Stillness and Speed: My Story

by Bergkamp, Dennis

  Twenty-four hours later, the Inter deal was made public, as Dennis and Wim attended a press conference in Gouda. They then immediately returned to work. In their mind the entire business had been done to avoid harming Ajax. They posed for one publicity picture in Inter shirts, then said they would give no interviews to the Italian media until after the season; the players’only concern was to finish on a high note, by winning trophies. Dennis and Wim’s agent, Rob Jansen, joked that while his boys would be millionaires Ajax would become multi-millionaires (Inter paid about ten million guilders for Jonk and 30 million for Bergkamp – the largest amounts ever paid for Dutch players).

  In the last four months of the season, Ajax were maddening, one week crushing eventual champions Feyenoord 5-0, the next dropping points to minnows like MVV Maastricht. In the UEFA Cup, two mistakes by goalkeeper Stanley Menzo cost Ajax a tie against Auxerre and Van Gaal revealed his ruthless side: Menzo was dropped and permanently replaced by youngster Edwin van der Sar. In another match, winger Bryan Roy failed to follow Van Gaal’s instructions to the letter – and was promptly shipped off to Foggia. As the chances of glory receded, Van Gaal appeared to take out his frustrations on Bergkamp and Jonk, blaming them for the PSV defeat. Even now, this rankles. Dennis: ‘His criticism of me and Wim was unjustified. I did everything I could that season to win the title with Ajax. I was totally committed to that. While Rob Jansen was negotiating with Inter, there was only one thing on my mind: the match against PSV. I wanted to win it. Yes, I had to go to The Hague on the Friday night to confirm the agreement, but I had everything under control. I took it easy on the Saturday and went to bed early. I more than made up for one late night. Van Gaal insinuated that my attitude changed after I signed for Inter. It’s just not true. Every match I wanted to perform better than the previous one. I always had that same drive, to be the best player on the field, to win. That didn’t change. Louis really should have known better.’

  At the beginning of May, Ajax lost 1-0 to little Willem II, ending their title hopes. Twenty minutes into the second half, Van Gaal replaced his star striker with mediocre defender Johnny Hansen. As he walked off, Dennis looked daggers at Louis and jerked his head as if to say: ‘What the hell are you doing?’ A TV microphone caught Van Gaal’s non-answer: ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’ When tomorrow came, Van Gaal claimed the substitution was tactical ‘because Bergkamp wasn’t in the game. Or rather, he wasn’t in the game again. Dennis is a sophisticated talent, but at the moment he seems to be blocked.’ Dennis reflects now: ‘It was obvious what he was doing. It was my last Ajax season and I’d hit my ceiling in Holland. I needed to go but somehow I felt he needed to keep me in my place, to say: “You’re nothing special, you’re just one of the team.” In that game, it was really a silly decision. I was top scorer in Holland. There was almost half an hour to go. We could have saved that game. But he wanted to make a statement.

  ‘Towards the end, I had the feeling that Ajax resented the fact that I was leaving. That puzzled and disappointed me. Before the [1992-93] winter break I’d already announced – well in advance – that this would be my last season. I gave Ajax plenty of time to prepare for my departure and the club earned a huge amount of money from my sale. What more could they have asked for? It’s normal procedure at Ajax for a home-grown player who has performed well for a while in the first team to be sold off for a lot of money.’

  * * *

  IT SEEMS STRANGE that your football relationship with Van Gaal can be so productive – yet there’s tension. And even though your football relationship with Leo Beenhakker was much less creative, you still like and get on well with him.

  Dennis: ‘I couldn’t get angry at Beenhakker. I still can’t. Leo is a great guy, with his clever comments and his ability to manage a group. He has great rapport with star players, but he’s also friendly with the reserves. He’s more suited than anyone else to a team that includes big names. He’s a real people manager. That’s the main difference between him and Louis. Leo has a lot of wisdom and he knows how to manipulate the media, too. I enjoyed working with him, even though we didn’t agree about me being number ten. Damn, that was my position! But I enjoyed training every day. Leo always had something nice to say and I admired the way he could correct or encourage players by taking them aside and just saying a few words.’

  Van Gaal was all smiles when, after the final league match of the 1992-93 season, fans at De Meer gave Dennis and Wim an emotional send-off with a fireworks display. A few days later, though, when Dennis played his last-ever competitive game for Ajax, he revealed his feelings. Scoring in the Dutch Cup final against little Heerenveen, he celebrated with an atypical snarl and clenched fist – gestures that spoke of his anger and frustration.

  And that, between the two men, was that. The match turned out to be the last time Dennis would ever play for Louis. Their paths as player and coach never crossed again. By the time Van Gaal became national coach in 2000, Bergkamp had retired from oranje. More recently, the two men were on opposite sides during the civil war at Ajax that followed the coup of 2011. Dennis was Cruyff’s closest ally, while Louis was the candidate of the anti-Cruyffists. Van Gaal is now national coach once more. When asked for an interview for this book he declined via his press officer, who said that everything Louis wanted to say about Dennis was in his 2009 book Van Gaal: Biography and Vision. There he mentions Dennis only to disparage him, claiming that Ajax were only able to win the Dutch title and the Champions League because Bergkamp left: ‘It’s not nice to say so, but [Jari] Litmanen as number 10 was an improvement on Bergkamp. Thanks to him the team became more balanced.’

  It’s an odd and ungenerous remark. Bergkamp and Litmanen were very different players, operating in different roles at a different time and with different colleagues. In any case, Van Gaal has elsewhere acknowledged that it was the return of Frank Rijkaard, first in midfield, later in central defence, which truly stabilised his side that went on to become European Champions in 1995.

  * * *

  IS THERE BAD blood between you and Van Gaal?

  Dennis: ‘It’s OK between us. It would be too strong to say that I don’t get along with Louis. Looking back, I’d say I had him as a coach at just the right time. If I’d stayed another season, things would have become difficult. It would have been a war, actually. But it’s not a big problem.’

  You basically respect him?

  ‘Of course.’

  Your difficulties weren’t like the ones you had at Inter with Ottavio Bianchi?

  ‘Oh no! It was nothing anywhere near that. And you have to remember, Louis has always wanted fantastic football. Ajax football. He would never admit it, but the football he wants is like the football Cruyff wants, and Wenger . . . It’s just their methods are different. Cruyff’s coaching is based on what he was like as a player: adventurous, spectacular, attacking. Johan relies on instinct and skills, he doesn’t analyse much. Van Gaal is more didactic. He gives his players assignments which they have to carry out in order for the system to work. And the system is sacred. Wenger is somewhere in between. His nickname is “The Professor”. He’s good at tactics, but he’s even better at creating balance in his team. Wenger doesn’t think in terms of systems. He thinks in terms of players, intelligent players, and he allows them to determine the system on the pitch. And, like Cruyff, he loves technical players, guys who can play instinctively.’

  As Van Gaal showed in the mid-nineties at Ajax and a decade later at AZ Alkmaar, his forte is working with young players who still have everything to prove and with teams who still have everything to win. It’s tougher for him when his players are less obedient. At Barcelona he clashed with Rivaldo. At Bayern he fell out with with Luca Toni and Franck Ribéry. And, five years after winning the 1995 Champions League with his young Ajax disciples, the same players were no longer willing to follow his orders blindly in the Dutch national team. Their experience with bigger clubs abroad had made them more independent.

  Dennis: ‘For Va
n Gaal all players are equal. For him there’s no such thing as big names, because everyone serves the team and the system – his system. By contrast, Cruyff relied on exceptional players, on individualists, because they were the ones who could decide a match. He stimulated his great players and challenged them, even by creating conflict if necessary. Johan himself was the greatest player of all and the other players served him, but that would be unthinkable in a team led by Van Gaal. Even for the greatest players, the team has to take precedence. But imagine you have ten mediocre painters and you also have Rembrandt. Are you going to tell Rembrandt he’s really no better than the others? Or are you going to make him feel special and let him be special, so he can create his most beautiful works of art? Wenger is different again. He keeps his distance and goes out of his way to avoid creating conflicts. His calmness, seriousness, professionalism and intelligence all rub off on the group. That’s how he makes sure everyone behaves professionally and the big players are team players. At the same time, he lets them do their own thing, which gives them the freedom to be great.’ And, of course, the Rembrandt of Dutch football was Johan Cruyff.

  When Van Gaal first started out as a young trainer under Cruyff, the two football men who grew up near each other in east Amsterdam understood and were intrigued by each other. But that changed. Differences in character gradually drove Louis and Johan unimaginably far apart. A reconciliation between two forceful and stubborn personalities seems impossible, particular after the coup and counter-coup at Ajax during 2011.

  Philosophically, the key difference may be that while Van Gaal advocates the same football as Cruyff, he remains convinced that his players need him to play it. If football is physical chess, then Louis sees himself as the grandmaster and his players as pawns. Cruyff, by contrast, aims to educate intelligent, talented players to become independent-minded individuals who will then instinctively make the right choices and collaborate efficiently with team-mates. In other words, while Louis sees the role of the manager as supreme, Johan wants to develop footballers who make the manager superfluous.

  Dennis entirely prefers Cruyff’s approach and is in turn precisely the kind of player Cruyff holds up as an example. Indeed, the whole Cruyffian plan at Ajax now – as Johan might put it – is to create new generations of Dennis Bergkamps.

  4

  INTERMEZZO

  I. The Religious War

  SIGNING FOR ONE of Italy’s biggest clubs seemed the smart move. But Dennis’s decision to join Internazionale in 1993 plunged him into a whirlpool of confusion and stress. He became a victim of broken promises and cultural misunderstandings, fell out with his coach, found himself mocked both by his own fans and by the Italian press and was even dubbed ‘strange and solitary’ by his striking partner, Ruben Sosa. By the end, his experience of football in Italy turned so bleak that Dennis considered retiring early. But what was it precisely that made the two years at San Siro difficult? ‘We were in the middle of a religious war,’ explains Tommaso Pellizzari, renowned sports writer of Milan’s main newspaper, Corriere della Sera. Dennis had unwittingly stepped into the middle of a battle between Italy’s future and its past.

  The immediate cause of conflict was one that outsiders might consider a minor doctrinal matter. But since Italian football is dominated by tactics, the issue was profound. It was this: should Italian teams stick to their traditional man-marking methods or follow the example of coaches elsewhere and switch to zonal defence? Beneath this technical issue lay a philosophical question: was defensive football really superior to the attacking game? And lurking deeper still was the yet more complex issue of identity. Should Italians continue to be Italian? Or should they try to become Dutch?

  The seeds of strife had been planted in the mid-1980s when an emerging media tycoon called Silvio Berlusconi, owner of AC Milan, the lesser of Milan’s big two football clubs, began to take an interest in the ideas and methods of an obscure young coach called Arrigo Sacchi, then at little Parma in Serie B. Sacchi himself had been incubating heretical ideas since his youth. The official creed of Italian football had long been defensive security. The country’s footballing greatness had been built on catenaccio, the ‘door-bolt’ system whose key feature was a belt-and-braces approach to stopping other teams from scoring. The strategy was to build an impregnable fortress in central defence, with two midfielders shielding two man-markers and a free man, the libero, sweeping behind. Writer Gianni Brera may have claimed that perfection in football was a 0-0 game in which neither defence made a mistake. But even the dourest defensive coaches preferred to deploy at least one free-spirited attacker whose job was to grab a goal so the rest of the team could defend the lead.

  Many foreign observers were appalled by the Italian approach, which was rooted in their historical sense of weakness. (One notable exception was Stanley Kubrick: he preferred the dark neuroses of Italian football to the ‘simplistic’ pleasures of the Dutch or Brazilians.) It should be noted that defensive football had not always been the Italian way. In the 1930s, teams representing Mussolini’s Italy had won two World Cups with a style based on the WM formation of Herbert Chap man’s Arsenal. But, much as Total Football became the official creed of the Netherlands, so post-war Italy turned devoutly Catenaccist. The system made the two Milan clubs, Inter and AC Milan, into European champions in the 1960s. Italian defenders were recognised as the best in the world; and catenaccio had proved time and again that it worked. Only now it didn’t.

  As a young man, Arrigo Sacchi had worked as a salesman for his father’s shoe factory but his real passion was football. Despite the prevailing orthodoxies, he was instinctively drawn to attacking teams like Pele’s Brazil and the great Hungarian and Real Madrid sides of the 1950s. But the style with which he fell most deeply in love was Dutch Total Football. In the early 1970s, as the golden Ajax of Cruyff and Johan Neeskens approached perfection and won the European Cup three years in a row, Sacchi found himself visiting Amsterdam with his father on business. While his dad attended trade fairs, Sacchi headed to the Middenweg to watch and learn from the great Ajax team’s training sessions.

  Sacchi was not the only Italian to be enchanted by the Dutch. In 1972, Ternana, a small team from Umbria, reached Serie A with an Italianate version of Total Football dubbed the gioco corto (short game). Ternana’s coach Corrado Viciani recited Camus to his players and drilled them to previously unimaginable levels of fitness. And when Ajax played Inter in the 1972 European Cup final, Viciani appeared on TV to declare that, for the good of Italy, Inter should lose by three or four goals: ‘The Dutch play real football, but in Italy managers are interested in playing defensively, in playing horrible and un-aesthetic football.’ In the event, Ajax outclassed Inter, but only won 2-0, and the defeat, like Ajax’s 1-0 victory over Juventus in the following year’s final, failed to shake fundamental Italian faith in their ‘horrible’ – but still rather successful – style.

  Meanwhile, Sacchi had turned his back on the shoe business and gone into coaching, starting with his local team and working his way up to Parma. Central to his vision was the abolition of man-markers and liberos. Instead, he deployed ‘The Zone’, a flexible four-man defence moulded to play as part of a fluid, compact Dutch-style formation which pressed high up the field. His defenders, midfielders and attackers were required to move as one unit and concentrate on offence. At a time when most Italian teams trained only once a day, Sacchi insisted on two sessions, so his players ran further and faster than anyone else. Silvio Berlusconi recognised the potential of this kind of entertaining football and in 1987, after Parma had beaten Milan in two Cup games, he recruited Sacchi. To help him, he went on to buy the three greatest Cruyff protégés of the day: Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard became the three most important players in the Italian league. Thus was born ‘Il Grande Milan’, one of the great teams of history. Sacchi’s Italo-Dutch fusion swept all before it, and in the process thoroughly eclipsed neighbours Inter, which remained a bastion of the old ways under
coach Giovanni Trapattoni, a veteran of the glory days of catenaccio.

  In the six years leading up to Dennis’s arrival in the city, then, the two Milan football clubs were locked in a theological as well as tribal conflict. And the contest became embarrassingly one-sided. Pellizzari, a lifelong Inter fan, recalls the shock of witnessing Milan’s era-defining destruction of a great Real Madrid side in 1989. ‘People remember the second leg, when Milan won five-nil, but the one-one away draw was more astonishing to us. For the first time we saw an Italian team go to Madrid and play as if they were in the San Siro. Milan went to Madrid and attacked! Traditionalists said, “No, we cannot play this way because we are Italians.” It was even seen as a betrayal of our identity. Trapattoni and Inter represented this view.’ Even when dour Inter won the scudetto in 1989, they were promptly overshadowed by Milan’s dazzling 4-0 victory in the European Cup final.