Stillness and Speed: My Story

by Bergkamp, Dennis

  As colleague and teacher, Cruyff now galvanised a generation and reignited the fire of what we now call ‘the Dutch style’. Cruyff was a huge influence on young Dutch players at Ajax like Frank Rijkaard, Marco van Basten, Sonny Silooy, John van’t Schip, and John Bosman. He also left his mark on the club’s Danes, Jan Molby, Soren Lerby and Jesper Olsen, helping to set the fuse for the remarkable ‘Danish Dynamite’ team which played Total Football at the 1986 World Cup. At the end of the 1982-83 season, Ajax chairman Ton Harmsen declined to renew Cruyff’s playing contract because he thought the maestro was ‘too old’ to perform well enough to pull big crowds to justify his salary. Furious, Cruyff signed for rivals Feyenoord and won them the Double in his only season there (passing on his wisdom and attitude to his young team-mate Ruud Gullit into the bargain). Harmsen vowed that Cruyff would ‘never set foot in here again’. Having made his point, Cruyff finally hung up his boots at the end of the 1983-84 season and retired to his house in the village of Vinkeveen, south of Amsterdam. Restless, he was soon looking for a way into management, preferably with Ajax, the only club in Holland he cared about. That the club already had a rather good coach, Aad de Mos, the chairman hated him, and Cruyff didn’t even have a coaching badge (as Dutch FA rules said he must) were the merest of difficulties. His two best mates in the team, Van’t Schip and Van Basten, agitated on Cruyff’s behalf, undermined de Mos and he was finally sacked. The media was on Cruyff’s side, too, and Harmsen was forced to appoint him as manager in 1985. To get round Dutch FA regulations, Cruyff was called ‘technical director’. A model for Ajax takeovers, to be put into effect again nearly 30 years later, had been established.

  While Dennis was patiently working his way through the youth ranks, Johan went straight into revolutionary mode, quickly building a dazzling new version of the old Total Football, or, as he puts it now, ‘working according to my own philosophy’. And what is that? ‘Throwing the opposition into chaos. That’s football. If you get past your man, you throw the opposition into chaos. Creating a one-man advantage using positional play has the same effect. If you don’t get past your man, if you don’t get that extra man advantage, then the opposition stays organised and nothing happens. The one-man advantage is Ajax football.’

  Highlights of some of the games Ajax played at that time are on YouTube: treat yourself by looking them up. To say that Cruyff got his team playing 4-3-3 would be to miss the point. What counted was not the formation but the state of mind. His daring young side pressed, passed and moved in beguiling patterns high up the field. Rijkaard, Ronald Koeman, Van’t Schip and Van Basten were imperious. Silky veteran Arnold Muhren, lured from Manchester United, rarely misplaced a pass, and goalkeeper Stanley Menzo played so far from his line he sometimes seemed to be an auxiliary midfielder. In Cruyff’s first season, Ajax scored 120 goals, Van Basten getting 37 of them in just 26 games. The team had off days as well, of course, but when they were good they were spectacular. A couple of years earlier Van Basten had led an 8-2 demolition of Feyenoord. Now rugby-esque scorelines – 9-0, 8-1, 6-0 – became routine against lesser teams. After his first season, when technical midfielders Koeman and Gerald Vanenburg followed the money to PSV, Cruyff counter-intuitively replaced them with two gnarly defenders, Danny Blind and Jan Wouters. Having revamped the Ajax Youth system, he also promoted youngsters like Aron Winter and the Witschge brothers, Robbie and Richard. The team, thus stabilised, played even better than before.

  This was the Ajax into which Dennis, still at school, would now be thrown. He describes himself as ‘pleasantly nervous’, as his parents drive him to the stadium in their little Datsun Cherry for his first game against Roda. Dennis’s mum tells the security guy that the kid in the back seat will play in the first team. The security guy has never heard of him and only lets him through after a conversation on his walkie-talkie. Inside, Dennis is soothed by the calm of the players’ lounge where Frank Rijkaard welcomes him and cracks some jokes. Dennis just watches and takes it all in. Then Cruyff arrives. ‘He’s a pretty small guy but his presence was enormous,’ Dennis remembers. ‘You felt a personality enter the room. He didn’t speak to me. That came later. Everyone wished me a good time, including “Auntie Sien” the bar lady.’ Soon the game is about to start and Dennis takes his place beside Cruyff in the dugout. ‘Nice to see you here,’ says the great man. ‘Take a good look around, taste the atmosphere, enjoy it.’

  ‘There you are, in the stadium, sitting next to Cruyff. But I wasn’t scared, not at all. The only one thing I wanted was to get on the pitch. I was sure Cruyff wouldn’t have brought me out there for nothing. I thought, “After half-time he’s going to bring me on.”’ In the 66th minute, he does. Dennis, aged 17 years and seven months (the same age as Cruyff on his debut 22 years earlier), trots on wearing number 16 and takes his place on the right-wing. ‘I wasn’t a bundle of nerves. I was just excited.’ There are just 11,000 people in the stadium: barely half full. His parents, having bought their own rather expensive tickets, are sitting in the Reynolds Stand, on Dennis’s side of the pitch. Marcel, nervously standing near the F-Side, tells one of the regulars: ‘I think that’s my little brother warming up right now.’ Dennis remembers every detail. ‘I went onto the pitch and I loved it: the grass, the atmosphere in the ground, being able to join such a great squad, the encouragement from the other players, especially Rijkaard. And I had Wouters behind me, which was reassuring. Right away I saw I was faster than my opponent, so I thought: “OK, I have options here: my advantage is speed and I’m going to use it.” I really wasn’t thinking: “Oh my God, I’m playing for Ajax!” I just felt good, totally natural.’ Ajax won 2-0. Afterwards, in the dressing room, Rijkaard came over and asked Dennis how old he was. ‘Seventeen? Then you’ve got a golden future ahead of you.’

  A few weeks later – after the Dutch winter break – Dennis started a match for the first time and made an even greater impression, ruining Haarlem full-back Luc Nijholt’s day and even scoring in a 6-0 win. Faced with a more experienced opponent whose main tactic was the sliding tackle, Dennis devised a simple counter-measure. ‘I thought: “A little chip, that’s the solution.” When Nijholt came at me, I lobbed the ball over him and I’d beaten him. I was free to make the cross. Wingers played a more simple game back then. You weren’t expected to get in the box and try to shoot. You had to stay wide, feel the chalk of the touchline under your boots. Your job was to stretch their defence, get past your man at speed and cross the ball.’

  Bergkamp was soon playing regularly, but the toughening up process continued. ‘We used all sorts of sneaky little methods,’ admits Cruyff. ‘For example, we told Dennis [during free-kicks] to stand in the wall, on the outside, so he’d have to coordinate with the keeper. We wanted to see how he would manage that, and how he’d react to free-kicks. Would he turn his shoulder in, put his arm in front of his face? Dennis learned quickly. You really didn’t need to work hard to make him tougher or more cunning. And he had a sense of responsibility. He understood he was playing with other people’s money. At that time income was based on match bonuses and Dennis felt he shared responsibility for the salary of older players, guys with families to support. He was a well-mannered kid but knew exactly what was expected of him on the pitch. Others took longer to get it. Rijkaard, for example, was a bit slower on the uptake. But Bergkamp was smart.’

  Dennis was also learning from his team-mates, especially the peerless Van Basten. ‘I paid attention to absolutely everything. I watched how Marco and Frank worked, but also how all the players and trainers interacted, the dynamics in the dressing room, the players’ attitude to me, the relationship between me and the trainers. I noticed everything. And in the same way that I’d watch Hoddle on TV, I’d observe Van Basten in training, seeing what I could borrow from him. I liked the way he could accelerate. He’d drag the ball past his opponent with the outside of his boot and then accelerate, leaving his man for dead. He was very good at that. Marco was a killer, a real goal-scorer, always at th
e front of the attack, whereas I was more of an incoming striker. If records had been kept they’d show how often Marco scored from ten yards or less. For me it was from about fifteen yards.

  ‘Marco was more ruthless than I was. At Arsenal, Ian Wright was like that too, but Marco did it all with great elegance. He could find every inch of the goal, and he had that sharpness in his shot. A short quick flick of the foot – bang! I had that as well. And he had a characteristic way of running with his feet a short distance apart which was also like me. Later, when he had problems with his ankle, his posture sagged a bit whereas I stood straighter. But the way we ran and the way we leaned forward as we sprinted away, were similar. It was a way of running that enabled us to get away very fast, faster than our opponents. It was something that just came naturally. I didn’t learn to run like that at the athletics club. There they told me: “You run beautifully, very naturally.”’

  Because he was still a pupil at the St Nicolaas Lyceum (Louis van Gaal’s old school, too, thanks to one of Cruyff’s ‘logical coincidences’), Dennis could train with the first team only on Saturdays. During the week he worked with the reserve team whose sessions were arranged to fit in with school hours. ‘We weren’t so much training the reserves as using the reserves to train Dennis,’ Cruyff explains. ‘The trainers knew their job was to work on his shortcomings.’

  Juggling school and top-level football became increasingly difficult. When a biology test prevented Dennis travelling with the team to Malmo for a Cup Winners’ Cup quarter-final, he made his own way but had to sit out the match on the subs’ bench. Four days later, in the return leg, came his breakthrough performance. In the first match, the Swedes, coached by future England manager Roy Hodgson, had unnerved Ajax with their fierce, hard-running game and won 1-0. For the return, Dennis would have to face the experienced Swedish international full-back Torbjörn Persson. Before the match, Bruins Slot presented his dossiers. Dennis was surprised. ‘He knew everything about the other team. He’d say: “That defender is semi-professional, his day job is a postman, he’s got two kids called such and such, he’s left-footed and he likes to go forward . . .” Frankly, it went in one ear and came out the other. I didn’t really have any use for that. My attitude was more like: “We’ll see how it goes, I’m just going to play my game and trust my speed.”’ Cruyff’s approach was more basic still. He told Dennis: ‘That defender is an old fart, he’s useless and slow, you’re better than he is.’

  It was yet another psychological ploy. Cruyff: ‘I always told my strikers: “You’re better than the other guy.” I wanted Bergkamp to forget all about the stadium, the TV cameras, the European trophy and focus on beating his man. “Two things can happen,” I said to him. “Either you get past him and then he won’t dare go forward any more, or you don’t get past him and then he’ll forget about you and run forward whenever he fancies. But then I’ll tell the others: Pass everything to Bergkamp because his defender has abandoned him. So either way it’s good.” That’s how I presented it, but of course I was always taking a risk. It was a gamble, but it usually paid off.’ Dennis did as instructed and gave Persson a torrid night, bringing the crowd to their feet and setting up chance after chance as Ajax won a tumultuous match 3-1. But there was no time to celebrate – Dennis had to be up early next morning for his maths class.

  * * *

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN weird for you. One minute you’re a star playing in front of thousands of screaming fans. The next you’re in a classroom. How did you cope?

  Dennis: ‘It was very strange. You can’t be big-headed, of course. That’s not even allowed in Holland! “You’re playing European games? Yeah? So what?” Of course, you’ve got some jealous people, but most of them were positive. After the game, a TV camera crew was allowed into the classroom to watch my reaction to the semi-final draw, which was live, so they could ask me: “How do you feel about that?” So the draw happens and they say: “OK, Dennis, now how do you feel about the draw?” and I say: “Well, it’s OK, I don’t mind.”’

  Getting in some practice for all the in-depth interviews of your later career?

  ‘Exactly! But it was all good stuff. And for the people at school it wasn’t like it was a surprise. I’d been in that class, and in the Ajax Youth for four or five years already, so they understood the situation. And being at Ajax is already a big thing. So they knew it was coming. And to have a professional footballer in the school was something nice for them as well, something for them to talk about.’

  Dennis was surprised by the lasting impact of his performance against the Swedes. ‘For years afterwards, people kept talking about it: “Wow, Dennis, I remember how you drove that left-back nuts.” For me, too, it was such a thrill: playing in the first team in that stadium, coming out of the dressing room, walking down the tiled corridor, seeing the other team coming from the opposite direction. Studs clicking on the tiles, picking up the flowers which we took onto the pitch and threw to the crowd. Seeing the red and white nets in the goals, the wonderful, white Derby Star ball. The huge pitch which was usually immaculate with the grass neatly cropped, then the murmuring of the crowd, sometimes whistling, and the surging noise when I get the ball . . .’

  As it turned out, the semi-final draw was indeed OK. Ajax beat Real Zaragoza comfortably. Next stop would be Athens for the club’s first European final since the glory days of the early seventies. Their opponents were the East Germans of Lokomotive Leipzig, whose most colourful contribution in the final turned out to be their bright yellow shirts. Dennis, given special leave of absence from school, flew with the squad to Athens. ‘That trip made a huge impression on me. For example, when we arrived in Greece, Van Basten came and sat next to me on the coach and started talking about the match bonus. I think it was 17,500 guilders. Maybe it was even 25,000, but it meant nothing to me. I wasn’t thinking about money at all. I said something like: “OK” but I was thinking: “Who cares about that anyway?”’

  He also had another chance to observe Cruyff’s fascinating mind at work. In Athens, Danny Blind injured himself running on the beach, leaving the team without an experienced full-back. Cruyff calmly picked one of the youngest players in the squad, Frank Verlaat, telling the older players nearby to cover him in case he got into trouble. ‘Everyone was panicking because we’d lost Danny, but Cruyff didn’t bat an eyelid. Whenever something went wrong, it actually seemed to interest him. I think it gave him a kick. I was like that as well. I never panicked when circumstances suddenly changed. It just made me think about how to solve the problem. I liked the challenge of getting out of my comfort zone and adapting.’

  In the event, Verlaat coped just fine and Ajax won a rather dreary game 1-0, thanks to a Van Basten header, his last goal before he left to join Ruud Gullit at AC Milan. Dennis came on as a substitute in the second half but remembers little. ‘I remember Marco’s great goal, but that’s about it. I think I set up one attack, but suddenly it was all over and we had won the Cup. There was a party in the hotel afterwards, but I was quite calm. I didn’t really stop to think how special it was. Now I think: “I had just won a European trophy.”’

  Before the start of the 1987-88 season Dennis signed for Ajax as a professional. His physiotherapy studies would continue for another year, but football now took priority. Meanwhile, Cruyff was losing his footing on the high wire. To fill the void left by Van Basten’s departure, Cruyff had recruited Frank Stapleton, Arnold Muhren’s former team-mate at Manchester United, which proved to be a big mistake. Stapleton, a strong and clever centre-forward in his day, was chronically injured. While Ajax struggled in the league, Cruyff argued with his players and the club. He demanded that the team grow up fast and wanted the club to be run more professionally, in a more American style. Harmsen fumed: ‘Cruyff doesn’t know how to listen.’ Cruyff accused the club of amateurism. Team unity began to unravel. By mid-September, Ajax had lost three games. Then they lost their new captain when Frank Rijkaard stormed out, shouting at Cruyff: ‘Stop your cons
tant complaining!’ Unlike Van Basten and Van’t Schip, who didn’t mind being criticised, Rijkaard had had enough. He then vanished, turning up only later in the season at Real Zaragoza before playing in Euro ’88 and then signing for Milan. Around Christmas time, Harmsen publicly denied having agreed earlier in the season to extend Cruyff’s contract. Cruyff was livid. A few days later, at the beginning of January 1988, he told Harmsen he wanted to quit. If it was a bluff, it backfired. The board accepted his resignation. Suddenly, Cruyff’s reign was over.

  As a coach, Cruyff went on to greater things, moving back to Barcelona, building their Dream Team, winning them the European Cup (with Koeman scoring the winning goal), teaching Pep Guardiola everything he knew, and setting up Barca’s Youth academy, La Masia, to run on Ajax-like lines. Ton Harmsen’s folly ultimately cost Holland the 2010 World Cup final when a Spain team full of Cruyffian footballers, playing explicitly Cruyffian football, beat a Holland side dominated by players from an Ajax team that had fallen below his exacting standards. But, as we shall see, Dennis and Johan were a long way from being finished with each other, either.