The Question: How do Fulham do it?

There is something endearingly old-fashioned about Fulham, about their ground, about their manager, even about the way they set about winning European ties. Which is not to decry their achievements; rather it is to acknowledge that wherever the tides of tactical evolution take football, certain virtues remain constant.

Watching Fulham beat Shakhtar Donetsk at Craven Cottage earlier this season, you could have been watching almost any game between an English side and an eastern European team from the 70s or 80s, as pluck and organisation eventually overcame technically superior opponents. It was a similar story in their 0-0 draw with Hamburg last week, methodical patient obduracy eventually breaking the will of opponents who, if football were merely a test of skill, would surely have won quite comfortably. Yes, Mark Schwarzer made a couple of useful late saves, but Fulham were never subjected to the sort of onslaught to which, for instance, they subjected Juventus.

Had Bobby Zamora been fully fit, they might even have nicked the away goal they'd managed in Donetsk, Turin and Wolfsburg. In the tale of them training on the hard shoulder after being caught in a traffic jam, there even seemed a nod to Clough-like eccentricity, he having made Peter Shilton train on a Madrid roundabout before the 1980 European Cup final. It's the sort of story that, should Fulham reach the final, will echo through the ages, a quirk of management that will be deemed to have drawn the squad together, as perhaps it did.

As Phil Brown, Roy Keane and others – perhaps even Clough in his later years – have discovered, team-building eccentricity is not an easy trick to pull off, for it requires both a fine judgment of the mood of the squad and that the squad should have absolute faith in their manager. If not, the manager just looks rather silly and the players feel resentful. It's hard not to be reminded of Steve Archibald's comment that team spirit is an illusion brought on by victory when considering the difference in reaction of Hull's players to having their half-time team-talk on the pitch at Eastlands, and Fulham's to running up and down the side of an autobahn.

Hodgson's method

That Fulham's players responded positively, seem even to have regarded it as rather a laugh, is evidence of the esteem in which they hold Hodgson. Given the job he has done, though, that is natural. The narrative arc of his time at Fulham feels like the plot of some unpublished Michael Hardcastle novel, perhaps called something like "Manager", in which one of the kids brings in a friend of his dad who looks a bit like an owl and has done something ill-defined abroad for 30 years. There is widespread suspicion, but gradually the team adapts to his methods, avoid relegation in thrilling circumstances, and two seasons later find themselves on the brink of a European final. Actually, that's pretty much how it sounds when Simon Davies describes it as well. "We're two and a half years down the line now, so we're all converted," he said, hinting that there were doubts about Hodgson's methods at first.

So what is it that Fulham do? The easy answer is that they keep their shape, and certainly that was in evidence against Hamburg, who passed and passed and passed and found navy shirts thwarting their progress wherever they went (a more complete analysis of that game is given here on the excellent zonalmarking website).

But why? Everybody knows that teams who keep their shape are harder to break down; why and how are Fulham better at doing it than other sides? There is, sadly, no easy solution; it's all down to hard work. "We work on it every day," said Davies. "Every day in training is geared towards team shape. I've been working with the manager three seasons now and every day is team shape, and it shows."

A faint smile suggests the work isn't necessarily particularly interesting. "We have a little laugh about it now and again," Davies said, "but when he [Hodgson] came in we were fighting relegation and now we're in the Europa League so you take it. 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."

So what is it exactly that they work on? "I don't want to give any secrets away," Davies said, "but he gets the 11 that he wants and he drills everything in that he wants. 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. We do a lot of work after every game on analysis, sorting the bad things out, sorting the good things out. It's nice to know what you work hard on works so well. It's just working on little things now and hoping we can still get better."

Often those who work hardest in such a system go unnoticed, as the likes of Stephane Guivarc'h have found. He was derided by outsiders for his finishing at the 1998 World Cup, but revered by those within the France squad for his work-rate and his intelligent running. According to Davies, Zamora suffered a similar disregard last season, before some high-profile and spectacular goals this season won him the acclaim he deserves.

"Last year playing with him you could see what he brought to the team but only maybe playing could you appreciate that," he said. "The fans obviously look at and judge strikers by goals, and last year he didn't get his fair share, but this year he's absolutely on fire. He shoots all the time and they're going in at the minute. Confidence makes a massive difference.

"Everyone last year was talking about Emile Heskey and what he brings to the team. It was the same with us last year, with [Zamora's] work rate and bringing the midfielders into the game all the time. When you don't have somebody like that you really miss him, and this year he's added goals to it and he's looking a top player. It's just a shame people sometimes overlook that there are other things you look for in a striker than goals."

Second-order complexity

Hodgson's philosophy has remained more or less unchanged since he joined Maidstone as Bobby Houghton's assistant coach in 1971. There they implemented the ideas of Allen Wade, the modernising technical director of the FA, who, in a quite literal way, rewrote the coaching manual. Wade saw no point in drills that weren't specifically related to game play, and so formulated a whole theory of coaching based on specific match situations.

Houghton and Hodgson moved to Sweden, Houghton at Malmo and Hodgson at Halmstad, and it was there that Wade's ideas took root, as Sweden was divided between the modern, English method – which favoured pressing, zonal marking and counter-attacking with direct passes – and the more traditional German school with a libero and man-marking.

As the Swedish academic Tomas Peterson put it, "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."

Traditionalists, including Lars Arnesson, who had been appointed as a de facto technical director to work alongside Sweden's national manager, called the English approach "dehumanising" and said it turned players into "robots", but it was undeniably effective. They won five out of six league titles between them, while Houghton took Malmo to the 1979 European Cup final, where they were narrowly beaten by Clough's Nottingham Forest. More than that, they changed the mindset of Swedish coaching, inspiring, among others, Tord Grip and Sven-Goran Eriksson.

The football their sides produced may not have been as obviously aesthetically pleasing as what had gone before, but 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, as other cultural modes had since the dawn of modernism, began to work with an overt knowledge of its workings.

The second leg

The early Swedish critics who condemned the sterility of some of the English school may have had a point. Certainly when two Wadian 4-4-2s meet – as they did in Hamburg last Thursday – the result can be unspectacular, something perhaps exaggerated by the use of inside-out wingers. Their possibilities may be thrilling from an attacking point of view , but when both sides use them cautiously – Davies and Damien Duff for Fulham, Piotr Trochowski and Jonathan Pitroipa for Hamburg – with an absence of attacking full-backs the effect can be stifling. Part of the game-plan of both sides is to compress the effective playing area vertically by playing in three compact bands; inside-out wingers also compress it horizontally, by constantly coming inside.

In fact, if there is a criticism of Fulham this season that it is not explicable by the slenderness of their squad, it is that in defensive mode they seem to struggle to pose any sort of threat. Of the last 12 games in which they've kept clean sheets, seven have finished 0-0, and in only one – against Manchester United — have Fulham scored more than once. In the absence of an away goal for the first time in a knockout European this season, that must be a concern (which is one of the reasons the away goals rule is such an excrescence).

Given the sacking of Bruno Labbadia after Sunday's 5-1 defeat to Hoffenheim and his replacement with Ricardo Moniz, once a skills coach at Tottenham, it is difficult to know how Hamburg will line up on Thursday, although given Labbadia's apparent unpopularity they will presumably be mentally buoyed, but we can be sure that Hodgson will be sticking to the familiar programme, remaining loyal to a mode of play that has served him well for almost four decades.