This is my little tribute to Johan Cruyff, football, and the beauty of the world
‘I’m attracted to soccer’s capacity for beauty. When well played, the game is a dance with a ball.’
Eduardo Galeano
Johan Cruyff. A footballer. Cruyff played football as if to music. Johan Cruyff is art.
Please watch of the Cruyff videos I have posted at the bottom. The way Cruyff plays football is poetry in motion. It's not mere speed, although he was super quick. It is grace and elegance. It is elan - that combination of energy, flair, style, and enthusiasm. Cruyff can pause, take his time, glide, go, and then be gone. He ghosted past and through defenders. This is how I saw myself playing football. This is how I played the game in my head. All those times that I overran the ball, lost control, was immediately tackled, gave away the ball, fell over, ran into walls, and was generally a complete liability to my team, I saw none of this debacle, of course. Watch how Cruyff runs with the ball in the videos - this is what was in my head when I took possession of the ball on the football field and started to move. To those watching, I was attempting no more than a headless, hopeless charge down the park, doomed to end in abject failure. And they were right. My team mates knew it, and hence very rarely gave me the ball. They didn't trust me. They thought I would charge headstrong and headlong into certain disaster. And that is how it almost always was. Yet another embarrassing disappointment for me, yet more proof that I was a complete failure at the game I loved most of all. And yet another blow to the optimistic view that dreams may one day come true. I was so enthusiastic as to keep getting carried away and losing control. I'd like to put it down to over-excitement rather than complete lack of ability.
Things never turned out how I imagined them. Apart from once. Just the once. Anyone who knows me well will have heard this story a million times. They will hear it a million times more, too. I will never tire of telling the tale of my greatest moment on the football field. In just one game, my usual charge upfield ceased to be a charge but instead became a graceful, effortless, balletic, sublime movement which culminated in a goal of sheer perfection. I was in space somewhere just past the halfway line making myself available for a pass out of defence. I received the ball with my back to goal, with an opponent coming in strong and quick behind me. With perfect timing, I took the ball on the instep and executed the famous Cruyff turn perfectly, sending the defender straight past me, completely missing me and ball. He went forwards, I turned and moved in the other, at speed towards goal. It was still some distance away, but I started to glide over the turf, as I had always imagined. Remarkably, I didn't speed into trouble, as I did normally, but float. I felt like i was floating. I felt so good. For once, I felt confident. I remember feeling heady, but being in control. For once. I remember thinking that this is going remarkably well, I hope I can keep it going. Whereas I was nearly always robbed first challenge, or, frankly, just left the ball behind me as I raced forwards, this time, with the field opening in front of me, opponents either side dropping off and giving up, I eased effortlessly past the first challenge in front of me, then past the second, with the ball on my right foot. I then approached the third challenge, moving rightwards, only to cut the ball back inside to go past the defender and onto my left foot. Still at pace, all in one continuous movement, I cut the ball back inside the next defender with my left foot and onto my right to face the last defender and the goal behind. For the one and only time in my entire footballing life, I kept a cool head. I blanked the defender out of my mind, and just eased to the right with a view to lining up a shot. In my mind’s eye, I knew where the goal was. I didn't need to stop and look. There was no hesitation. My usual doubts were silent. I didn't rush and snatch at the shot - everything was slotting into place in my head as I carried the ball upfield. I took my time, and eased the body into position, arching slightly sideward and backward and with my right foot curled – curled I tell you! – the ball past the flailing arms of the goalkeeper just inside the post.
That was a deeply satisfying moment. It was a beautiful moment. It was my Cruyff moment. A Dalglish moment. That curl inside the post. My only one. My only complete one, anyway. I didn't need any more than the one moment. That one moment is as good as it gets. And it made endless years of misery, pain, suffering, abuse and taunts worthwhile.
I remember on Bishop Road field, St Helens, 1974 shouting "Cruyff" every time I attempted the turn, only to trip over my feet or collapse in a heap, the whole pretension ending in calamity, inviting the derision of one and all whose attention had been caught by my shout. I was never among the first choices for the football teams. It was a case of having me, or one of the sick, the lame, the lazy, or the rotund that were always left over at the end. But here, in 1981, I had my day at last. Everything I had ever tried – and failed – to do on a football pitch finally came off. It was a little moment of perfection.
It's my greatest ever sporting memory, certainly. My second greatest memory was the day I buried the opposition forward with a hard hitting tackle when the rugby seconds (my team) played against (and got murdered by) the firsts. It was my last ever attempt to make the first team pool. I hit him so hard and with such speed that the tackle sent him face down into the ground. And he was enormous, about ten feet tall and twenty stone. The bigger they are .. I received a dead arm for my troubles. At the time, I thought it had been broken. But I could have cared less. In my elation, I ran up and down the touchline to get a list of those who saw me. My bid for the rugby team was to be of no avail. The rugby coach was absent and his stand-in was somewhat unappreciative. I can still hear him now shouting "where's the full back gone?" as the try was conceded anyway. "I'm here", I thought, "on the touch-line with a .... broken arm from tacking the opposition cyclops who has just flattened half our team and chased the rest into hiding on the wings!"
But, really, there is no comparison at all. Big things bashing into each other has a certain visceral appeal, I don’t doubt. A game for grunting oafs. But I’m an incorrigible football romantic at heart. I know the bad stuff surrounding the game of football. It’s called commercialization. Tribalism. Fake religion. Us and them divisions. Competition. I know, I know, I know. It’s the same bad stuff that is eating up this world. But it’s still a good world underneath the layers of corruption. There’s nothing that is inherently bad, just a corruption of the good. Lucifer was once the most beautiful of the angels. In Dante's Inferno he is petrified, immobilized, shorn of all his grace and movement.
And, for once, I shared in the beautiful game with a beautiful, balletic movement full of grace and exuding style, panache, and flair but most of all an effortless flow.
The odd thing was that, whereas I would normally shriek, holler, and jump around at the most meagre things I would struggle to accomplish on a sporting field – when you achieve so very little, you have to make the most of what little you do achieve, the odd strong clearance, block, and tackle – this time, I just turned and walked slowly back to the halfway line for the restart. For once, I didn’t stick out my chest and grin and wave my arms around and shout about being the greatest thing ever, all evidence to the contrary. I now had evidence that ... I could actually do a Cruyff! And run like the wind with the ball at my feet and curl the ball on the inside of the post/
Normally, on the (very) rare occasion I would do something good (OK, something half-decent would be about the best I could do), I would run around and seek validation from all and sundry, make sure the coach saw me, and do all I could to demand recognition. This time, however, I just turned and walked slowly, head down, back to the halfway line for the kick-off to resume play. I didn’t look around to see who had noticed, I didn’t look around to see the reactions, I didn’t see if the coach got my name and number and pencilled me in for great things in the first team. The moment was an end in itself, utterly self-contained and requiring no external validation. A perfect case and therefore complete. I was expressionless, blank, seemingly emotionless. I don't remember consciously thinking anything. When certain team mates started to laugh, point to my face and mimic the serious expression that was etched on there, it is obvious how solemn a moment it was. I had been moved to the brink of tears. It was everything I had ever set out to achieve whenever I had started a hare-brained charge up the park.
I didn’t score many goals. In fact, I don’t remember scoring any. Not in the big games, anyway. I do remember being so desperate to score, for once, that I hung around the six yard box in one game, goal hanging. Team-mate Dave Thomas hit a decent shot that was creeping into the corner of the goal. I stopped it, to take a shot at an open goal myself – and promptly, from point blank range, put the ball wide. It was easier to score! In fact, it was impossible not to score. But I missed all the same. Poor Dave Thomas, he didn't score many goals, if any, either. I can only apologize all these years later. I'm sure he remembers that game all these years on. David, sorry.
In the big games, I never did anything good of note. I’d run around and be a general menace to my own team. I hardly scored goals in any kind of school football. But when I did – it was the greatest goal ever scored.
Football as art, as music, as poetry. That was Johan Cruyff to me. My favourite footballer. I didn’t have a zillionth of his talent. But I shared his ideal. He did what I dreamed of doing. And showed us that the ideal is real. I actually enjoyed my charges up the football park. I enjoyed them so much, that I would get over-excited and get carried away. I was a decent runner, came third in the school 400 metres. I could sprint, too. I enjoyed running in bursts. But that's athletics, not football. I found athletics boring. I loved football. Less haste, more speed was the order of the day on the football. And I managed it once. Once, I calmed down, showed some composure and control, and did everything right in the one continuous flow.
The German theologian Dorothee Sölle was once asked: “How would you explain to a child what happiness is?” “I wouldn’t explain it,” she replied. “I’d toss him a ball and let him play.” I would do the same with an adult.
Football mirrors the world we live in. There's ugliness aplenty there. Everything that Eduardo Galeano writes on football in Soccer in Sun and Shadow applies to the world we live and the life we lead:
‘Professional soccer does everything to castrate that energy of happiness, but it survives in spite of all the spites. And maybe that’s why soccer never stops being astonishing… that’s the best thing about it – its stubborn capacity for surprise. The more the technocrats program it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, soccer continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs, the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and ….’
I've felt cut off many a time in football and in life, but I'm stubborn. The roots are good in this world, and we all share them; and every so often this dwarf has grown big. I'll confess to being a hopeless dreamer with a hare-brained head full of football fantasies and ambitions which bear no relation to any known abilities on my part that can come out of the shadows and into the sun, and find that little bit of magic that puts inner and outer in tune with each other, turns the world on its head, and puts it the right way around, expose fame and fortune to be the pathetic frauds that they are, and in the process make the great and the good look like imposters in comparison to you enjoying your one and only Cruyff moment.
The world is good and life is ever-resurgent and ever-insurgent, no matter the machinations of the expropriators, enclosers, calculators, schemers, strategists, accountants and bureaucrats.
The writer Eduardo Galeano got it. He knew the ugliness. But he never allowed his understanding of the problems to choke his experience of the pleasures. Football, like life, is full of contradictions and corruptions – but the essence is good and the heart is warm and still beating. Galeano approached football like we should approach life – with warmth and generosity, protesting the corruption in the name of the good, exposing the darkness out of devotion to the joyous and the magical.
“Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.”
—Galeano on his love for the sport exceeding his love for any one team.
Here’s to stripping away all the stuff that stands in the way of all those pretty moves. We can survive the corruption, and we can participate in and share the good. You have it in you. I found it in myself. And I was one of the worst footballers you could ever see (or would ever want to).
'A certified intellectual, Galeano loved football for its ability to survive corruption, its stubborn capacity for surprise, and readers were never in doubt of the warmth of the blood running through his veins.'
‘To describe this as a perfect book would be inaccurate, but it would also be irrelevant. It is a mess. It is deliberately a mess, a cavalcade of diversions and tangents and idle thoughts and musings and eulogies and excoriations and laments. Not all are memorable, perhaps not all are necessary, but it all amounts up to something unique, righteous and quite beautiful: history by turn as jumbled memory, as fractured story, as furious broadside, as hazy dream, and occasionally even as joke.’
That sounds like my kind of book! I remember when I had to cut my thesis. The bits I offered for sacrifice were the parts that the academic panel deemed the best and most essential parts of my argument. The bits they wanted to cut, I thought were my best arguments. I thought they had failed to understand. I seem to like a mess. Such is life. I seem to thrive amidst contradictory dynamics. No wonder my team-mates speculated that I was really playing for the other side.
Galeano also had good politics: “I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”
There are some beautiful words, and sharp insights, in Gary Younge's interview with Galeano.
Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan 'poet laureate' of the anti-globalisation movement, has written a book of historical and political lessons for each day of the year
"This world is not democratic at all," he says. "The most powerful institutions, the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank, belong to three or four countries. The others are watching. The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture."
‘Military and economic interests are destroying the world, amassing increasing power in the hands of the wealthy and crushing the poor.’
How long will the struggle continue? How long before ideal is lived as real? Do dreams come true?
"Don't worry. It's like making love. It's infinite while it's alive. It doesn't matter if it lasts for one minute. Because in the moment it is happening, one minute can feel like more than one year."
Or an eternity. I think that is what I was saying about football.
"My great fear is that we are all suffering from amnesia. I wrote to recover the memory of the human rainbow, which is in danger of being mutilated."
To illustrate his point, Galeano cites the example of Robert Carter III. Have you heard of him? I hadn't, and I studied U.S. History at degree level. He was the only one of the US's founding fathers to free his slaves. "For having committed this unforgivable sin he was condemned to historical oblivion."
Who, then, is responsible for this forgetfulness?
"It's not a person," Galeano explains. "It's a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten … We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful."
And, if only for that one moment, I was a far better footballer than I had ever shown myself to be on a football field, but which deep down I knew myself to be. We are all of us much better and much more beautiful than we are told. I had my Cruyff moment. And that's some moment indeed.
Proof
Cruyff played football as if set to music. Johan Cruyff is art sets Cruyff’s moves to music.
Cruyff was an artist and an innovator, he changed the way football is played, inventing an entirely new way of playing. He was a ‘total footballer’ who would cover the entire field, and play in any position. It’s not just about winning a game, but the manner in which you play, and the enjoyment you receive in playing. That's precisely the sense of infinity of which Galeano wrote. Enjoying the game is much more important than the winning. Holland finished the 1974 World Cup as the losing finalists. But everyone remembers that Dutch team and the beautiful football they played. (The same with respect to Hungary, a team that played beautiful football but which lost to West Germany in 1954. People remember Hungary, have forgotten West Germany). Cruyff and that Dutch team inspired the generations that came after. Cruyff put it well:
‘Let the people come to the stadium, and let them enjoy themselves.’
‘As long as you looked at a certain way of playing, everyone can play.’
‘When they saw us playing, everybody was happy. They just went home laughing. If you can laugh and enjoy yourself, it’s one of the most important things to me.’
It’s true. I’ll tell you how true that is. A teenage Cruyff ran riot when Ajax destroyed my beloved Liverpool 5-1 in the European Cup match of 7 December 1966. The defeat was and remains Liverpool's record defeat in all European competitions. Cruyff scored twice in the second leg at Anfield too. That game was the birth of the total football with which Holland blessed the world in the 1970s. Liverpool were on the receiving end. And to have been present at the birth of total football is an honour.
Cruyff had a fine relationship with Liverpool and his quote about the club and its supporters hangs in the Reds’ Melwood training complex to this day.
“At that time, Liverpool were not just the best club in England, but one of the strongest teams in the world,” he wrote in his posthumously-released autobiography My Turn.
“In a technical sense,” Cruyff wrote, “the English champions were blown away.”
What made the biggest impression on the teenage Cruyff, though, was the atmosphere at Liverpool’s Anfield ground.
"There’s not one club in the world so united with the fans. I sat there watching the Liverpool fans and they sent shivers down my spine. A mass of 40,000 became one force behind their team."
“I stood on the pitch at Anfield with goosebumps, because of the atmosphere,” Cruyff remembered. “My happiness at our progress was matched only be the impression Anfield had left on me; from that evening English football had captured my heart. I had never seen anything like this – the passion for the game, and how much the fans wanted their team to win, and it made me think that one day I would like to play in England. Unfortunately that dream didn’t come to pass, because in those days borders were still closed to foreign players. Even today I still think that was a terrible shame.”
Indeed. Imagine Johan Cruyff playing for Liverpool!! Not all dreams come true. Only some. And they are always enough.
'Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not invite us to have them.' (John Updike).