In almost all arts or disciplines, to speak of "Italian school" is to speak of an often excessive inclination to style, a refinement that can degenerate into rhetorical mannering. The Italian school is usually, in short, a bit of a mess. Less in football. There the Italian school is virile defensiveness, pragmatic tacticism and cunning cunning. Patapum p'arriba, if we want to synthesize it with a Basque technicality.
But that was not always so, in fact until the sixties no one associated Italian football with a certain way of playing. The Italian team had won two successive World Cups in 1934 and 1938 with a rather conservative tactic, but there were still plenty of apologists for the bel giuoco and the epic d'annunziana (and somewhat fascist) attack. It was mainly a man - not a coach, but a journalist - the theoretician, ideologue and propagandist of the form of game most hated by aesthetes and Spaniards, catenaccio. His name was Gianni Brera and is probably the most well-known, influential and original pen in the history of Italian sports journalism.
Brera was born in 1917 in a village on the Po plain, in the province of Pavia. A fertile area but with a disgusting climate. During World War II, he fought like partisano in the valley of Ossola, to the north of Milan, one of the few zones liberated before the arrival of the allies. In the autumn of '44 in that valley they came to proclaim a Partisan Republic, while the Anglo-American army was still about two hundred miles south, attempting to break the Gothic Line between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. The thing did not last long, a counteroffensive of the fascist troops ended it, but as it is said in these cases, what counts is the intention. In any case, Brera must have internalized quite well what works and what does not work when one is facing a stronger enemy. Arising artillery battles when you have two mortars and a dozen shotguns is not brave, it's imbeciles. Wait crouch, hit fast and re-hide, that's the plan.
And that was, more or less, the football conception of Brera. He was convinced that the Italian football squad was undermined by an old hunger, and that this atavistic calorie deficit had produced mediocre athletes, unable to fight on equal terms with Englishmen, Germans or Scandinavians. We produce fast and leathery defenses, as well as elusive and opportunistic, sometimes even fanciful, front lines, but we lack true athletes who can impose themselves on the "middle-field maremágnum," Brera argued. Only waiting prudently closed in defense and launching fast counterattacks in a timely manner, skipping the midfield with long passes that reach directly to the front line, can an Italian team beat top teams from an athletic point of view. Their ethnic-cultural arguments may not seem to be too solid today (and indeed they are not), but, as we shall see, they were, and still are, scrupulously confirmed by the reality of events.
In the 1930s, when the young Brera, still a student, moved his first steps in sports journalism, in the world of football began to impose the so-called WM system. The name came from the way the players were on the pitch. It was a kind of 3-2-2-3, in which the defense was composed only by a central and two high sides. Herbert Chapman had invented it in the Arsenal and in a short time it would impose itself in the British islands and, by extension, in all Europe. It was a fast and spectacular system, with a lot of aerial play, suitable for fields like the British, well maintained but often soaked, in which the circulation of the ball was difficult. It required markings on the man, a great physical waste and some acrobatic ability to control tall balls.
Vittorio Pozzo, the Italian coach at the home World Cup in 1934 (or year XII of the Fascist Era, according to the current schedule in the host country) realized that the frenzied WM badly adapted to the physique and style of play of the Italians, who played at a slower pace, with sudden accelerations in the attack phase. So he did not allow himself to be seduced by the new arrivals of the perfidious Albion and imposed a much more conservative scheme on the squadron. It was a system invented by himself, with two centrals in the area, called WW or, more grandiloquently, the Method. Thanks to the Method (well, and to the band of Argentineans international that Mussolini nationalized for the occasion) Italy would finish prevailing in that World-wide one. Success that would repeat in France four years later, becoming the first selection in winning two consecutive World Cups.
The war brought with it an uncontrollable desire for change and openness, after twenty years of autarky. And football was no exception. The old Pozzo Method had evolved little, and the more versatile WM seemed to give the teams that used it a certain tactical superiority. In Italy it would end up penetrating in the decade of the forties, of the hand of a legendary equipment. It was the Torino, winner of five consecutive championships (1943, 46, 47, 48 and 49), whose hegemony would end abruptly and tragically on May 4, 1949, when the plane carrying the team back from a friendly in Portugal was Crashed into the hills surrounding Turin, near the Basilica of Superga. The tragedy will enlarge the legend of the "Grande Torino" and the WM would become, in spite of Brera, in the module most used in the calcium of the fifties. Brera, meanwhile, had begun to work at the Gazzetta dello Sport immediately after the end of the war, dealing mainly with athletics and cycling. After a time as a correspondent in Paris, in 1949 he became, at the age of only thirty-two, the youngest director in the history of «La Rosa». Critical militant, theoretician and sports agitator, will become such a prestigious position in a pulpit from which to defend his Italian conception of football. He will utter anathemas and slander, he will beat himself, practically alone, against the apologists of the attack game, whom he will contemptuously define, with a point of northern superiority, as "Neapolitan school". He is a brilliant polemicist, a baroque and powerful prose, put at the service of an analytical will. It incorporates numerous neologisms, which serve to fill the gaps in the language of sports journalism of the time, often anchored in the lyrical and aesthetic description of the game, without the terminology necessary to deploy a technical analysis.