Stillness and Speed: My Story

by Bergkamp, Dennis

  15

  LEADERS

  WHO LEADS ON A football field? And how do they do it? Some times it’s hard to tell because dominant figures come in a range of shapes, sizes, personalities and decibel levels. There’s also confusion between different types of leader and teams usually have more than one. As well as formally appointed captains, there are ‘technical leaders’ and specialists. Old English centre-forwards, for example, were said to ‘lead the line’. Goalkeepers dominate defence. Some of the natural leaders who have influenced Dennis Bergkamp’s career, like Tony Adams in clenched-fist warrior mode or Johan Cruyff, who used to shout, point and tell team-mates where to run, are impossible to miss. Others, like Dennis himself, are harder to spot.

  In fact some colleagues failed to see leadership qualities in him at all. At Inter, in the view of Riccardo Ferri, Dennis was ‘too quiet’. To Ferri, the crucial point is that the leader must be vocal and gregarious. ‘Dennis never became the technical leader at Inter. You can’t just say: “He’s the leader now.” The team decides. I don’t know how it was in the Arsenal dressing room, but at Inter if you don’t socialise you won’t be the leader. You can be Maradona but if you don’t socialise you still won’t be the leader. At Napoli, Maradona showed his feelings all the time. And he was very generous. When he was interviewed after a game, even if he’d scored three goals, he always praised someone else in the team. He’d say: “I couldn’t have done it without De Napoli,” though De Napoli was a very modest player. Maradona was generous to the whole team, outside as well. He invited everyone out, had dinner with everyone.’

  Osvaldo Bagnoli makes a similar point: ‘A team chooses who must be the team’s leader. It is an automatic, unconscious thing. Subconscious even. It just happens. And that Inter team didn’t choose Dennis. Maybe it was because of his character, his shyness, his loneliness, his “closedness”. If he’d had more time maybe he could have become the leader. But he didn’t.’

  As Arsenal goalkeeping coach when Dennis arrived at the club in 1995, Bob Wilson saw the Dutchman differently. ‘When you’re a genius it’s often very difficult not to be arrogant with it. Some people could misinterpret Dennis’s aloofness at times. I saw it as shyness. He would never talk about how great he was as a player or anything like that. He was humble. But I’m seventy-one years of age now, and I’ve loved and followed football from the age of six or seven, and he is in my handful of top players of all time. I put him up there with Stanley Matthews, Puskas and Hidegkuti, Duncan Edwards, Pele, Garrincha to a degree, Cruyff, Maradona, Messi, Beckenbauer, Bobby Moore: players who without doubt made the game better. Dennis Bergkamp took the game to a new level. For all watchers of the game, I think he led them into almost an unknown area of how they viewed the game. It was his total mastery, total mastery, of the ball. He was like a juggler on stage, except people were kicking him. Was he a leader? Of course he was. He was the one the others would turn to and say: “Look Dennis, we’re in trouble, we can’t find a way through,” and he would come up with something different. But without doubt the biggest thing that Dennis did for the players was to show them they didn’t need to hide or be scared if they made a mistake. “Do it. You can do it! You’re capable.” He was never like Tony Adams or Frank McLintock. He was more like Bobby Moore. There was this presence and calmness about what he did that made people think: “My God, we’ll try that.” He was the leader of the pack. He was inspiring.’

  Thierry Henry confirms this. ‘People sometimes get confused between arrogance and confidence so they misunderstand Dutch players. Dutch players are very, very confident. People always go: “They’re a bit arrogant.” No! They are confident. One of the things I loved right away about Dennis was that he was super-confident and not arrogant at all. Sometimes I heard people say: “Why does he have to show off?” He’s not showing off. That’s how he plays. Like his goal against Newcastle. People cannot comprehend why Dennis did that. But for him there is no “why”. The ball was coming this way, so: “OK, I’ll control it the other way, get in behind Dabizas, make sure the spin is right to come back . . . then finish.” For someone else it’s impossible. For him it’s natural. I played with Zidane, with Messi, with Xavi, Iniesta, Ronaldinho, Eto’o . . . Those guys were unbelievable. If you’re talking about raw talent, Zizou was out of this world. He could do whatever he wanted. I mean the guy was dancing with the ball. Sometimes I was watching him and my mouth was just hanging open. Messi? He’s doing stuff that I don’t know if anyone will ever do again. Maradona? Incomparable! Cruyff? The same. Platini, the same. But I played with Dennis Bergkamp the longest and I saw him every day in training and the way he saw the game and the way he was . . . and that’s why I always say Dennis was the best that I played with. For me Dennis was and always will be The Master.

  ‘When I arrived it was his team so it was always like that. When he left it was different, but as long as he was there it was his team. Don’t get me wrong. Dennis has a big, big personality. But that’s why I admire him even more. Any big players at that level have a big ego, but Dennis could control it. When he was in his prime he could have scored a lot more goals. But sometimes the game was asking him to pass the ball to the free man, and that’s what he did. Dennis was for me and always will be The Man. It wasn’t a case of “looking up” to him. It was just like having an older brother. But he was intelligent enough to know he didn’t need to be the front man. He doesn’t shout a lot but when he looks at you . . .! Dennis talks with the ball, which is the best way to talk.’

  Tony Adams was more sceptical. ‘Other people can be sentimental and tell you about his magic more articulately than me. But what you’ll get from me is the reality, my experience. I had respect for Dennis but I wasn’t overwhelmed. You’ve got to take into consideration where I was when Dennis came to the club. In 1995 I wanted to die. I didn’t give a shit about Dennis Bergkamp. Then I got sober and the world was my oyster. I came to life and I had this fellow team-mate who was technically unbelievable. But there were a lot of players who came into that team, don’t forget. So I’m just seeing it differently to everybody else. I went from being very sociable, one of the lads, but being masked most of the time, to going to AA recovery meetings. Suddenly I’ve got this new-found know ledge and health and I can enjoy playing with Dennis.

  ‘But I’m still the captain. And that’s like line management. You need to play a role at times. I couldn’t be his mate. I didn’t think it was my place. Maybe in another life, another place, another situation, we would have had a different relationship. But I had the voice of the manager. I was wanting to win and Dennis was a player who could get me to where I wanted to go. So I was going to make sure I was on him.’

  On him? Driving him? Pushing him?

  ‘Yeah. But he didn’t need a lot because he was the ultimate professional. I didn’t need to keep him on his toes. Only the once. That’s all I needed to do, and that’s all he needed to take. You know, I’ve played with hundreds, and against hundreds, of players in three decades. People like Maradona, Van Basten, Dalglish, Thierry . . . unbelievable players. And I put Dennis in my top three. Top three. I’m not saying who the other two are, but Dennis . . . For me, he was ten times the player Thierry was. But I’m also serious. I’m professional and I don’t like waste and I just felt at one point that he was on cruise control, just going a little bit through the motions. Super, super player. But come on Dennis, it’s about time you won the league, player of the year. That kind of stuff should be yours for the taking. This would have been 1997 or early 1998. We’ve come through the dark years. We’ve done the Bruce [Rioch] thing. We’ve got the team in place. We’ve got the finance. The next step is to win stuff. So we’re getting on the coach after the Middlesbrough game and he’s sitting there. On his own . . .’

  On his own?

  ‘. . . We had a kind of set-up with the English boys at the back of the coach. It was more to do with us and nobody can kind of come in, like no one can just walk into an old East End family.
We’d grown up together. Me and Bouldy used to drink together. Dicko [Lee Dixon] I’ve known for ten years at that point. With Nigel [Winterburn] we’ve known each other ten lifetimes, and Dave Seaman . . . We’d lived and breathed, men together, you know? Like in the army. So we’re sitting at the back and we’re maybe to blame for not including other people in the squad . . . But anyway, I go to Dennis and I say it. “Dennis, you’ve been here two-and-a-half years and you haven’t won anything. It’s time for you to win something. How much do you want it?” It looked like I got a reaction from him, physically, in his face. As I was going, I was thinking: “He might just turn round and punch me.”’

  And did you sense a change after that?

  ‘A few months later we’ve won the Double, Dennis is player of the year and he’s just played the best football of his life.’

  He’s said your phrase stuck with him: ‘How much do you want it?’ It was kind of a revelation for him. It’s a phrase he adopted and often uses now.

  ‘Yeah, I remember him saying that. But it was all for me, really, because some players don’t need motivating. He could quite easily have said: “Oh, for fuck’s sake shut up, Tone.” But he didn’t. It was just part of my thing. “How much do you want it? Come on!” Passion, pride in the club, motivation. That’s the way I kind of worked. It helped my concentration. Manu Petit was very quiet, but I was . . . [clenches fist, makes war face, bangs forehead] WOOO-Aaaarr! I would be that kind of pumped up. The adrenaline going. Motivation! Martin [Keown] was like that as well, but he didn’t calm down. He needed to calm down. Oh God, the number of penalties Martin gave away down the years with his impetuous tackles! And Dennis was so quiet I felt I needed to get him up now and again. But maybe he didn’t need it. There was enormous self-motivation in there anyway. He couldn’t have got to where he got to without having drive. I was learning about me and other people, and what makes other people tick . . .’

  To Patrick Vieira, Adams’s successor as Arsenal captain, Dennis’s secret lay precisely in his quietness. ‘Dennis is not the one who will shout and he is not the one who will talk. But on the field we knew that he was our technical leader, the one who would bring the small magic that would help us win something. You knew he would be the one to make the assist, to create something.’

  You were the captain, but Dennis was the leader?

  Vieira: ‘Dennis was our inspiration, he was the leader. We knew that Thierry would score, and we knew that Dennis would make something happen, and we knew that Sol Campbell would be the one who leads at the back and we knew that in midfield I would be the one who got the red card.’

  How did the squad see him?

  ‘He got the respect from people. That’s why everybody likes Dennis. Of course he has got this kind of Dutch arrogance. I say it all the time. “We are the best, we have the best way,” you know? [laughs] But everybody liked him because he respected everybody. And he was popular in the dressing room. Everybody was laughing and talking with him so we all knew that he was our technical leader on the field. But I think what was really good as well was that they brought in a manager who has got the same philosophy. You couldn’t have in your team Dennis Bergkamp and a manager who would want to play kick and rush. If you didn’t have Dennis and you had instead a player like Duncan Ferguson, that would not fit your team trying to play football. Because that is the way it is.’

  * * *

  DENNIS SAYS HE was impressed by Vieira as a leader.

  ‘He is French, so he is moody sometimes and arrogant. I keep telling him that as well [laughs]. Off the pitch he is just a normal very polite guy and very charming. All the women say: “Patrick, he is so charming!” But he’s got this personality. It’s overwhelming when he comes into the room. Fantastic charisma. And he was a good leader as well. After Tony Adams, it was like “Who can take over?” Tony was the captain. Tony ‘Captain’ Adams. It was his middle name almost. Who is going to be next? But Patrick built that role fantastically in his own way, less clenched fist, more connecting to everyone, to the kit man, to the chef, the coach, the players . . . That role doesn’t suit everyone, but he could do it. He could play football and take that role on himself.’

  This still leaves the question of how the role of technical leader works in practice and how, specifically, it worked with Dennis. Having failed to be accepted as a leader in Italy, he goes on in England to lead Arsenal not just moment-by-moment on the pitch but from boring football to Total Football. What exactly was the mechanism? Arsene Wenger has the most intriguing and perceptive explanation: ‘It took Dennis a while to adapt. Because he was questioned a lot in the first year. But after that, he slowly became more and more important in the team. Was it linked with confidence? Was it linked with the fact that I arrived? Was it linked with the fact that there are more technical players around him? And some are improving technically because of his influence? It is . . . certainly a little bit of all of that. It’s very difficult to give a percentage to that. But the biggest thing was that everybody acknowledged his quality.

  ‘Of course, I am a lover of the way the Dutch see football. They have a positive philosophy and they build the game from the back. The Dutch also have a philosophy that they put the ‘brain players’ through the middle, the technically gifted players, the thoughtful, clever ones. They put them through the middle of the pitch, in the heart of the team. And there is nobody better than Dennis as the symbol of this Dutch philosophy, because it is based on technical quality, imagination, the brain. When you’re a manager, you can only develop that game if the player is respected in the team. That means the team accepts to play the game that suits the player. They do this if they feel they have an interest to do it. And the big strength of Dennis is that he was hugely respected by the other players of the team.

  ‘I find similarities when I speak with my former players about Dennis, and when I speak with the former players of the French national team about Zidane. Without judging who was the better one, I find similarities between the respect and the admiration of their partners in the team. Once you have that, it’s easy because when they say something, people listen. They understand that it is in their interest. Because a team has a kind of subconscious intelligence. And the game flows naturally through the strong points of the team. That means the game goes from Tony Adams to Patrick Vieira, from Patrick Vieira to Dennis Bergkamp, from Dennis Bergkamp to Thierry Henry. The team understands that it’s in their interest to do that. It can sometimes become detrimental if one player is so strong that the team always goes through him, because the variety of your game can suffer. But it was not the case with us, because Dennis had such intelligence. What is quite remarkable, he was more . . . He was a guy with a strong personality. Sometimes they say when a person enters the room that people look at him. To go in there, to give that impression, that person has to think: “I am the most important person.” It is a subconscious way. I would say Dennis is the exact opposite. The exact opposite. But he still has a kind of aristocratic elegance in the way he walks, in the way he behaves. And he provokes attention through a kind of attitude and class, natural class, and elegance.’

  Gary Lewin recalls how this worked in practice. ‘When Dennis came into the club, he was fully aware of what was going on around him. Some things he liked, some things he probably didn’t like. People around him could see what he was like. He would always talk before and during a game: “Try doing it like this . . .” He would educate players in that way. But he wouldn’t be in your face, he wouldn’t be shouting at you, and he wouldn’t do it in front of other people. He was more of a quiet-word person. Some people would say “introverted”, but I don’t think he was introverted. I think he knew exactly what he was doing.’

  Dennis himself reflects: ‘What is a leader? It’s an interesting question. Cruyff used to stand with his foot on the ball gesticulating and point wildly to everyone, telling them where to go. He was a leader. But in my day I never had time to stand still with the ball. I would have been ha
cked down immediately! By the nineties, there weren’t any leaders like him. In my day everyone coached each other. That’s what I did. I was constantly coaching and I led players, too. I never hid, I always demanded the ball. I always tried to play a prominent role, to be the best. I was never satisfied, I always wanted to try even harder. As a trainer I’m like that, too. If one of our strikers misses a chance, I start thinking about it. What can I do to make sure he scores next time? I want to be such a good trainer that I can teach a striker to avoid missing any chances. I want to be good at what I do, and I want to be important, but I’m not after fame. That’s why I have no ambition to be a manager.’

  OK. There are all sorts of leaders – so what kind are you?

  ‘You mentioned how Patrick Vieira was a totally different leader to Tony Adams, but they were both leaders. Patrick, of course, had a completely different style. Maybe you didn’t really see on the pitch, but he led the team and all the people in the club. It’s fantastic, and it’s different. And, yes, you can be a technical leader as well, and I like to be that more, you know, leading by example. It’s similar with coaches. You’ve got coaches who are loud and really out there shouting so people will say: “Look at him, he’s a real coach!” Whereas Wenger is more a teacher, and he’s teaching the right stuff. I never like people who are out there for show, the guys who shout all the time. At the lower level of the game, you see a lot of coaches and captains as well – ‘leaders’ – who are just out there for the armband and the show. To me a leader is someone who affects people, who makes changes, who makes other players or people better. It’s the opposite of someone doing it for the cameras.’

  Tony Adams is obviously camera-friendly, yet he also leads in the sense you mean, doesn’t he?

  ‘Oh yes, yes. You look at him and think he’s the prototype leader, you know, with all the shouting and the clenched fists. But he’s not doing that for the cameras. If you didn’t know him, you might think he was, but he’s like that in the dressing room, too. A real leader. Bergomi was similar, actually. Tony was rougher, I’d say, but within the team Bergomi was also very strong and he approached the game, the players and the coach in a way that was similar to Tony. He did it in an Italian way, of course, but almost military-like: “I’m the captain!” I kind of liked him, because he had this awareness and intensity. I thought he was a good guy. He had a presence. Tony’s got presence as well. Actually, a lot of players have got presence.