Englishman was not an obvious candidate to lead them but Swedes pushed Nottingham Forest all the way in 1979
E
arly in the 1979 European Cup final, Kenny Burns misjudged a long ball and ended up lobbing it up in the air for Jan-Olov Kindvall. He, in turn, attempted to knock the dropping ball over Peter Shilton but the goalkeeper was not as close as he had perhaps anticipated and Shilton ended up catching it simply. The chance was gone and, with it, Malmö’s hopes of beating Nottingham Forest.
“I had quite a good chance to score and then they were the better team,” says Kindvall. “But maybe if we had got the first goal, maybe we had a chance. We were very good when we didn’t have the ball ourselves. We had good organisation in the defence. And Forest were very good without the ball as well. It was more difficult for us to play against a team who were more like our team. We played the English way.”
That was because Malmö had an English manager in Bob Houghton, who was in the process of revolutionising Swedish football. Houghton had been on the books at Fulham and Brighton without making an appearance for them when, at 22, he joined Hastings United as player-manager. He moved on to Maidstone, where his assistant was Roy Hodgson, before becoming assistant to Bobby Robson at Ipswich. Houghton had been one of the keenest students on the coaching course established by the Football Association’s technical director, Allen Wade, which sought to break down football into its component parts, focusing training on match situations. Like many who had studied under Wade, Houghton became an advocate for a back four, zonal marking and a direct approach.
