Cruyff enjoyed great success as a player and later as a manager too

The first time I had a beer with Johan Cruyff was in one of those brass-top bars in Amsterdam on one of those giddy nights when he inspired Ajax to one of those shimmering victories which transformed the world game.

He had a cigarette lolling from the corner of his mouth.

But then everything Cruyff did was deceptively languid. As Arsenal had discovered earlier that evening while being hung, drawn and quarter-finalled as he and Ajax began closing in on their first European Cup glory.

Johan Cruyff holds aloft the European Cup in 1973 after winning it with Ajax for the third straight year

Cruyff (right) helped Holland beat Uruguay 2-0  in the opening game of the 1974 World Cup finals

Barca legend Cruyff leads his side onto the field in 1977, as they prepare to take on Rayo Vallecano

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The talk was of Total Football.

Rudi Krol was standing with us and they were explaining the rudiments of the fluency of movement and fantasy of the intellect which was beginning to enchant us all.

‘Look at this skinny young man,’ said Krol. ‘Who would have thought that when he turns up in defence he can do that job as good as me.’
 

‘See him,’ said Cruyff. ‘When he materialises at outside left he does things no opponent would ever expect from a centre half.’

It was the spring of 1971 and they were re-imagining the game as we knew it.

What was their secret? I asked. ‘Simple,’ Cruyff retorted. ‘We can all play anywhere.’

Suddenly going Dutch meant something other than buying our rounds, which we did throughout the night.

When the dawn came up it was glistening with rotation instead of set positions, players inter-changing rather than stagnating, intelligence confounding the belligerence which was intimidating football in England and elsewhere at the time.

Seeking a word for it, I came up with: ‘Kaleidoscopic.’

‘Not bad,’ said Cruyff with a slight frown. ‘But Total Football is better, don’t you think?’

Krol grinned, a touch ironically: ‘Johan always knows best.’

That he did.

Henrik Johannes Cruijff, as he was christened, had known best since he was a child of the street football which remains, unlike in England now, a vital foundation of the Dutch game.

The rest of the boys whirled about him as he span around the lamp-posts and danced over the kerbs.

His devoted father did not know it then but he was watching in embryo the mesmerising movement which would eventually enshrine Cruyff as the only footballer ever to have a manoeuvre named after him.

The Cruyff Turn, in which he shaped to cross only to drag the ball back behind his standing leg with the other foot while turning through 180 degrees and then shimmying past a defender, was to be immortalised on the world stage.

His dad did not live to see that happen. It fell to Vic Buckingham, the mild-mannered Englishman who was Cruyff’s first manager at Ajax, to be not only a mentor to the boy he described as ‘God’s gift to football,’ but his surrogate father.

Cruyff, wearing his iconic long-sleeved, orange Holland shirt beats Northern Ireland's Pat Rice

Ajax players and boss Cruyff (centre) celebrate with their UEFA Cup Winners' Cup trophy having won their final in Athens, Greece. The Amsterdam outfit defeated Lokomotive Leipzig 1-0 in 1987

Then came Rinus Michels, his professor.

A few weeks after those beers beside an Amsterdam canal Cruyff, Krol & Co brough their shiny new new game to Wembley and duly bewildered the Greeks of Panathinaikos in the European Cup Final.

One year later, in the 1972 Final, Cruyff scored the two goals which crushed Inter-Milan.

The next time we shared a proper drink was the following May. When Ajax completed their Euro hat-trick with victory over Juventus they traumatised Italian football in all its defensive insularity.

This time it was not the beer bottles hissing but the champagne corks popping in a hotel on the banks of the Danube in Belgrade.

The toast was to Cruyff the best footballer on earth, to Ajax the team of the decade, to Total Football.

And to Michels, the manager who was the architect of this Dutch renaissance in which Cruyff was the supreme artist. The meeting of their genius minds was the catalyst for all that poetry in motion.

That telepathy, when called into harness for their national team, produced a World Cup campaign of even higher revelation, albeit one which ended in 2-1 defeat in the 1974 Final.

Holland were confounded not only by Germany’s traditional never-beaten resilience but a mixture of old enmities and a certain arrogance which had grown up through their ascendancy.

Cruyff opening proceeding in Munich with a hypnotising run which ended in a foul and first minute penalty. Johan Neeskens converted before the Germans had touched the ball. Remembering the war, the Dutch proceeded to play keep-ball as a process of humiliation, rather than killing off the game.

English referee Jack Taylor’s penalty decision was correct. But it was one he was to counter-balance later, at the other end. Paul Breitner’s equalising penalty was more controversial and Cruyff, recalling Geoff Hurst’s over-the-line goal in the ’66 Final, would voice his suspicion that the two tournaments had been rigged in favour of England and Germany winning at home.

Not that he was ever shy of expressing his opinion.

Cruyff is the main attraction at Barcelona before the start of the 1996 UEFA Cup quarter-final against PSV

Cruyff is photographed as sits behind the wheels of his Alfa Romeo car as a mere 21-year-old in May 1968

Cruyff, considered by football writers as the best forward in the world at the time, is seen undergoing a physical examination on an exercise bike after arriving at Barcelona from Ajax in 1973

When someone in my hearing once had the temerity to question the great man’s work-rate, he retorted: ‘It’s not how much you run, it’s how and where you run. I say run less but more to the point. The intention is to arrive at the perfect moment. If you don’t do that you can either be too late….or more often too early. Learn to play football with your brains.’

And with the brush-strokes of an artist.

It became something of a cliché during that era to describe Cruyff as The Dutch Master.

David Winner, author of Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, painted the best word picture: ‘Cruyff’s vision of harmony and movement was rooted in the same sublime ordering of space that one sees in the canvasses of Vermeer.’

Cruyff took that concept with him when he left Ajax for Barcelona. First to carry on scoring championship and cup-winning goals in vast numbers. Then to become the creator of the tika-taka pass and move game which remains the fundamental of that club’s phenomenal success to this day.

As he was managing his way back to Wembley, to win the 1992 European Cup by beating Sampdoria 1-0 after extra time, I went to see him in Barcelona. ‘They’re beginning to get it,’ he said of his players., the cigarette still between his lips. ‘Not Totally, yet. But that will come in time.’

That it did, under Pep Guardiola who says of his predecessor: ‘Cruyff built the cathedral. It is our job to maintain it.’

Cruyff and the family upon whom he doted to the end fell in love with Barcelona. He defied Madrid law to christen his third child and first son Jorgi, after Catalonia’s patron saint. Apart from the occasional venture into US soccer and the now-and-again returns to help revive Ajax, they lived there in the sunshine to his very end.

Cruyff looks on during the 1974 World Cup which he lit up with his skills, including the trick now only known as 'The Cruyff Turn.

Cruyff receives the European Cup after winning the final for Ajax against Juventus at the Red Star Stadium

The last time we clinked glasses was during the 2016 World Cup in Germany.

This time we sipped white wine. I asked again for the real explanation as to why the greatest player in the world of that time – Pele was finished, Maradona just starting – had withdrawn from the 1978 World Cup, an action which many of his countrymen blamed for Holland losing that Final to Argentina.

There had been talk of more injury, perhaps illness, and of a kidnap attempt in Spain. He replied: ‘When your family receive death threats, their safety must be your priority.’

Johan knew best, again.

Too late, so sadly, he discovered what was best for his own well-being.

The cigarette was missing that day in Germany. The last of those had been inhaled 15 years earlier, following chest pains and a double heart by-pass.

After that scare he observed: ‘Football gave me everything in this life, tobacco almost took it all away.’

Shortly after beginning the fight which followed last October’s lung cancer diagnosis, he said: ‘I feel like I’m 2-0 up in this match.’

This time, he could not keep the lead long enough to carry him beyond his premature death, at 68.

But if you want to see for yourself how great a footballer and noble a man he was, join me one clear night, look up and espy, shining in the dark sky, the minor planet named after Johan Cruyff.

In football, as in all things, there are stars. Then there are real stars.

 source: DAILY MAIL