The last four winners relied on marauding defenders but is a tactical change under way in South Africa?

Brazil won the World Cup in 2002 with Cafu to the fore as one of their two attacking full-backs. The first round of games from South Africa has suggested that coaches are looking for alternatives to this template. 

Correlation is not necessarily causation. It is intriguing that the last four World Cup winners have been the sides who have had the pair of attacking full-backs in the best form (Jorginho and Branco for Brazil in 1994, Lilian Thuram and Bixente Lizarazu for France in 1998, Cafu and Roberto Carlos for Brazil in 2002 and Gianluca Zambrotta and Fabio Grosso for Italy in 2006), but that is not sufficient to state that the side with the best attacking full-backs this time round will be equally successful.

There is, to start with, a troubling circularity about the argument, for the team that wins the World Cup is liable to have the player in the best form – or at least perceived to be in the best form – in any given position. Does a team win the World Cup because it has the best full-backs, or does it have the best full-backs because it wins the World Cup? It's hard to say, but even allowing for that caveat, the link between success and attacking full-backs seems strong – Thuram, Cafu and Grosso stood out even in excellent teams.

In this tournament already, it is notable that Philipp Lahm had a fine game in Germany's 4-0 win over Australia, that Cha Du-ri was excellent for South Korea in their 2-0 win over Greece, and that it was an overlapping Maicon who finally opened the scoring for Brazil against North Korea last night. Even Chris Lochhead, operating more as a wing-back, was the source of much of New Zealand's attacking intent in their 1-1 draw against Slovakia. Given Glen Johnson and Ashley Cole were two of their less disappointing players against the USA, even England fans could cling to the full-back theory as a source of hope.

Before making any judgment on the importance of full-backs, though, it first must be established why that correlation between attacking full-backs and success exists. This is a subject I've dealt with in greater detail before, but essentially it comes down to the point Jack Charlton made after the 1994 World Cup, that when a back four meets a team playing 4-4-2 or 3-5-2, the full-backs are the players who tend to have the most space in front of them, and thus the most time on the ball, and the most opportunities to make relatively risk-free runs into unexpected areas.

Increasingly, though, teams are not playing 4-4-2, and so the advantage Charlton highlighted no longer exists. When a back four plays a 4-2-3-1 or a 4-3-3, the full-back no longer has space in front of him, but a winger. That complicates matters for an attacking full-back. If he is playing an attacking wide player, then he can effectively fight fire with fire – as, for instance Roberto Carlos did against David Beckham when Real Madrid beat Manchester United 3-1 at the Bernabéu in 2003, or Michael Essien against Cristiano Ronaldo in the final hour plus extra-time of the Champions League final in 2008.

That, though, is a risk: Theo Walcott didn't just score a hat-trick in Zagreb in 2008, he destroyed Croatia's entire left side by making Danijel Pranjic, a full-back so attacking he usually plays in midfield, try to defend. So it may be safer for even an attacking full-back to sit deep and try to absorb the threat, as Ashley Cole did against Ronaldo in Euro 2004. If they are going to sit back, then it probably makes more sense for the full-back to be a naturally defensive player (Arsenal's Lee Dixon on Newcastle's David Ginola in a League Cup tie in January 1996, Manchester United's Gary Neville on Arsenal's José Antonio Reyes in October 2004) in which case the hegemony of the attacking full-back may be over.

That's not to say that the attacking full-back is outmoded, but that they are not such an advantage as they once were. If that is so, then the likes of Argentina and Holland may not be so hindered by their lack of attacking full-backs as it seemed they might be. There is always the chance in tournaments that a team reverting to a formation that seems thoroughly outdated will shock the opposition by setting them a problem they have forgotten how to solve. It worked for Greece when Otto Rehhagel reintroduced man-marking at Euro 2004, and it may be that a back four of essentially defensive players is such a novelty that opponents struggle against Diego Maradona's Argentina.

Jonás Gutiérrez, of course, is not a particularly solid option at right-back, and Nigeria frequently exploited his weak positional sense, but it could be that he is dropped for Nicolás Burdisso, who looked more convincing having come off the bench on Saturday. Holland present a less extreme case, but neither Gio van Bronckhorst, because of his age, nor Gregory van der Wiel, because of his essentially defensive outlook, are likely to be pouring forward making overlapping runs.

Both play, in diluted form, a version of the "broken team" that was so prevalent in Italy in the late 1990s, in which some players have a very clear attacking role, and some a very clear defensive role, with little in between. Against Nigeria, Argentina had a very obvious back four plus Mascherano, and a front four of Angel di María, Carlos Tevez, Lionel Messi and Gonzalo Higuaín, with Juan Sebastián Verón providing some sort of link as a deep-lying playmaker. The Dutch similarly had a back four and a front four plus Nigel De Jong, with Mark van Bommel linking.

That is a mode of play that places great onus on individual talent, and less on the system. Perhaps that is natural in international football, in which the lack of time available to coaches, as both Valeriy Lobanovskiy and Arrigo Sacchi made clear, makes sophisticated systematisation difficult to develop, perhaps it even plays into the hands of the advertisers whose ideal is a Ronaldo step-over rather than Rafa Benítez making compact gestures, but it does suggest that the age of the attacking full-back is, if not over, then at least being challenged.

If Maradona has recognised that – or if he has listened to Carlos Bilardo telling him that – then he may just be smarter than many give him credit for (and, of course, Argentina's lack of attacking full-backs makes it a wholly logical experiment). For if it comes down to a battle not of system – which would benefit Spain with their phalanx of gifted midfield pass-and-movers – but of individual attacking talent, then there is no side better placed than Argentina, with Holland not too far behind. It worked for Bilardo and Argentina in 1986 when, to put it slightly crudely, seven players defended and Jorge Valdano, Jorge Burruchaga and, of course, Maradona attacked. If Gabriel Heinze and Gutiérrez or Burdisso can help provide a platform, then with Angel Di María, Gonzalo Higuaín, Carlos Tevez and, of course, Messi, it might just work again.