'In 1966, English football changed forever. Alf Ramsey led his wingless wonders to the World Cup and Allen Wade sat down to start writing the FA Guide to Training and Coaching, a book that, published the following year, became a Bible to a generations of coaches.

Wade's thinking chimed with that of Ramsey, whose success legitimised an approach that might otherwise have been thought of as overly negative. His name may barely be known today outside professional coaching circles, but Wade was arguably the most influential post-war English football theorist. His book and his courses informed the thinking of the likes of Bobby Houghton, Dave Sexton, Don Howe and Roy Hodgson.

The team, Wade realised, is a system: the actions of one player have a knock-on effect on everybody else. That revelation had profound implications for the zonal-marking system developed in Brazil a decade earlier. In Kyiv, Viktor Maslov was coming to a similar understanding, as was Rinus Michels in Amsterdam. They used their knowledge to formulate quite different styles of football, but this was beginning of European football's great schism: roughly speaking, to the north, zonal-marking and system; to the south, man-marking, a libero and individuality.

Wade knew what he was suggesting wasn't popular, which perhaps explains the passing reference to Schopenhauer in the introduction to the FA Guide. "There are, reputedly, two stages through which worthwhile ideas must pass before they are accepted," he wrote. "In the first stage they are ignored, in the second, ridiculed. Coaching has passed through these stages and is now accepted as a necessary process."

For a long time, players had disdained coaching altogether. Walter Winterbottom, the first England manager, had fought a constant battle to bring tactics and shape-work into match preparation. "You're going to tell Stan Matthews how to play outside-right?" sneered the centre-forward Tommy Lawton on one occasion. "And me how to score goals?" One of the most famous Len Shackleton quips has him, after Winterbottom has explained how he could interchange with Lawton, asking what side of the net he wants him to score in.

Wade was aware that his understanding about the inner workings of the game was too abstract for most players and so he set about devising a series of drills to explain them, playing his ideas into match situations. His FA Guide is a masterpiece of taking a philosophy and generating from it a practical teaching method. He favoured zonal defence and spoke of the importance of diagonal balls and overlapping runs from deep. He prioritised possession (the key difference from Charles Hughes, whose 1981 book The Winning Formula supplanted Wade's as the main English coaching manual) while acknowledging there are times when it is better to sit back, defend, and soak up pressure.

Revolution in Sweden

Houghton, who had been a player with Fulham and Brighton, came through Wade's coaching course with top marks. He became player-manager of Maidstone in 1971 and appointed as player-coach a former school-mate who had also shown promise on his own coaching courses: Roy Hodgson.

He moved to Sweden with Malmo in 1974 and two years later installed Hodgson at Halmstad. There they set about imposing Wade's methods, to the consternation of the Swedish FA which, after failing to make it through the first group stage of the 1970 World Cup, had instituted a technical director, Lars Arnesson, to work alongside the national manager, Georg Aby-Ericson. He envisaged unified playing style across Swedish football, and decided it should feature a German-style libero.

Houghton and Hodgson employed a zonal defence, pressed hard and maintained a high offside line. They counter-attacked, not in the way of the Dutch or Dynamo Kyiv, but with long passes played in behind the opposition defence. According to the Swedish academic Tomas Peterson, "they threaded together a number of principles, which could be used in a series of combinations and compositions, and moulded them into an organic totality — an indivisible project about how to play football. Every moment of the match was theorised, and placed as an object-lesson for training-teaching, and was looked at in a totality."

That, according to Arnesen, "stifles initiative, and turns players into robots", and, as critics dismissed the English style as "dehumanising", there arose a debate about the relative merits of beauty and success. Peterson compares it to listening to Charlie Parker after Glenn Miller or viewing Picasso after classical landscapes: "The change does not just lie in the aesthetic assimilation," he wrote. "The actual organisation of art and music happens on a more advanced level." Naivety is gone, and there is a second order of complexity. Football began to be played with a knowledge of its inner workings.

"What Bobby [Houghton, who was working at Malmo] and myself introduced to Sweden was not so much 'English football', the long-ball game and so on, than a different style of defending," Hodgson told The Blizzard. "Instead of playing with a team that was very spread out from one end of the field to the other, with a libero who stays in his penalty area and a centre-forward who never tracks back, we set up a system of zonal defence, a back four, people pushing up and, of course, getting the ball forward into the final area much more quickly.

"Interestingly, in my first year at Halmstad, we not only won the league, but scored 57 goals in 26 games. I don't think this has been achieved since. And the Swedes didn't like the idea that their game was dominated by two English guys. Bobby had won it in 1974 and 1975, I won it in 1976, he won it in 1977, I won it in 1979. It was obviously not with a 'Swedish style' and it's only when [Sven-Goran] Eriksson appeared in the 1980s with Gothenburg that, all of a sudden, it was possible to talk of a 'Swedish style'. In actual fact, I don't know what Eriksson did to 'Swedify' the game, except copying everything we'd done."

Eriksson was an anglophile and studied briefly under Bobby Robson at Ipswich before taking the Gothenburg job. After two second-placed finishes, he won the league, cup and Uefa Cup in 1982, settling the debate for the three decades that followed. He too, in those days at least, was obsessed by shape. "Svennis would place us like chess pieces on the training pitch," the midfielder Glenn Schiller said.

"'You stand here, you go there,' and so on … The biggest problem was fitting all the pieces together and getting them to move in harmony. The defensive part was the key to it all. When we were attacking there was a fair amount of freedom to express ourselves, but we had to defend from strict, zonal starting positions."

Shape, shape, shape

Hodgson has clearly evolved as his career has taken him through Scandinavia, Italy and Switzerland, but the basic principles remain the same. "If you're going to play for him you've got to put a shift in and perform, work to a system and be tight defensively," the Fulham midfielder Simon Davies said after his side had beaten a technically more accomplished Shakhtar Donetsk in the Uefa Cup. "What you get after that is a bonus. We work on it every day. Every day in training is geared towards team shape."

That can, Davies admitted, be dull, and the suspicion is that one of the reasons Hodgson's time at Liverpool was so disappointing is that bigger names were reluctant to knuckle down to repetitive work. Davies admitted it took a little while for Fulham's players to be converted, before the results convinced them. Significantly, Hodgson continues to follow the Wade principle of practical game situations. "He gets the 11 that he wants on a Saturday and he drills everything in that he wants," Davies said. "We've got the ball — it's never unopposed. It's certain drills defensive, certain drills attacking, and we work very hard at it. There's no diagrams, it's just all on the pitch."

There is something hypnotic about watching a Hodgson side at its best, as for instance, in West Bromwich's victory over Chelsea last year. When out of possession, the back four stays perfectly in line, moving forward and back as though one unit, the midfield four (or five) rippling according to where the ball was, one advancing, the other three (or four) forming the blanket of cover behind, maintaining a gap of no more than 15 yards, often less, to the defensive line.

That's the strength the 4‑4‑2 (or perhaps more accurately, 4‑4‑1‑1) still has. It feels basic, unsophisticated even, but it is tough and resilient. It's what English football always reaches for in time of crisis, a tactical chicken soup for players in need of something familiar and comforting. It won't produce thrilling or proactive football, but it's probably the best chance England have in the Euros.

The inquest as to why the crisis has developed can wait; after a century of decline, we can probably hold off another three weeks.

There were signs in Saturday's 1-0 win over Belgium that the Hodgson doctrine is being adopted. He notably singled out Steven Gerrard for praise afterwards. He had played well, and was as worthy of the man of the match award as anybody, but as Hodgson spoke of "concentration and determination" it was easy to imagine a specific message being relayed to a player who has so often in the past lacked tactical discipline.

For all their possession — 59% — Belgium only really came close when Guillaume Gillet clipped the outside of a post with a 25-yard half-volley; if England can restrict opponents to pot shots from their right-back during the Euros, they will have done an excellent job.

Belgium, it should be acknowledged, for all their technical excellence, struggled throughout qualifying to turn possession into chances. England restricted them, but Belgium have made a habit of restricting themselves. Other sides will provide England with a far stiffer examination, but they did a reasonable job of stifling Spain in Fabio Capello's second last game as manager.

It is legitimate to ask why England need to play a containing game but at least there seems to be a recognition that this is their best approach. For once a sense of realism reigns and, while it does, Hodgson's prosaic 4‑4‑2, simple, unfussy and solid, is its logical tactical manifestation.