Do you know "Who were the first team to use a Christmas tree formation?"  "Surely Terry Venables wasn't the first?"
 
Indeed, the 4-3-2-1 was around long before El Tel stuck Alan Shearer on his own up front. The earliest reference we can find in the British press comes from August 1970, when Peter Dobereiner was at Selhurst Park to watch Crystal Palace v Newcastle for the Observer, and delivered a pretty damning verdict on Bert Head's defensive tactics:
 
"Last season Palace played an uncompromising 9-1 formation," he wrote. "Now they were deployed in a loose 4-3-2-1. It made little difference to the plot.
 
"The ball would be floated up to Queen, whose tactical role has always been to have the living daylights hammered out of him by four defenders acting in concert. Mathematically, such a situation ought to have left several Palace players unmarked elsewhere on the field. It might even have happened momentarily when they were a safe distance from the ball. Whenever the ball was returned upfield however, the Palace men seemed outnumbered two to one. "Then an extraordinary, almost unprecedented event occurred. Two Palace men so far forgot themselves as to stray way out of position, right into the opposing penalty area no less. Birchenall headed the ball towards goal. Queen, possibly unnerved at the sight of one of his colleagues at such close quarters, promptly headed it straight back and Birchenall kicked it into goal."
 
Head, having led the side to promotion to the First Division for the first time in their history the year before, had the Eagles battling for their lives at the foot of the table – a tad harsh, then, to bash his understandable caution.
 
But the 4-3-2-1 as we know it may have emerged from Holland. As tactics uber-guru Jonathan Wilson writes in the award-winning Inverting the Pyramid: "The 4-2-3-1 is just one variant of the five-man midfield. One of the additional attacking midfielders can be sacrificed for an additional holder, producing the 4-3-2-1 – the Christmas tree – or the modern 4-3-3. Co Adriaanse seems to have been the first exponent of the 4-3-2-1 at Den Haag in the late 80s."
 
Post-Head, the formation appears to have taken a 25-year British break. One of the first references to the 4-3-2-1 back in English domestic football came in January 1995, when Russell Thomas saw Leeds face Aston Villa with Howard Wilkinson sending out his side "in an intriguing 4-3-2-1 formation", with Brian Deane and David White playing off the lone frontman Philomen Masinga. Yes, you read that right.
 
Although the 4-3-2-1 was around long before Venables's appointment as England manager on 28 January 1994 – his use of the formation spawning copycats in the nascent Premier League – its festive moniker only entered the British footballing lexicon during his tenure. The first member of Her Majesty's Press to use the phrase seems to have been the actor and writer Colin Welland in the Observer, who in a piece praising the new manager after a 1-0 victory over Denmark in his first game in charge of the national side, wrote, somewhat tangentially, of Rodney Marsh: "Here was a Venables man. For Rodney belonged on no Christmas tree. He was tough as old boots, locks flowing, powerful … he'd laugh his way through his Saturday stint like the overgrown imp that he was. Marvellous," on 13 March 1994. By May and the friendlies against Greece and Denmark the phrase was being happily bandied about by one and all.

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