On Sunday 2 February 1969, 32 teams from two of Europe’s proudest leagues played 1,440 minutes of football and produced just 17 goals between them

Our first priority is a clean sheet – prima, non prenderlo – is the First Commandment of catenaccio. While the tactical system made famous by Italian clubs in the 1960s was a lot more complex than simply massed defence with a libero parked behind, not conceding goals was very much the key aim at the core of its dark and cynical heart.

The famous Italian journalist Gianni Brera mused that the perfect game of football would finish 0-0 and his reasoning was thus: goals were predominantly a result of errors during a passage of play, thus a game devoid of goals was by association a game devoid of telling mistakes. Errors would still occur in scoreless games of course, but a 0-0 result suggests that none of those mistakes was ultimately significant enough to lead to a goal and a shift in the match outcome.

Brera’s comments are still referenced to this day as if they had been a declaration of all-out war on the art of goalscoring. They weren’t - Brera was simply projecting ahead to what the outcome could be if defensive application of catenaccio-orientated systems continued to improve and mature. His thinking was influenced, among other things, by his interest in baseball, a sport where a “shut-out” refers to a single pitcher preventing the opposing team from scoring a run in a complete nine innings match – a much-prized outcome.

Still, it was quite a culture clash between football romantics yearning for entertainment and football theorists such as Brera sketching out a vision of a technically pure yet potentially deathly future. The fewer goals scored – or allowed to be scored – the closer to perfect a game it would become; the closer to a perfect game it became, the more diminished it would be as a source of entertainment.

So, depending on which side of the fence you are on, when did Italy come closest to achieving the most perfect/terrible round of matches in Serie A? Here are the scores from Sunday 2 February 1969:

Fiorentina 0-0 Roma

Internazionale 1-0 Lanerossi Vicenza

Juventus 1-0 Atalanta

Palermo 0-0 Cagliari

Pisa 1-1 Torino

Sampdoria 1-1 Milan

Varese 1-1 Bologna

Verona 1-0 Napoli

Hate the boredom but respect the binary. Those nine goals scored in eight fixtures made this round the only one in Serie A’s long history that failed to muster a goal aggregate in double figures. And of those nine goals, one was a penalty and another an own goal.

While the Spanish game never took undiluted catenaccio to its heart, its clubs did envy the results the system produced in Italy and this influenced a shift in the Spanish top flight towards a more defensive model. La Liga’s equivalent perfect/terrible championship round produced the following set of results:

Barcelona 4-0 Granada

Las Palmas 1-0 Pontevedra

Sabadell 0-0 Real Madrid

Valencia 0-0 Malaga

Atlético Madrid 1-0 Real Zaragoza

Real Sociedad 1-0 Elche

Cordoba 0-0 Deportivo de La Coruña

Athletic Bilbao 1-0 Espanyol

Barcelona’s goal glut against Granada almost spoils the effect, with the Catalans singlehandedly scoring the same number as the other 15 La Liga sides put together. And the date of this championship round? Also Sunday 2 February 1969, a date when 32 teams from two of Europe’s richest and most watched leagues amassed just 17 goals between them; only one of those clubs finding – or being allowed to find, if you prefer – the back of the net on more than one occasion.

Depending on your perspective, this very specific date in football history was the moment when the “strategy of the nil” was elevated to its highest level of tactical and organisational efficiency/represented a nadir for the sport and an abominable indictment of the poverty of attacking ambition prevalent in the Latin European game. Delete as appropriate.

If Italian and Spanish football of that era was analogous to a particularly grim and attritional game of chess, English football resembled something more akin to the knockabout randomness of a game of Snakes and Ladders. The equivalent English First Division round of fixtures played in early February of 1969 produced 25 goals from 11 fixtures – almost a deluge. The English game was perhaps less ordered than its Latin equivalents, less tactically disciplined for sure, but probably on balance quite a lot more of a pleasure to live with every week.

• This article appeared first on Beyond The Last Man

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