One of the game’s legends has passed on fighting till the very end his battle with cancer. Johan Cruyff was the face of total football. This lanky man was its conductor and the world witnessed a revolution as the Clockwork Orange swept through to the finals of the 1974 World Cup. As Eduardo Galeano puts it “everyone attacked and everyone defended, deploying and retreating in a vertiginous fan. Faced with a team in which each one was all eleven, the opposing players lost their step.”
Cruyff was the one pulling the strings. In Cruyff, Rinus Michels, the genius behind total football found the perfect embodiment to carry forth his ideas to fruition. From Ajax to Barcelona via the 1974 World Cup, the game would never be the same. He led Ajax to three consecutive European Cups from 1971 to 1973, orchestrated Holland’s march to the 1974 World Cup to the finals where they were overcome by Germany, and won three Ballon D’Or titles. By then he had cemented his legendary status winning 22 titles in Holland and in Spain in his two decades as a player finishing his career at Barcelona. By then he had scored 392 goals in 520 matches. He retired at the age of 37 to take up the coaching reins at Ajax and then Barcelona for the next eight years winning them a European Cup and four La Liga titles as he brought his total football tradition and honed it at the Camp Nou. winning them a European Cup and four La Liga titles.
Cruyff’s hallmark is Barcelona’s well oiled, slick, and high pressing game and his philosophy passed onto the next generation of coaches like Frank Rijkaard, Pep Guardiola, Tito Vilanova, and Luis Enrique. Pep Guardiola would state, “Cruyff built the cathedral, our job is to maintain and renovate it.” He was a fiercely outspoken man full of reasoning and clear cut ideas about the game and its practitioners.
Cruyff was known for his technical ability, speed, acceleration, dribbling and vision, possessing an awareness of his team-mates’ positions as an attack unfolded. In 1997, Dutch journalist Hubert Smeets wrote: “Cruyff was the first player who understood that he was an artist, and the first who was able and willing to collectivise the art of sports.”
It’s probably safe to say that Cruyff was probably the William James Sidis of footballing genius. As a player he was incomparable but it is as a visionary of the game that he will truly live on through the ages when everything else is dust in the wind.
We leave the final word to Galeano, one of the most astute observers of the game to remark on Cruyff’s indomitable will so evident even as a child while at Ajax. “He did everything they asked of him and nothing they ordered him to do.”
Hendrik Johannes Cruijff: April 25, 1947 – March 24, 2016