The surprise package in the second half of Premier League season was the only side who switched to a back three on a permanent basis.

Cruijff was perhaps the most original thinker in football’s history, but most of his thinking was about attack. He liked to say that he didn’t mind conceding three goals, as long as Barça scored five. Well, Guardiola also wanted to score five, but he minded conceding even one. If Barcelona is a cathedral, Guardiola has added the buttresses. In Barça’s first 28 league games this season, they have let in only 22 goals. Here are some of “Pep”’s innovations, or the secrets of FC Barcelona:

Jonathan Wilson, tactics extraodinaire:

For years that style was almost a default in the English game: one attacking wide midfielder covered for by a narrower, more defensive player on the other flank. Even as late as 1999-00, Sunderland finished seventh in the Premier League with Nicky Summerbee as a bona fide winger on the right, balanced by Stefan Schwarz tucking in on the left and Michael Gray overlapping from left-back. But how to you denote it? As a 4-3-3? As a 4-4-2? It's both and neither, somewhere in between.

"The Argentinian is called El Loco for his attention to detail but he has built the most exciting Athletic Bilbao team for decades."

It would be misleading to paint the result [Brazil beating Spain in the U20 World Cup] as a great injustice, although Spain certainly had the better of it, but equally it would be negligent not to report just how superior, how much more sophisticated, Spain seemed. Brazil may have won the battle but the suspicion is that if these sides were to meet again, all grown up, at the 2018 World Cup, Spain would prevail; individuals are unreliable; a team system far less so. The full-backs Hugo Mallo and Carles Planas were neat and composed. Isco, at the front of midfield, distributed superbly. Chelsea's Oriol Romeu was imposing yet skilful in front of the back four. Rodrigo of Bolton was intelligent in his movement and scored a header with the stumbling elan of Kevin Davies. The quality of Sergio Canales, used on the right, is well known.

One last thing to note is that Barcelona do not put any players on the goal line at either of the goal posts. This is considered HERESY in British football but Barcelona do it all the time with success. The reason they dont put any players on the goal line is because it would be very difficult to create an offside trap after the initial ball is cleared. This was the flaw in Mexico’s implementation of zonal marking, the player on the far post kept playing people onside as he was late to push up.

Kenny Dalglish's Liverpool and Steve Bruce's Sunderland have both made eloquent recent cases for the old ploy of three centre-backs and a diamond formation.

At the World Cup, only Spain – who have had a stable side for three years and whose players are drawn largely from two clubs and so have an understanding – and Chile – who were coached by the idiosyncratic and brilliant Marcelo Bielsa – were genuinely proactive and, as Arrigo Sacchi said, it is proactivity that makes for true greatness. Even Germany, for all the goals they scored, were essentially reactive, a very good counterattacking team. Most disappointing were the sides with a great tradition of proactive football, such as Brazil and the Netherlands, who relied on a solid base and hoped individuals could turn the game their way.

Here Anthony, who was present as Watford met Leicester City in the Championship at the weekend, analyses the game and brings us a tactical breakdown of the match.

He is not one of the game's theoreticians, that's true. He is not a Viktor Maslov, a Rinus Michels or an Arrigo Sacchi – but so what? He does what he does. He is probably a better motivator than he is a tactician, just as Rafael Benítez is a better tactician than he is a motivator. But that doesn't mean Redknapp is clueless, even if it at times it suits him to set himself up as the bluff English alternative to all the sophisticated foreign mumbo jumbo, a line that always plays well with the media he courts so superbly.

Jurgen Klopp, sitting on the proverbial throne placed on the zenith of Die Südtribüne, has earned his position of Dortmund royalty this season.

His tenderfoot squad has exceeded expectations, and after thirteen games lead the ‘World’s Best League™’ by seven points. The path to seniority in the Bundesliga has not been through attritional, grinding football, but with an expansive and unrepressed style.

The numbers are impressive, they’ve scored the most (31), five more than any other team in the division and have conceded the least (8), six less than their competitors. But we don’t do things by numbers here (apart from painting, naturally), and this startling improvement surely needs to be legitimised through analysis.

When 3-5-2 began as a tactic in the 80s, pioneered variously by Carlos Bilardo with Argentina, Sepp Piontek with Denmark and Ciro Blazevic with Dinamo Zagreb, it was essentially an attacking tool. Fielding three centre-backs seemed to have become outmoded with the emergence of lone striker systems, but the system has evolved and re-emerged, only this time it has a distinctly defensive aspect. Against Manchester United at Old Trafford, Rangers used the formation so successfully they conceded just 12 attempts, only three of which were on target. A similar defensive wall will face United at Ibrox on Wednesday.

This book examines match strategies for creating goal scoring opportunities out of the following systems of play: 4-4-2, 4-3-3, 3-5-2, 4-3-1-2, 4-5-1. For each system, the author discusses the strategy, tactics, system and schemes of play as well as the technical, tactical and physical characteristics of the players who use the system. Several situational attacking schemes are also presented, using clear diagrams and detailed descriptions.

Football is a holistic game. Advance a player here, and you must retreat a player there. Give one player more attacking responsibility, and you must give another increased defensive duties. As three at the back has become outmoded as a balanced or attacking formation – though not as a defensive formation – by the boom in lone-striker systems, coaches have had to address the problem of how to incorporate attacking full-backs without the loss of defensive cover.

Wilson takes ten key England fixtures - from defeat in Madrid in 1929; to Steve McLaren's evening to forget at Wembley in 2007 - and hacks back through the myth, conjecture and personal recollections, to get at the games themselves, and explore how what actually happened on the pitch shaped the future of the English game. Bursting with insight and critical detail, yet imbued with a wry affection, this is a history of England like no other before.

The graphs, diagrams and match reports on Zonal Marking are pored over by thousands of football fans the world over and have helped push tactical analysis towards the centre of mainstream football debate in the United Kingdom. Set up in January this year, the phenomenally successful website received an average of 210,000 visitors per week during the World Cup and counts tactical mastermind Jonathan Wilson among its many admirers.

Variously believed to be the work of either a particularly public-spirited professional coach or a crack team of disaffected former Opta employees, the force behind ZM is in fact one man: Michael Cox. He very kindly agreed to grant his first ever interview to Football Further.

The Premier League season is less than two weeks old, but a look at how the top sides lined up in their opening matches provides an interesting indication of how they plan to approach the season from a tactical perspective.

Arsenal’s effective wing play, Blackpool’s adventure, two holding midfelders, and the joys of Chamakh and Rosicky.

Surprisingly, Hodgson opted to change nothing at half-time – Liverpool had rallied in the five minutes before the break, maybe convincing their manager to have faith in the 4-4-2. If Hodgson remains committed to that system long-term, then we must have patience with him, and understand that a change in formation rarely has instant results. But in the sole context of this game, Liverpool needed something different.

Tactical notes from the first weekend of the Premier League season.

This has been a decade of broadly attacking football, at least at the highest level, but at the start of 2010-11 the game stands at a crossroads. Internazionale's triumph in the Champions League, the predominance of reactive football at the World Cup and the growing realisation that nobody can match Spain/Barcelona at their brand of possession football, though, might mean a turn into defensiveness.

International competitions are always fascinating tactically if anything for the inflexibility they confront managers with. Arrigo Sacchi, in charge of the Italy side who reached the final of World Cup ’94, stated it was “impossible” for a national manager to drill the same understanding that club level coaches are afforded due to the lack of day-to-day availability of personnel. The sporadic amount of time they have with players means it can be difficult for coaches to develop plans so they usually are forced to stick with philosophies they think are correct – and that in turn highlights the common trends in the thinking of modern coaches. And certainly, what has become oblivious from the recent World Cup in South Africa and indeed club football for the past few years is that the use of two holding midfielders in front of the back four is become crucial in the modern game.

Evolution never stops. As the World Cup showed, 4‑2‑3‑1 has come to replace 4‑4‑2 as the universal default (18 of the 32 teams played some form of 4‑2‑3‑1 at some stage, with another three fielding a 4‑4‑2 that perhaps should have become 4‑2‑3‑1) so the system at the very highest level has already begun to mutate. Spain, by the end of the World Cup, had followed what Barcelona did at times last season, what Arsenal seemed to be reaching towards, and set up in a 4‑2‑1‑3.

"At the dawn of the tournament Football Further posed ten tactical questions that the World Cup would answer. Three days after Spain’s tense extra-time victory over the Netherlands in the final, the answers to those questions reflect a tournament in which defensive rigour was overwhelmingly de riguer and tactical innovation conspicious by its rarity."

"... passing triangles are only important for a side looking to dominate possession. For a side looking to disrupt that, 4-4-2 can be extremely effective – the famous "two banks of four" that for a long time seemed to be such a feature of any English team playing an away game in European competition. Fulham showed last season how effective the style can still be. Sit the midfield line deep on the back four so there is minimal space between the lines for attacking midfielders or deep-lying forwards to exploit, and it becomes very hard to penetrate. It doesn't matter how many triangles you create if you never get the ball closer than 35 yards from the opposition goal."

Two issues, however, do seem to have struck a common denominator with those critics of Del Bosque's tactical plan for the opening group game in Durban.

The first points to the redundancy of Spain's doble pivote of Xabi Alonso and Sergio Busquets when facing against sides such as Switzerland and Honduras who will display a reserved game plan.

The second gripe concerns the presence of llegada, or breaking into the box, arriving as a surprise element for second balls and generally just shooting! Xabi Alonso can launch thunderbolts from distance but he tends to do so only when the play has stalled to a static stage with the opposition defence already amassed on the edge of its 18-yard box. What is needed to punctuate Spain's neat mastication of passes when approaching the final third is a dynamic presence, the arrival of a midfielder who will break the lines and carry the ball beyond the defensive barriers before either culminating or else setting up another attacker.

Jonathan Wilson: Will attacking full-backs win the competition? http://bit.ly/cJmkTB #WorldCup
– Guardian sport (guardian_sport) http://twitter.com/guardian_sport/statuses/16375346348

NEW ON ZM: Mexico's fluid shape makes them dark horses http://bit.ly/dmClM6
– Zonal Marking (Zonal_Marking) http://twitter.com/Zonal_Marking/statuses/14825290012

Friendly internationals are regularly derided as meaningless spectacles with no real benefit other than gate receipts for the national football association. That said, England's match against Egypt at Wembley this coming Wednesday evening is primarily intended to give England experience in playing against an African nation, ahead of their match with Algeria in this summer's World Cup.

Wilson points out that it also provides the opportunity for England to play against a team that line up using 3-5-2, a formation that has largely fallen out of favour in recent years back to the perennial 4-4-2 and the 4-5-1/4-3-3 variant that is currently in vogue. In an article similar to a section of his 'Inverting the Pyramid' book, he draws on the work of Brazilian coach Nelsinho Baptista that explores how the 4-2-3-1 formation currently employed by Capello might nullify Egypt's threat.

"From the danger of highlights to celebrity undermining the team, that box in your living room could be shaping the sport's future."

"The end of the goal poacher and the rebirth of the libero are two trends we are likely to see during the next 10 years."

The always-excellent Jonathan Wilson on the development of tactics, and their symmetry - or lack of it: "England's lack of a natural left-winger is often seen to be their weakness, but Fabio Capello has turned it into an advantage."