A year has already passed since one of the great footballers left us at the age of 68, according to some the greatest, swept away prematurely by a cursed disease that wore him out in just six months without giving him a chance. We are talking about Johan Cruyff.
Johan Cruyff was football . He was a universal footballer, one who could boast of sharing the space in the collective imagination with the elite of the ball and of being recalled in the speeches of fans alongside names that have marked their eras and that are scary only to pronounce them, such as Pele and Maradona, Di Stefano and Puskas and, coming to the present day , Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
A CAREER OF SUCCESS
His career has been studded with successes, at home, with 9 Dutch championships won between Ajax and Feyenoord and abroad, with the victory of the Spanish championship in 73-74 with the Barcelona shirt and he has also had the blessing of European competitions. , thanks to the 3 European Cups won with the “Lancers” together with a UEFA Super Cup and an Intercontinental Cup.
But his greatness has also been certified by the successes on an individual level if it is true, as it is true, that, until the arrival of the “cannibals” Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, he held, together with two poets of the caliber of Michel Platini and Marco van Basten, the Ballon d’Or recordawarded by France Football: 3 (in 1971, 1973 and 1974), also being elected second best player of the twentieth century, (behind Pele but ahead of Maradona!), in the special ranking drawn up by the IFFHS.
His leadership brought him to great results also as a coach, where, in the 11 years of careers at the helm of Ajax and Barcelona, ​​he was able to win 4 Spanish championships, 1 Spanish Cup and 2 Spanish Super Cups, 2 Cups Netherlands, 2 Cup Winners’ Cup, 1 UEFA Super Cup and 1 European Cup. Yes, because Cruijff is one of the seven coaches to have won the Champions Cup after having won it as a player : in the company of Miguel Munoz, Giovanni Trapattoni, Josep Guardiola, Frank Rijkaard, Carlo Ancelotti and Zinedine Zidane.There isn’t much to add .
THE 1974 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
But it is with the national team that the greatness of the “white Pele” exploded in the most evident and clear way, even without raising any trophies. Cruyff was in fact the soul of the Netherlands national team who at the 1974 World Cup in West Germany was able to invent a new way of playing football, a model that was based on continuous movement without the ball and on the systematic application of pressing and offside. The totaalvoetbal, total football . We could define it as an embryo of the modern tiki-taka.
The 1974 national team, led by one of the theorists of this expensive and spectacular football, Rinus Michels, it was a wonderful machine that, today we would say, looked like it came out of a video game. And Johan Cruijff was its emblem, a performer who reduced champions of the caliber of Rep, Rensenbrink and Neskeens to mere supporting actors, who followed the continuous movement of their leader as followers, as in a fluid and at the same time aggressive dance.
The greatness of the achievements of that team in that World Cup is even more sensational if you think that it was internally exhausted by a thousand frictions and envy, also due to the extreme choices of Michels who had formed it by creating two irreconcilable blocks that saw the two ends oppose the Ajax and Feyenoord players .
Despite incurable fractures, the Tulips are on the fieldthey were one, an orchestra perfectly in tune and with a single conductor, which, after an easy qualifying round, with victories over Uruguay and Bulgaria and a draw with Sweden, was able to smash, among others, Argentina with a resounding 4-0 and Brazil with a sharp 2-0 reaching the final with the hosts of West Germany .
And the Olympiastadion final also seems to start under the best auspices. Ready-away and the ball and the Tulips who, with an incredible series of quick passes bring the ball into the penalty area, Cruijff aims for the goal and is spread by Berti Vogts, and a penalty, which Neskeens realizes. At the first turn of the clock we are already 0-1 for the Netherlands and Germany have yet to touch the ball .
But you know, the Germans never die and, thanks to the determination of Vogts, the class of Beckenbauer and the goals of Breitner and the usual, deadly, Gerd Muller managed to overturn the result and win the game with a score of 2-1. . A bitter ending, one step away from the dream, that the Tulips certainly did not deserve .
This was undoubtedly Cruijff’s highest point with the national team . After that experience, there was a third place in the 1976 European Championship and the non-participation in the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, but the performances of that German World Cup will forever remain etched in the memory of all fans., not only of those who were lucky enough to experience them firsthand. And believe it, they gave the Dutch football movement the push to reach what, to date, remains the only football triumph: The victory at the ’88 European Championship where Van Basten (with the most beautiful goal in history) and Gullit got the better of Russia, in the match between the Golden Balls with Belanov . As it happens again in West Germany, again at the Olympiastadion, again with Rinus Michels at the helm: almost a revenge of the 1974 defeat.
Cruijff was a born leader and this made him an uncomfortable character in the locker room. There are countless quarrels and diatribes with teammates who have perhaps limited his use in the national team. But, under his armor as a determined man, he beat the heart of a real man, attentive to the social, so as to give life to a charitable foundation, the Johan Cruijff Foundation and to become the testimonial of a famous anti-smoking campaign.
We just have to remember him on the day of the first anniversary of his death. A dark day, that 24 March 2016, which took away from the world a great champion and a great man, the Prophet of Goal.
Michele De Martin
