The Evolution of the Right Wing Role

No more so is the disjunction between football in theory and football in practice expressed than in the history of wing play.

The typical image of a winger is the 'clean set of heels'; a twisting, turning blur whose frenetic speed and dribbling leave a trail of split defences, exhausted full-backs and goals in their wake.

Yet the theoretical underpinnings of wing play show us that it has always been a delicate balancing act, a game of push and pull where the precise degree to which a winger has licence to roam or to come inside has to be carefully calibrated according to the needs of the rest of the team.

The need to create width, to build outward in order to build upward, is essential in team sports (perhaps with the exception of curling), and wide players have unsurprisingly been a part of football's tool kit since its formal inception.

The prevalence of directionless dribbling in the early days of codified football saw teams playing six or seven forwards up top at any given time, and it was not uncommon for there to be two wide players on any given flank.

But even as football was taking its first steps there were those who saw the possibility for tactical innovation on the touchline - Jonathan Wilson recalls in Inverting the Pyramid that Old Etonians were overcome by Blackburn Olympic in the 1883 FA Cup final through Olympians 'hitting long sweeping passes from wing to wing' rather than using wingers as ultra-direct dribblers - and how the profile of a right winger has changed from the right-footed creator Stanley Matthews to the left-footed goalscoring assassin Mo Salah has much to do with football's tactical development.

We are indebted to Huddersfield and Arsenal's Herbert Chapman and his 'W-M' formation (effectively a 3-2-2-3) for providing us with the exoskeleton of the modern game and the basis for the majority of modern tactical roles, and the winger is no different.

Watching an Arjen Robben or Riyad Mahrez over the last few years, it's difficult to imagine what the position would look like if right wingers were not encouraged to occasionally break away from the touchline, but Chapman's mastery of the push and pull of football tactics opened up a new zone for wingers to attack.

Brace yourselves because this part is a little convoluted - Chapman had decided that the 2-3-5 which ruled English football required a 'third-back', which would be provided by the midfield 'centre-half', which meant that the two 'inside-forwards' of the five man attack had to be moved deeper to atone for the subsequent gap created in midfield, which then meant that the wingers naturally had to provide some creativity and penetration in central areas that was now missing... and breathe!

The consequence of Chapman's tactical Sudoku was twofold - for him, what followed was fairly intuitive - his right winger Joe Hulme was encouraged to cut inside to either find a teammate or shoot, with his goal tally as a result stacking up with those of his illustrious colleagues on the right wing in Tom Finney and Matthews.

For English football, which has a long history of looking with interest at tactical innovation, and then taking the worst possible lessons from it, the subsequent ubiquity of the W-M led to the conclusion that traditional wing play, which had been transformed into something more subtle and therefore more effective under Chapman, was the key to its success.

Wilson chooses to characterise England's 6-3 loss to Hungary at Wembley as a moment where the fluidity of the Hungarian wide men doomed the English 'reliance on wingers to provide the artistry' to irrelevance, and what emerged from the detritus of the W-M was a remarkable range of ways to interpret the role of a right-winger.

In many ways, Garrincha typified the individualistic 'artistry' of a Finney or Matthews, with his ability to manipulate the ball at speed best suited to the classic profile of the 'outside-right' who tormented the full-back.

But though Garrincha liked to play the role of the uncontainable maverick, in the 1958 World Cup Brazil coach Vicente Feola tacitly acknowledged that this individual brilliance which disrupted the balance of his squad would not be enough to win games on its own. And so the game of push and pull began again, with future World Cup winning manager Mário Zagallo's own attacking abilities mitigated as he was instructed to track back on the left.

At a similar point, a sea change was happening in European football, with early experiments in positional fluidity. The USSR and the aforementioned Hungary particularly relevant examples, giving way to one of football's most famous studies in interchangeability.

Wilson notes that under Rinus Michels, the architect of Total Football, Ajax's right winger Sjaak Swart or Johnny Rep would be expected to participate in the defensive phases of the game, swapping responsibilities with the right midfielder or right-back when space opened up. Here, and with Michels' Holland side, the game of push and pull was played out not just in the tactics room but on the pitch.

This isn't to say that more direct right-wingers were drowned in the sea of orange which proclaimed the coming of 'Total Football' - Brazil's own decidedly space age side which blew away the 1970 World Cup accommodated Jairzinho through the defensive efforts of wing-back Carlos Alberto.

Alf Ramsey's English 'wingless wonders' had even won the 1966 World Cup in that period without conventional wide men whatsoever, and there has never quite been an easy way to define the role in the sense that you might define a number 10 or box-to-box midfielder.

Like any true tricky winger the role itself has moved not just forwards but sideways and backwards, with Luis Figo and David Beckham - two right wingers who directly preceded the role's current iteration - throwing it back to Stanley Matthews in their accomplished mastery of the fundamentals of crossing and dribbling.

Right wingers nowadays are indeed closer to the inside forwards that Chapman valued, pushed further inwards by the Golden Era of wing-backs - although 'Mo Salah, Mo Salah, running down the half-spaces' doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Yet despite this, you would struggle to name one 'typical' right winger at the moment - they might be a rapid right-footed like Serge Gnabry or Jadon Sancho, who use their superb close control to go round the outside of the full-back, or a left-footer like Salah, Mahrez or Arjen 'Don't Let Him Cut Inside' Robben - who can unerringly shift the ball onto their stronger foot in dangerous situations.

The winger is football's blank canvas, an unrefined cluster of energy and threat that can be moulded to the needs of any system. In a position constantly swept up in the tides of tactical innovation, the form of the 'next' Mo Salah is as unpredictable as the man himself.