The back three clearly made a huge difference, as did Antonio Conte’s man-management, but when Eden Hazard was asked in March what the biggest difference was between Chelsea this season and Chelsea last, he spoke of “automisation”.

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Conte is determined the shape should be right, and that means long hours on the training pitch, often playing against no opposition. So central is shadow play to Conte’s method that when Italy practised it at the Euro 2016, all but the smallest core of coaching staff were sent away so details of precisely what he was doing would not leak out.

Arrigo Sacchi was another devotee of shadow play and when he introduced the idea at Milan, the response was bewilderment. “On match days, in the morning,” Sacchi said, “we had a special training session. [The Real Madrid striker Emilio] Butragueño told me that, before the [1989 European Cup] semi-final, they sent a scout to watch our session. The scout reported back: ‘They played a game with a full 11 on a full-sized pitch against nobody and without the ball!’ We would line up in our formation, I would tell players where the imaginary ball was and the players had to move accordingly, passing the imaginary ball and moving like clockwork around the pitch, based upon the players’ reactions.”

Yet the idea long pre-dates Sacchi. Conte’s Chelsea have become the first side to win the league title using a back three as their default formation since Everton in 1962-63, and they have become adept at playing that system by using another English innovation of the early sixties, one developed by the Burnley, Sunderland and Sheffield Wednesday manager Alan Brown.

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Born in Corbridge in Northumberland, Brown soon demonstrated an ascetic streak. Aged 16, he ran 17 miles along the Tyne into Newcastle, rested for a few minutes and then ran back, part of an effort to improve his fitness as he prepared for life as a professional footballer. As a centre-half for Huddersfield, Burnley and Notts County, he developed a reputation for toughness and honesty.

Brown also set up a restaurant in Burnley as his playing career was coming to an end and worked briefly as a policeman before being named the Burnely manager in 1954. There he established a strong youth set-up, and oversaw the development of a training complex on the edge of town, helping with much of the physical work himself, and insisting his players also did their share.

“You lived in fear of him but there was no need to be because he was a really genuine, nice guy,” said Jimmy Nelson, a left-back who played for him at Sunderland. “He kept a very strict ship. We’d go down to Seaburn beach and we’d be training in skins in January – I don’t think bibs had been invented then. He’d have us training till the water lapped in over our ankles. We had individual baths then – slipper baths we called them – and you’d end up two of you sharing one of them because nobody wanted to wait. We’d all race back to the ground and get straight in just to thaw out.”

Brown insisted his players dress smartly and keep their hair short. He broke a family holiday in Bude in Cornwall to drive through the night to intercept Brian Clough and persuade him to sign from Middlesbrough before he set off on a cruise from Southampton. He became not just Clough’s manager but his mentor. He was also an influence on Lawrie McMenemy, Don Revie and Malcolm Allison.

Brown never stopped thinking up new methods of training. One summer, he walked the Pennine Way alone. When he returned, he’d filled a series of notebooks with plans for free-kick and corner routines. Not all his ideas were successful – Nelson remembers he once had his players practice heading with golf-balls, insisting it wouldn’t hurt if their technique was right – but his book Team Coach makes clear what an innovative thinker he was, how far ahead he was of the game.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eden Hazard spoke in March of how ‘automisation’ was the biggest difference Conte had made to Chelsea since arriving at the club last summer and following a season of turmoil for the London club. Photograph: Catherine Ivill - AMA/Getty Images

Long before Pep Guardiola at Barcelona, he was an advocate of what are now known as rondos (a pig-in-the-middle game passing the ball past defenders in a circle) as a way of improving the maintenance of possession. Long before they were common Brown insisted on warm-ups, explaining how they could be conducted in the dressing room if it were impossible to use the pitch. A rhyme, he said, could be chanted during warm-ups to maintain rhythm and help morale: “When I was a laddie I lived with me Grannie and many a hiding me Grannie gae me, but noo am a mannie, I hammer me Grannie – it serves her right for hammering me.” (variants, presumably, were available for those uncomfortable with north-eastern dialect).

Brown also developed an early, slightly less complex form of what Guardiola calls juego de posición. Imagining a team playing 4-2-4, he paired up the left-winger with the right-sided centre-back, the left-sided centre-forward with the right-back and vice-versa. When one of those players had the ball, he encouraged his partner to move into midfield to offer an option for a short pass, his place then being taken by the nearest player to him in the same line, whose own place would then be taken by one of the two midfielders, creating a triangular flow of movement that would disrupt opposing marking systems while always maintaining that basic 4-2-4 shape.

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A scheme like that, though, could only work if players were already comfortable in their shape – which is where shadow play comes in.

Unlike Sacchi, Brown would use a ball, but the principle is the same – playing against nobody to get the movement and the shape right. With shadow play, he said, players “become more imaginative on the ball… they become more selective in their passing certainly, and keener in perception and the reading of their colleagues’ movements.”

The points was not for them to become robotic but to have a level of automatisation, to use Hazard’s term, that permitted improvisation without being disruptive to the overall shape. Brown did not want puppets, always seeking direction from the bench. “The players themselves can get on and run the show,” he explained, “and, by their own decisions in movement on the field can get a response from the rest of the team.”

It’s an idea more than 50 years old but as Chelsea’s success shows it’s still extremely relevant today.