Stillness and Speed: My Story

by Bergkamp, Dennis

  In light of what happened to Dennis at Inter, it’s worth stressing that even Sacchi’s revolution almost failed before it started. In his first months, the Milan old guard were suspicious and defenders like Franco Baresi and Mauro Tassotti found it difficult to understand what was being asked of them. In the autumn of 1987, when Milan were knocked out of the UEFA Cup and lost a league game at home to Fiorentina, the atmosphere turned mutinous. ‘Every body thought Sacchi was finished, but then Berlusconi made his famous intervention. He goes to the dressing room and says to the players: “I want you to know that Sacchi is the trainer for this year and also for next year. As for you guys, I don’t know.” Then everything changed.’

  Italians in general, and Italian trainers in particular, are cynical, Pellizzari observes. They rarely think about aesthetics and care only about results. ‘The real revolution of Sacchi was not that The Zone game looked good but that it worked. Sacchi showed you can win this way. That’s why one of our great football writers, Mario Sconcerti, says that Sacchi is for Italian football what Kant is for philosophy: there is before Sacchi and after Sacchi. He changed us and all Italian coaches now are his heirs. Actually, I don’t think Sacchi invented anything. He borrowed it from Holland. But he is treated as if he was the inventor because nobody imagined we could play this way in Italy before.’ Even so, there is still resistance to Total Football. ‘Earlier this year a journalist called Michele Dalai wrote a book about why he hates Barcelona’s football. It was called Against Tiki-Taka and it did quite well. He doesn’t like Barça’s passing, pressing and attacking. He calls that “masturbation football”. He wants to score one goal, then defend.’

  Meanwhile, back in the early 1990s, Inter were in trouble. After Trapattoni left for Juventus in 1991, Inter president Ernesto Pellegrini, painfully aware of the superiority of Milan, tried to replicate Berlusconi’s revolution. He lighted upon Corrado Orrico, another philosophical coach, who had brought attacking football to Lucchese in Serie B. But Orrico was no Sacchi, and the Inter old guard, not least key defenders Giuseppe Bergomi and Riccardo Ferri, were unimpressed. Orrico failed and was replaced by the veteran Osvaldo Bagnoli, a much-loved, old-fashioned coach best-known for winning the championship with outsiders Verona in 1985.

  By the time Dennis Bergkamp had decided to leave Ajax and half of Europe and all the top Italian clubs wanted him, the picture had shifted once more. Sacchi was now running the Italian national team and his successor Fabio Capello, while keeping most of Sacchi’s tactics and squad, had made Milan less flamboyant but impossible to beat. Between May 1991 and March 1993 Capello’s team pre-emptively eclipsed Arsenal’s Invincibles by going a staggering 58 games without defeat. By the beginning of the 1993-94 season, though, their Dutch trio was no more. Ageing Ruud Gullit had fallen out of favour and gone to Sampdoria, Rijkaard had returned to Ajax, and Van Basten’s career was nearing its premature end because of his injured ankle. Pellegrini spotted an opportunity. Inter had finished the 1992-93 season second to champions Milan. Surely a sprinkling of magic from the Netherlands would be enough to win back the title? Inter went a-wooing and soon Dennis Bergkamp and Wim Jonk were posing for photographers in their new black and blue shirts. The Italian press hailed the signings as a nerazzurro masterstroke.

  * * *

  OF ALL THE GIN JOINTS in all the towns in all the world, Dennis, you walk Inter theirs?! You were the hottest young talent in Europe! Everyone wanted you! You could have gone to Barcelona, or Milan, or Juventus. Yet you picked the world headquarters of defensive football. It’s still hard to understand.

  Dennis: ‘Well, promises were made and it felt like the right move. I think there’s been a thread running through my life which is that I’ve made a lot of big decisions on feeling, on instinct. And that was one of them. And, you know, maybe it was the right decision in the end. I didn’t enjoy it, but I learned a lot at Inter. It was the making of me in a way. I would never have had the career I did at Arsenal if I hadn’t been there. You mentioned that I could have gone to Barcelona. Well, yes, I sort of knew Johan [Cruyff] wanted me to go there. He would drop hints about it. But he never said anything directly, so I was like “OK, if you don’t ask . . .” Anyway, at that time Spain had the rule of only four foreign players for each club, and Romario, Koeman and Hristo Stoichkov were already at Bar celona so I’d have been the fourth one. But that wasn’t really why I chose Inter. For a long time my heart was set on Italy because it was absolutely the best football country then. Italy, Italy, Italy . . . it’s all I was thinking about.

  ‘In the end, it came down to a choice between Juventus and Inter. My agent and my brother were talking to Juve and phoned me from Turin and said: “Dennis, we really don’t have a good feeling.” I said: “Well, you two guys are my eyes and ears so I believe you, I trust you.” So I chose Inter.’

  Didn’t you think to ask the AC Milan Dutch guys for advice? You were close enough to Rijkaard and Van Basten from Ajax and Gullit from the national team . . .

  ‘I didn’t feel I could pick up the phone and call them. More importantly, I didn’t want to. I was thinking: “I can go for the comfortable options of Milan, or Barcelona, or I can make my own adventure.” I wanted to do something new, go somewhere no one from Ajax had been. Guys like Johan and Frank and Marco want to let you make your own decisions. They want to help you, but if you want to make the decision yourself, that’s better, even if it’s the wrong decision.’

  So you follow your intuition. You go to Inter and the rest is . . . well, just misery, isn’t it?

  ‘Not only. I really loved the country. And my personal life couldn’t have been better. We’d [Henrita and I] just got married and it felt like a long honeymoon. We had a beautiful house outside Milan, in a small town called Civate looking over a lake. Brilliant! The guy I rented the house off was fantastic, a real Inter fan. He’d sold pots and pans out of his own garage and built up the business to be a big company. I like those success stories of people who work hard for their money. And we saw that house and loved it. Later we asked him why he hadn’t given the house to his daughter. And he said: “I don’t want to give it to that son-in-law!” [Laughs] We had a good feeling with each other. He was really normal and he talked about Inter in a nice way. He was very frustrated with their way of playing as well, so we bonded a little bit. And I remember we had to make up a contract for the rent, and he said: “No, no, you fill in the figure.” Crazy! We had another agreement as well. He had an old Ferrari in his garage, which I admired because I like cars. So he said: “If you score twenty goals, you can have it.” That was at the beginning of the first season. I thought: “I’ve just come from Holland with twenty-five goals, yeah, I think I can do that here.” I never got near the car, of course. No chance!’

  The first season wasn’t so bad. You scored some good goals and lots of penalties and everyone says you were the best player in the UEFA Cup. But you weren’t exactly surrounded by love.

  ‘Yeah, in the first season we won the UEFA Cup, though the stadium was never full and no one seemed to think those games meant much. But yeah, generally, it was . . . You know, many times I said to my wife: “We should have done it the other way around, first England and then Italy. That would have worked better.” As it was, I went from the comfort zone of Ajax, which is all playful, lots of creativity, warmth and young people to this boring, business-like atmosphere. Suddenly it’s a nine-to-five job and all the players are walking around with long faces. I’d say: “Come on, let’s have a good game today!” and they’d say: “No let’s get a result today.” It was so difficult because you see the space, you see the things you can do, and you see the quality in the team. But nobody wants to play the way I want to play. Nobody wants to follow you and I was too young to create something. And I think I turned into myself as well, a little.’

  You mentioned promises. What promises?

  ‘This was very important for me. Before we signed, the Inter president Ernesto Pellegrini came to meet us in Holland
and promised to change the way Inter played. He said they wanted attacking football, to be like the Milan of Sacchi. And that’s why they wanted to buy us, me and Wim Jonk. That’s what he said! And I believed him. So, at the beginning of the first season we tried pressing. That’s what they’d promised. They felt like Arsenal did two years later: “We need to change.” But we played two pre-season games with the pressing and we were all over the place. That’s normal because you’ve had a really different culture in the club. We didn’t know where to run. And we had a coach, Bagnoli, who for thirty years played in a certain style. He can’t change. Maybe if they’d got a young coach in from Europe, or a strong coach like a Sacchi, it might have been different.’

  Your second season with Inter was just awful. The fans turned hostile, the media were hostile and you were injured a lot and ended up scoring just two goals. And you had a coach you came to loathe: Ottavio Bianchi.

  ‘Yes, the first year was quite OK. The second was really difficult with the new coach Bianchi.’

  Wasn’t Bianchi the coach of Napoli when Maradona was there?

  ‘Yes, he did mention that a few times . . . every hour. I’ll just give one example of what he was like. He had an assistant coach who was a few years older. When we had a double training session, while the players rested Bianchi would play tennis with the assistant. To get to the court they had to walk from the training ground, past the dressing rooms and across two pitches. Well, I was brought up to show respect for people who are older than me. I look out the window and see Bianchi with his phone in his hand, walking out in front, and his assistant, who is much older, walking behind carrying the rackets, and four bottles of water and a bag . . . He’s got all this heavy stuff. He’s walking like this, carrying everything! And Bianchi is walking in front carrying nothing! Well, you lose my respect. That’s it. It’s gone. Maybe it’s supposed to be like that in Italy. But I can’t have that.’

  The relationship with Bianchi became increasingly strained, especially after Dennis returned to Holland over the winter break to get treatment for a groin injury. (Bianchi wanted him to stay in Italy; Dennis was frustrated by the failure of Italian doctors and physios to help him.) In February, Bianchi called Dennis into his office. ‘He was really strong, attacking me: I didn’t give enough, didn’t bring enough to the team, I had to work harder. And then he mentioned something about respect. And I realised: “That’s it, we’re going to have to part ways.” I said: “Listen, I really don’t have respect for you. I’ve got respect for my dad, but I don’t have respect for you. The things you have done . . .” (I had in mind the tennis thing, and the talking about Maradona, and what I saw as his arrogance and lack of respect for other people) “. . . so don’t talk to me about respect. I’ve got respect for the people I should have respect for.” Well, that’s the end of the relationship, isn’t it? You know me. It takes a lot for me to get to that point, to say those sorts of things. But I’d really had enough from him.’

  So who should we talk to from your Inter days?

  ‘Well, in the team, the people I was closest to were Massimo Paganin and Paolo Tramezzani.’

  But they were very junior. Maybe we should find people you didn’t get on with, like Ruben Sosa.

  ‘Get their side of the story, you mean? That could be interesting. We need an opinion, don’t we?’

  They could be hostile. They could say: ‘Dennis was rubbish, his attitude was wrong, he should have done this and that . . .’

  ‘I don’t mind, as long as I get a chance to react.’

  You can react all you like. It’s your book!

  ‘In that case, yes, you could get comments, but not silly ones. If you want honest opinions, you’ll more likely get them from someone like Bagnoli. He’s serious and intelligent. Yes, it might be interesting. I sort of know what they expected from me and what they wanted. But there is my truth, too. They have their truth and I have mine. Maybe they can come together somehow.’

  II. Their Truth

  OSVALDO BAGNOLI, the coach of Dennis’s first year at Inter is 78 years old now and lives in Verona. He is puzzled that Dennis is interested to hear his point of view. ‘I’m surprised he remembers me. I was with him for less than a year.’

  What do you remember about Dennis Bergkamp?

  Bagnoli: ‘Oh, a bravo ragazzo! A good guy who maybe couldn’t find his way in Milan and that’s probably why he didn’t play to his level.’

  Couldn’t find his way in football or culturally?

  ‘I think even he cannot answer this question because it is very difficult to say. I remember for example his problems with planes. He didn’t want to travel by plane. I was the same. I didn’t like travelling by plane either, but I did it. But somehow this was Dennis’s way of being: “I don’t like it. I don’t do it.”’

  Before Dennis and Wim Jonk joined the club, the president promised them that Inter would change and play attacking football like AC Milan. You were the coach, so Pellegrini must have discussed this with you . . .

  ‘No. I never heard about this and never talked about it. Every Wednesday I used to go to dinner at his house, but there was never anything like that.’

  When he appointed you as coach, did Pellegrini give you targets or instructions like ‘win the scudetto’ or ‘play like Milan’?

  ‘I think I was chosen by Inter because at that time I was fifty-six or fifty-seven years old and I had a reputation as a man with a lot of experience who was very calm, so I could work in an atmosphere of a club which had not won for a long time. I had won a scudetto with Verona so they thought I could run a difficult situation. But nobody asked me to win something, because it was very difficult in those years. Inter was not a winning team. In my first season we came second. That was a good year. But in the second year I was sacked twelve games from the end of the season, and in the twelve games after I left Inter won just one point. They were at risk of being relegated.’

  So Pellegrini never asked you to change the playing style?

  ‘No, there was nothing like that. But sometimes his wife asked me to write things down. Later, I found out she was an expert on handwriting and she studied my way of writing my signature. I don’t exclude the possibility that my sacking depended on my signature! I’m the kind of trainer who is very loyal to the club, loyal to the firm. That’s how I was in my nine years with Verona and with Genoa, too. I always had a very good relationship with the people of the club. So it happened that we might discuss about a player. Is this one or that one better than another? But I always used to accept with no problem all the choices of the club. In the case of Bergkamp, he was chosen by the club. I didn’t know anything about the fact that they were trying to buy him. He arrived and for me it was OK.’

  At Verona you were known as a rather attacking coach. But at Inter you used the classic Italian defensive style. What was your approach?

  ‘I was never a trainer who imposed my way of playing. Usually, I went to the players and said to them: “How do you prefer to play?” And then I tried to organise the team after having talked with the players.’

  Didn’t you ask Bergkamp?

  ‘I really don’t remember. It was twenty years ago. I remember there was a problem with the language, and I also remember studying him, trying to best understand his way of playing.’

  One of your ex-players, Riccardo Ferri, said your ideal was to reach goal with just three or four passes? That wouldn’t fit Dennis’s passing game at all . . .

  ‘Three or four passes? But it is obviously true! I used to say to the players: the fewer passes you make the better it is. I don’t like tick-tock football. I used to say even to the goalkeeper: if you have the ball and you see the forward is free then give him the ball. Throw the ball down there. If it is possible to do this, then do it. But if it’s not possible then we can also do the short game, the passing game, with possession of the ball because you can’t always do only one thing. So these things were also for Bergkamp. For us, he was a number ten in the of
fensive sense, though that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t come back to defend.’

  So Dennis was isolated up front?

  ‘When I was a player I was an attacking midfielder. So it was one of my principles of the game: it is totally useless if you have a forward up there on his own without the team moving altogether forward. If the forward is up there on his own, alone, you always lose the ball.’

  But that was Dennis’s experience! He was on his own with just one other attacker, usually Ruben Sosa, and it was two attackers against five defenders!

  ‘I don’t remember if this way of playing was successful or not in the sense you are asking. But I am quite sure that Dennis must have been used to playing with two forwards in Holland.’

  No. At Ajax, as the number 10, he had three other forwards and midfielders and defenders supporting the attack as well. When you say ‘the team moving altogether forward’ maybe that means something different in Italy?

  ‘That’s possible but I repeat: in my first season we finished second.’

  But Dennis wasn’t in that team. He only came in your second season.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t remember. But it is important to remember that in those years the idea was still very strong that the first thing is to use the counter-attack. That is why you have to remember the different numbers.’

  What about Dennis’s relationship with Ruben Sosa? It was so bad it was in the papers.

  ‘Generally speaking, I must say there is a great difference between reality and words, and even more between reality and words twenty years later. I really don’t remember. When I was sacked I don’t have any memory of me having problems with players or players having problems with each other. But I do remember Dennis never felt quite comfortable and never created a good relationship . . . actually neither a good relationship nor bad. I was not the kind of trainer who went to the players and said: “Please help these guys.” But I had the impression that the other guys didn’t help him. I’ve been a player myself, so I know those kind of dynamics in the dressing room. But my impression was not that there was bad will against Bergkamp. It is that maybe people thought that he was like this, so they left him alone. Maybe they respected this way of being, because they thought he was like this, because he preferred to be like this. Maybe that is what the other players thought. That’s why they didn’t accept him as leader.’