Johan Cruyff: Sky Sports' David Tanner recalls his time with the Dutch great
Friday 25 March 2016 11:20, UK
Sky Sports’ David Tanner has been reflecting on his time with Dutch great Johan Cruyff, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 68.
"If you don't play football to entertain the people, then what's the point of playing at all?" - Johan Cruyff.
One quote. One man and his ethos summed-up.
I became acquainted with Cruyff over many years of interviewing him when he visited Scotland to play golf and I was also invited to meet him at his foundation in Barcelona.
His views were always thought provoking, relevant and, unlike many footballers and administrators in this age of PR non-speak, he spoke his mind. And then some. A meeting with the former Netherlands international was, for me, the journalistic highlight of any year.
If a man was a business - and Johan made all aspects of football his business - that quote he gave me about entertaining football could easily have served as the Cruyff corporation mission statement.
It certainly fits his approach through the various stages of his career as a football man: player, captain, coach, director, commentator, entrepreneur, visionary and, through the auspices of his foundation, a social benefactor and football missionary.
His interviews, if he was in the mood, ran long and always had the feel of a sermon. This is my way and my way is the right way.
You did not have to show blind faith to believe in this messiah - the evidence was there for all to see. As a player he won three consecutive European Cups with Ajax, before coaching Barcelona to their first European Cup win, laying out the plans for the Nou Camp side's youth system and style of play that produced the greatest team - a sequence of them now, actually - in the history of club football.
Without Cruyff there is no tiki-taka and, who knows, Lionel Messi may have just been an entertainer in a good side rather than the shining jewel in Barcelona's crown.
I last spoke to Cruyff in the splendour of The Old Course Hotel in St Andrews after he had finished his round in the Dunhill Championship last October. He was late for our interview but this was no great surprise as word had reached me that he had been slow to get around the course.
It did not seem important at the time, but the suggestion around the golf course was that it had been a struggle for the 68-year old to finish his round. Cruyff, with trademark confidence (I never found him to be arrogant), strode into the Road Hole restaurant looking fit and wearing a pair of his own brand of stylish trainers.
He presented the figure of a strong and healthy man, which was at odds with the rumours of him finding his four-ball a test. I was genuinely shocked, therefore, to discover that days after our conversation, he had been given bad news by cancer specialists.
When I read the statement he issued just last month, I was convinced he was standing up bravely to cancer if he felt he was "2-0 up" and promised that he would hold on to win his match with the disease.
As a player, Cruyff was not as protected by the rules as Messi is now. The ban on the tackle from behind was introduced a decade after Cruyff had hung up his boots, outlawed after another Dutch icon Marco van Basten had been hacked into early retirement.
A couple of years ago, I took former Aberdeen manager Jimmy Calderwood to the Dunhill to meet Cruyff. After Calderwood had almost been knocked off his feet by the strength of a Ruud Gullit embrace, he steadied himself in time to hear the shout of "CALDA-VOOD" as Johan made a bee-line for him.
Calderwood, like Cruyff, had taken his coaching badges under the legendary Rinus Michels at the Dutch FA and the Glaswegian played for Sparta Rotterdam against a veteran Cruyff in the Eredivisie. He admitted: "Louis van Gaal [Calderwood's midfield team-mate] and I tried to kick him!" Cruyff laughed at the memory before adding: "I jumped over the tackles...easily."
If Calderwood and Van Gaal could not stop him in his tracks, Cruyff's smoking habit did catch up with him in later life.
Ex-Aberdeen and Manchester City striker Duncan Davidson told me recently he had turned out for Toronto Blizzards against Cruyff, who played in the old North American Soccer League for LA Aztecs and Washington Diplomats. Duncy was the last Blizzards player out after the interval and was surprised to see a cloud of cigarette smoke in the tunnel.
Cruyff was responsible for the pollution and was happy to keep the rest of the players waiting until he had finished his cigarette. Davidson was surprised that a top athlete was such a heavy smoker. He was amazed when Cruyff then scored from the centre circle from the re-start.
The greatness of Hendrik Johannes Cruyff is all the more startling when put into historical context; he was only the third full-time professional football player in the Netherlands. I noticed that he smiled when he spoke about that historical curiosity.
The KNVB had resisted calls for the introduction of professionalism until the mid-1950s but those first pro-contracts were part-time arrangements. Had Cruyff been born just a few months earlier, his development could have been stunted by the semi-professional player's need to divide sporting activities with work outside the game. His timing was always immaculate, of course.
With his formative years played out against a backdrop of revolution in the Dutch game, it is perhaps no surprise that he was not short of an opinion on how the game should be played. And he certainly knew how to deliver his views.
The quote at the start of this article was typical of his many bites at Jose Mourinho. Cruyff accused the former Real Madrid boss of having a "win at all costs" approach to the game which was the polar opposite of his footballing vision.
In our last sit down in October, he surveyed the flux at Chelsea and blamed the extraordinary collapse of the defending Premier League champions on Jose's ego and what Cruyff felt was his desire to be centre of the attention at his club.
He said: "It's probably because of his background, where he has never been cheered by 100,000 people, or whistled at by 100,000 people. Maybe it's because of that, maybe because of the interest from the press, but I don't think he is educating children to play football or educating for life."
Even Lionel Messi was not exempt from a tongue-lashing. Cruyff felt it wrong that the world's greatest player could not speak English, saying: "Barcelona is a global club. Messi is a global player. So he should learn to speak to everybody using the language of the world - English."
He loathed Mourinho's behaviour but Cruyff adored Josep Guardiola.
Cruyff told me of his first meeting with the teenage Pep upon taking the head coach's job at the Nou Camp in 1988: "I was being given a tour of the training facilities. I asked one of the coaches who he thought was the best youth player at the club. The answer was Guardiola. At the time he was in the third team! I immediately promoted him to play with the better players."
He told me of his regrets at not being able to play in England and the "wonderful ambience of the stadiums in Britain".
He had offers but deals did not quite come off. In the early 1980s, Leicester City's Jock Wallace tried to lure him to Filbert Street after falling in love with the player while watching him play for Ajax against his Rangers side in the first European Super Cup in 1972.
Around the same time, Scottish Division One side Dumbarton made a bold attempt to sign the Dutch great. Manager Sean Fallon, assistant to Jock Stein when Celtic lifted the European Cup, travelled to meet Cruyff in Holland but, despite considering the unlikely move, he spurned Dumbarton's offer.
I was shocked and saddened by Johan Cruyff's death and will miss my annual drink with him in the Old Course Hotel, but I suspect we will all be cheered by watching his legacy in action when his star pupil, Pep, takes over at Manchester City next season. Another member of Barcelona's 1992 European Cup-winning Dream Team, Ronald Koeman, is already sprinkling some of the Cruyff stardust on the Premier League with Southampton.
Football's greatest visionary will still inspire on-field greatness long after his passing.
