John Beck: Pioneer of Pragmatic Football Tactics
John Beck: The Football Tactician Who Was About More Than Just ‘Route One’
Football Historian Peter Kenny Jones returns to The Sporting Blog with the story of John Beck, a man known for his pragmatic tactics, and supposedly uncultured style of management.
Yet there was success with Cambridge Utd and lots of it. So was John Beck more than just a long-ball merchant? Read on…
Football is a sport that is loved by many, coined by one of its greatest players, Pelé, as ‘the beautiful game’. When at its best, the passing and movement that leads to oodles of created chances and goals makes it a magnificent spectacle to the fans lucky enough to witness it. However, this isn’t always the case.
For every Franz Beckenbauer, there’s a Danny O'Shea. For every Ronaldinho, there’s a Steve Claridge.
Your goals can be scored by Lionel Messi or Dion Dublin and the architect behind the style of play could be Johan Cruyff.
Or it could be a man that created a method of football so different and so devious, which also brought with it plenty of success, that he could almost be coined the antithesis of the beautiful game, John Beck.
John Beck’s early managerial career
The Englishman had spells at Preston, Lincoln, Histon and Kettering Town but it is his time spent in Cambridge United’s dugout that set him aside from the rest.
After the end of his playing career through injury, also at United, he immediately moved to the coaching staff in 1989. Following the resignation of manager Chris Turner, Beck took the top job the following year.
Beck took charge in January 1990 with his Cambridge side sitting in the Fourth Division and the next few years were set to be memorable for the loyal U’s supporters. He made an immediate impact with a strong cup run where his Fourth Division side were set to become the first-ever to reach the semi-finals of the world’s oldest cup competition.
Following a 5-1 victory over Bristol City in the famous cup run, a pitch invasion broke out and Beck was interviewed during the excitement.
He summed up the win by stating:
“Some of our channel balls were magnificent”
An insight into the type of football he loved to see. A Geoff Thomas goal for Crystal Palace in the quarter-final ended a fantastic cup run for the new boss who had beaten Millwall and Bristol City on the way.
His impact was immediate, as he became the first manager to win Manager of the Month in consecutive months after taking a new job.
He was working his team hard in training to improve their fitness and built around a solid defence and prolific target man, Dion Dublin.
Dion Dublin - CUFC Legend
The crowning glory of the campaign was to be lifting the Yellows into the Third Division for the first time in 6 years.
They had a strong second half of the season which saw Beck’s team climb to 6th place and thus fight for promotion through the play-offs. Semi-final victory over Maidstone led to the first-ever play-off final in Wembley Stadium.
A tight affair was ultimately settled by a Dion Dublin header from a corner with 13 minutes to spare against Chesterfield and promotion was secured.
The Basis for John Beck’s Tactics
For all his tactics can be queried or worse mocked today, it must be said that he was a pioneer of a Moneyball type tactic, made famous by Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s in MLB.
His weird and wonderful ideas were based upon numerical studies and examination of the most statistically successful tactics used in the game.
It may not have been as advanced as the techniques seen in baseball, but Beck had reportedly hired the help of a statistician to conclude the more time they spent with the ball in the box, the more chance of scoring.
The idea was that balls from deep are easier to defend, the players were under strict instructions to get the ball out wide to the wingers at every opportunity, load the box and get the ball in as soon as possible.
His thinking was if the ball is in their end, you will get more second balls and so, more goals.
Not quite this simple…but there was a bit of route one involved.
If he used quick wingers and big strikers, alongside a strong work ethic then he believed they would be unbeatable. He was aided by some great technical players who went on to have Premier League careers and for a few years at the start of the 90s, they were unstoppable.
His tactics are scoffed at today for appearing rudimentary. Nevertheless, he was a thoughtful manager in a city full of geniuses. He devised a way to play football that brought results and almost brought Cambridge to achieve the impossible.
He changed the way lower league football was perceived and produced an efficient winning formula.
Beck’s tactics off the pitch
Despite this praise, some of his tactics outside of the game itself are amusing to look back on.
He made all his players take a cold shower before each game, in any weather.
Steve Claridge recalled how one game he cut inside from the wing and had a shot at goal, Beck immediately subbed him off after 20 minutes as it was against the game plan and not what he wanted him to do.
He would also play mind games with the opposition, in the summer, the thermostat would be turned all the way up in the away dressing room and turned off in the winter.
He would take a full Under-18 squad to each away game so that they could cut up the grass of any ball-playing side’s pitch and disrupt their game.
He instructed the away dugout to be moved further down the pitch so that the opposition manager couldn’t see the far end of the pitch from his seat and put extra sugar in the away team’s vat of tea.
When Beck’s team faced Sheffield Wednesday in the FA Cup in 1991, the pitch closer resembled Crosby Beach due to the amount of sand that had been spread on the grass.
Cambridge Utd Vs Sheffield Wednesday in 1991
Such was the damage caused to the pitch that the Cambridge groundsman, Ian Darler, was given a letter from John Beck to confirm that the state of the playing surface was at the request of the manager and nothing to do with Darler himself.
Beck also instructed the ground staff to put advertising hoardings in each corner of the pitch, emblazoned in club colours with the word ’QUALITY’.
The players were instructed to hit the ball to quality, the ball would drop in the sand and then cross the ball into the box. If they lost the ball, he implemented an early version of Jurgen Klopp’s ‘gegenpressing’, his teams had to work hard off the ball and then implement their game plan again.
These weird and wonderful tactics were as successful as they are remarkable.
In Beck’s second full season he achieved another quarter-final appearance in the FA Cup and a table-topping finish in the Third Division meaning back-to-back promotions.
Beck’s Remarkable success with Cambridge United
Cambridge now found themselves in the Second Division, today’s Championship, and the momentum continued. On the 22nd of December 1991, Beck’s side were top of the league. However, a stuttering second half of the campaign saw them slip to a 5th-place finish.
From Division 4 in January 1990 to October 1992, Cambridge had a two-and-a-half-year period which culminated in them losing the semi-final of the play-offs to get into the inaugural Premier League campaign.
Two major decisions went against them in that season where late disallowed goals at Newcastle and Middlesbrough swung the pendulum from automatic promotion to the Premier League, to the ultimate play-off disappointment.
John Beck - Playoff Champion at the old Wembley Stadium
Leicester City, the team who would go on and achieve the greatest fairy-tale of all 24 years later, ended the Cambridge dream. United drew the home leg 1-1 but a 5-0 annihilation at Filbert Street saw the U’s crash out. They were on the cusp of the first Premier League season.
Cambridge could have featured in the famous simple minds advert and had their moment in the sun. It wasn’t to be and now it feels very unlikely that it will ever happen again.
The next campaign started poorly, and Beck was inexplicably dismissed by October of 1992. He had achieved two successive FA Cup quarter-finals, two successive promotions, narrowly missing out on a third.
Thereafter, Cambridge spiralled down the leagues and by 1995 they were back in the fourth tier of English football.
John Beck had given a sleepy university city a footballing journey to remember.
He gave the supporters hope and took them to within touching distance of the promised land, but it wasn’t to be. They weren’t a team that was bankrolled by a foreign owner, they had an enigmatic manager with some great players across three crazy seasons.
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