Johan Cruyff: Possibly the most influential figure football has ever known

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John Dillon24 March 2016

JOHN DILLON COLUMN

When I was a boy in the 1970s, the white-and-red Ajax football shirt was an item of longed-for foreign wonder, glimpsed very occasionally on television and in Christmas football annuals.

One player wore No14 on his back - something strikingly different in that era, also. Even exotic.

Every youngster around the same age and besotted with the game knew of Johan Cruyff. The playground talk was more about the unusual number on his jersey rather than the dazzle and philosophy of Dutch Total Football.

It made him look different. How different and how uniquely and individually brilliant only became apparent as kids of my time grew up and learned to revere Cruyff as one of the greatest players and one of the most innovative managers the game has ever known.

Amid the global torrent of tributes which poured forth following his death aged 68 after battling lung cancer, the memory of how that shirt number made an impact on a generation too young to have seen him play much in the flesh could serve as emphatically as any other because in football, such simple things really do come to matter and be imbued with magic.

He chose 14, against the old 1-11 tradition, apparently for effect. It was a powerful statement of self-confidence.

That belief, so endearingly typical of the strident nature of Dutch football, under-pinned a talent and a vision which placed Cruyff on the highest pedestal of the pantheon of the game. One of the greatest of the game.

As a player his pace, balance, goalscoring ability, deftness of foot and levels of assuredness were allied to such an acute sense of vision and space that one English journalist, David Miller, famously named him: "Pythagoras in Boots."

This made him the well-spring, the fulcrum of the two teams which came to embody the hallowed creed of Total Football - the Ajax team which won successive European Cups between 1971and 1973 and the Dutch side which was the finest to go unfulfilled in a world Cup final in 1974.

This was football as "architecture," according to the Dutch - in which the appliance of movement, awareness and flexibility among players who inter- changed positions as fluently as they shifted around the ball took the game to a new tactical level, elevated beyond its own era.

Among a horde of great players, in a nation which has produced so many clever footballers, Cruyff, step-son of the Ajax groundsman, who grew up within sight of their old ground in Amsterdam, was the figure-head and the supreme exponent. It meant he was a team player too, though - because that was what the whole idea was about.

Later, he took the same skills and approach to Barcelona. Although his impact there was epic, too, it wasn't until he was the Catalan club's manager that they finally lifted their first European Cup - at Wembley in 1992, against Sampdoria of Italy.

Nineteen years later, at the same stadium, Barcelona won the trophy for a fourth time, playing Manchester United off the park to record their second Champions League success under the leadership of Pep Guardiola.

A golden thread was apparent. The swirling, whirling carousel of passing which made Barca the kings of Europe was the ultimate expression of the tactical and coaching philosophy first built at the club by Cruyff.

Protagonists such as Andres Iniesta and Xavi had been formed by the youth development system put in place by Cruyff.

Guardiola was his captain on the night of that first triumph at Wembley, which, with lovely football serendipity was where Cruyff had won his first European Cup as an Ajax player against Panathinaikos - one of the first live televised games I can recall from my own childhood as a matter of fact.

Pep, now the most sought-after coach in the game says that above all, he owes more to Cruyff than anyone else in football.

It is facts like these which back-up the claim that Cruyff may well be the most influential figure football has known.

That can't be quantified exactly, of course, although Spain's successive triumphs at Euro 2008, World Cup 2010 and Euro 2012 add weight to the argument because they were built around the players and ideals of the Camp Nou.

Certainly, too, what adds to the case is the uncompromising - and often controversial - style and conviction Cruyff brought to his work as a player, a coach and a forthright analyst.

Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo dominate the modern game but this is in its air- brushed corporate era.

Never mind debating their merits as players compared to Cruyff, they will never be as cool, in that grainy, whey-faced , highly individual and archetypal natural and strong-willed Dutch way of Cruyff - either on the pitch or off it.

He was outspoken, strident and defiant in taking stances about politics and social matters away from football too.

He chose Barcelona, it is said, ahead of Real Madrid, when he left Ajax because he couldn't countenance playing for the club of Spain's dictator, General Franco.

We grasp for ways of articulating why football matters so much when it might appear so trivial.

Cruyff found a way with the ball at his feet, as a coach and as a man off the pitch with powerful opinions about the game and much else. He had a style and he had a philosophy. And he was able to put them into practise, on and off the pitch.

That is why football matters.

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