceutical means.
In an interview he game to the magazine Vrij Nederland in 1973, Hulshoff spoke of having been given drugs ahead of a match against Real Madrid six years earlier: ‘We took the pills in combination with what we always called chocolate sprinkles,’ he said. ‘What it was I don’t know, but you felt as strong as iron and suffered no breathlessness. One disadvantage was you lost all saliva, so after thirty-five minutes of the game I was retching.’
Salo Müller, who was Ajax’s masseur between 1959 and 1972, admitted as much in his autobiography, published in 2006, and revealed that Hulshoff and Johnny Rep had both come to him with concerns over pills given them by John Rollink, the club doctor. Over time, Müller collected pills Rollink had distributed from other sportsmen and had them analysed. ‘The results were not a surprise to me,’ he wrote. ‘They ranged from painkillers, muscle relaxants and tranquilising pills to amphetamine capsules.’
Even before joining Ajax, Rollink had form. The first drugs scandal to hit Dutch sport came at the 1960 Rome Olympics, when a female swimmer took two prescriptions from a team-mate’s bag and gave them to the press. A doctor said one was indicative of doping, pure and simple, and that the other was likely to be part of a programme of drug use: Rollink’s signature was on one of the prescriptions. He later left the Dutch Cycling Union when doping controls were instituted, and said that Ajax would have refused to comply had doping controls been brought in to Dutch football. He even admitted to taking amphetamines himself if he was working late. It may have been the systematic drugs programmes of the Soviet bloc that attracted the greatest attention, but they were certainly not the only ones at it.
Michels was the father of Total Football, and he carried it on at Barcelona"
