In the first two group games, Holland, with Dennis conducting the team from his new deeper position, overcame stubborn Czech and Danish resistance. They then beat a reserve French team in a dead rubber before the quarter-final in which Dennis inspired a devastating 6-1 win over the Yugoslavs. Patriotic football frenzy now gripped the Netherlands. Towns and cities were awash with flags and bunting and the entire village of Hoenderloo, where the Dutch team was staying, painted itself orange. It made Dennis uneasy. ‘It’s great when the people are behind you, their enthusiasm really gives you a kick. But this was over the top, too much hysteria with all those orange masks and wigs. When you’re abroad you hardly notice what’s going on at home. When you turned on the TV during the World Cup in France, it was lovely and relaxing, it helped you forget football for a while. But in 2000 every time the TV was on, orange hysteria burst into the hotel room. Almost every programme was about us, about the Championship we’d apparently already practically won. You couldn’t shut out the craziness.’
Beating the Italians in the semi-final in Amsterdam would surely be a formality. And so it should have been. But one of the strangest, most one-sided of matches produced a bizarre ending. Italy, playing with ten men after the sending-off of Zambrotta, had just one clear chance. Holland had more than twenty chances, failed to score from any of them and even missed two penalties in normal time. In the shootout they missed three times. By that stage, however, Dennis, who would surely have done better with his spot-kicks than Frank de Boer, Jaap Stam and Paul Bosvelt, was no longer on the field.
In the 77th minute, coach Rijkaard had replaced winger Boudewijn Zenden with Peter van Vossen, the 32-year-old who’d had a mediocre season with Feyenoord. When he came on Van Vossen urged the crowd to make more noise but otherwise contributed little. He and Rijkaard were close, but surely the manager would not have been swayed by sentiment during a major semi-final? Then in the 84th minute Clarence Seedorf came on for Dennis. Dennis was bewildered. Fine all-rounder though he is, Seedorf was not known for Bergkamp-style match-winning moments – and didn’t produce one. Rijkaard’s third change, in the 95th minute, was the strangest of all: Cocu off in place of 33-year-old midfielder Aron Winter. The substitution enabled Winter to break Ruud Krol’s record for appearances, but did nothing to break down the Italian defence.
Even though the game was clearly headed for penalties, the two renowned pinch-hitting strikers and penalty specialists, Pierre van Hooijdonk and Roy Makaay, were left on the bench. Rijkaard later said his idea had been to inject energy into his sagging team. But Dennis remains unimpressed. ‘I still think they were peculiar changes. I thought: “Come on, man, why don’t you leave me on the pitch? Remember Van Basten in 1988 against the Germans, Bergkamp in 1998 against Argentina?” I felt I was capable of producing something like that again. I was still in the game, I wasn’t tired and I was sure I could do it: give the deciding pass or score myself. But Rijkaard brought me off and I was very, very unhappy about that.’
As at the World Cup, the French were amazed to see their most feared opponents fall, and went on to beat Italy narrowly in the final. Patrick Vieira observes: ‘I never understood why that Dutch team didn’t win. They had everything that generation: Kluivert, Bergkamp, Overmars . . . I remember watching them play against Argentina and they were unbelievable. Unbelievable! That was a good game of football! One of the differences between Holland and France at that time was that we had maybe less quality but we had more physical power. If you look at our back four, physically it was unbelievable: Thuram, Lizarazu, Desailly, Laurent Blanc . . . We were winners. We were putting our heads where the Dutch would put their feet. And maybe the Dutch would not put their head where we were putting our feet. That was the difference.’
Dennis reflects sadly on the two tournaments that got away: ‘I still don’t know how we didn’t beat Italy. Losing on penalties like that was humbling, but it was less shocking and less long-lasting than 1998. The World Cup is much bigger than a European Championship and you sense that. When it was over, we thanked the crowd and I knew: “OK, that’s it then. Now I have to make an announcement and bid farewell.”’
But ’98 still haunts you?
‘We shouldn’t have lost to Brazil. That’s definite. We were better than them. In ninety-six we know the problems of course. I’m not sure if we could have won that, but we could have got into the final, I think. But in ninety-eight it all clicked, it was all good. We should have won that. We should have beaten Brazil. And then we could have given France a real good game. They didn’t want to play us, from what I understand. And the same with Euro 2000: we should have beaten Italy easily to get to the final. I think our game didn’t really suit France. They liked being technically better than their opponents, but we were technically better than them. So in the end we knew we were really good players but we couldn’t take that extra step. That is disappointing because . . . After tournaments we always say: “But we are only a small country . . .” We do have fantastic players. But sometimes I feel you need a bit less of the same, you know? We are all technical players, all thinking, playing football, all passing the ball, doing it in a good way. But sometimes you need a defender who just puts it in the stand, or just takes pleasure in his striker not scoring. And upfront, as well, we needed to be more clinical sometimes. You need to have differences in a mental way as well. But, yeah, it’s so disappointing. We should have won one of those tournaments.’
17
THE PENALTY
‘ISN’T IT EVERY little boy’s dream?’ Dennis wonders. ‘You’re playing in the World Cup final. It’s one-one and just before the final whistle you’re awarded a penalty. And you get to take it. In your dream you put it away without effort. But in real life most kids cave in under the pressure because fear of failure suddenly kicks in. But that didn’t affect me. Of course, taking a penalty can be scary but – and maybe this sounds weird – I liked that scariness. I enjoyed that tension.’
It’s 14 April 1999 and something close to the little boy’s dream is about to be enacted. It’s 1-1 in a throbbing FA Cup semi-final replay at Villa Park between the two great English teams of the day: Arsenal, the reigning Double champions, and Manchester United, champions in four of the previous six seasons. United are a man down because Roy Keane was sent off. Just before the final whistle, Phil Neville clatters Ray Parlour to give Arsenal a penalty. Every boy’s dream . . . Dennis, Arsenal’s most reliable penalty-taker, places the ball on the spot and runs up to take the kick that will surely send his team to their second successive FA Cup final and set up an unprecedented double Double.
‘I’d scored our goal. It was deflected but it had gone in. And I’d played well. So I felt confident enough to take that penalty. I was up for it. Of course, it’s against Peter Schmeichel. He’s a great goalie and he’s got plenty of reach to the corners. So you have to hit it firm. And that’s what I do. I pick my corner – as always – after I walk back from the spot. That was my routine: put the ball down, walk back, then decide. I’m going to hit it there: bottom right corner. Don’t show it too much to the goalkeeper, and hit it firm and then it should be OK. But here, Schmeichel’s got – like a cat, you know? – a better reaction than I expect. Maybe he sees something, or maybe he guesses correctly. And as soon as you kick it, you look up and you can see him going. Then you know it’s not good enough. You already know before he stops it. You look up. You don’t see the details, but you see . . . it’s like a shadow . . . a little flash . . . And then it’s . . . you realise it’s a miss. Yeah. It was a bad moment.’
Manchester United survived and, to everyone’s surprise, including their own, went on to win thanks to Ryan Giggs’s solo goal after a mistake by Patrick Vieira. Another error cost Arsenal the league title at Leeds four weeks later, when substitute Nelson Vivas left Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink free to head the decisive goal. Manchester United went on to win the Cup, the Premier League and the Champions League: the Treble. Ray Parlour remembers it all too well: ‘In th
em days it was only us and Manchester United. It was such a close call between us! I mean, Dennis, if he scores that penalty we win the Double again, because Man United would have gone. If we’d won the semi-final their heads would have gone down and they would have dropped points in the league. It was amazing how close we were to winning the Double again. One kick away! Then that game at Leeds . . . oh God! It was nil-nil and we only needed a point. And we let in a goal in the last minute! I played with Hasselbaink later at Middlesbrough and said: “What were you doing, Jim? What’d you do that to us for?” And he had a big grin on his face. Even the Leeds fans wanted Arsenal to win, so Man U wouldn’t win the league. But Jimmy was obviously a Dutchman and didn’t realise!’
Was it a bad penalty from Dennis or a good save by Schmeichel? Parlour: ‘Look, at the end of the day, if you blaze over the bar or miss the target completely, it’s a bad penalty. But Dennis hit the target. It’s all about the keeper going the right way, isn’t it? But, oh dear! Dennis didn’t speak for days. We all said: “Dennis, it happens: ups and downs, football’s like that, you’re going to get bad days, good days. And this was a bad day for all of us, not just for you. It just wasn’t to be.” Then look back to the ’03-’04 season. At Old Trafford, Manchester United get a penalty against us in the last minute and hit the crossbar! You’d bet your house on Van Nistelrooy scoring. If he scores that, we lose in September. Instead, we go the whole season unbeaten. That’s how football can change sometimes. So it’s a little bit of fate at times, and Manchester United especially had a bit of [good] fate that year.’
Tony Adams remembers Dennis’s distress. ‘It’s the last time he ever took a penalty, isn’t it? I think he said he’d never take another one. We didn’t blame him. Never ever. But it was a trauma to him. I could tell because he was even more quiet than usual. Vulnerable, weak human being that I am, I always kind of left him alone because he seemed like he could manage. He’s like Becks, who’s emotionally intelligent as well. After that Argentina thing [Beckham sent off as England lost to Argentina in the 1998 World Cup] I made him laugh. At least I think I did. I said: “It’s all right for you. You’ll get another chance, but it’s my last World Cup and you’ve fucked it right up for me!” And it kind of broke him out of it. But he was in bits and it was completely normal. And the reaction of Dennis was completely Dennis.’
* * *
IT WASN’T YOUR last penalty was it?
Dennis: ‘No, I still took the odd one, without problems, without hesitation and without missing. But that miss did bother me for quite a while, and the next season Thierry Henry became our penalty-taker. That didn’t bother me. If someone else is better at something than I am, then they should do it, it’s better for the team. Anyway, by then I was becoming more of an assister than a finisher so I didn’t really need to score that extra goal any more.’
What was your immediate reaction?
‘Well, I’m not a person to just drop, you know? It’s more that I was angry and you just get on with it and want to make up for it. It’s still one-one. We’re still a man over. Then, afterwards, Giggs scored. Yeah, it’s strange. Sometimes winning is a question of habit. Man United had the habit of winning. They expected it. This is football. It’s not our day. It’s not my day. It’s their day. It’s their season. You can’t catch those things, you don’t know why it happens. What is luck? What is form? You can work for it, but, really, what is form? You don’t agree with it, you want to fight it . . . Afterwards you realise that it’s one of those things.
‘I should have done better with the penalty, but everything came together for them that season. If you look at the Invincibles, I’m sure there were forty or fifty things that happened in that season where it could have gone the other way. It could have gone the other way against Man United in the fiftieth game as well. If we’d had a draw then our unbeaten run would have carried on for another twenty or thirty games. These things are really strange in football.’
It can’t be analysed?
‘I don’t think so, because you’re talking about a level where everything is so close. It’s not like a difference of three goals. It’s close. Sometimes you’re better on the day. Sometimes you’ve got the better players who are more in form. And sometimes it’s the other way. “Why didn’t that ball go in? I’ve done everything right . . .” That was my first reaction on the penalty as well. “I’ve done everything right, but Schmeichel is a great goalie.” But then you’re fooling yourself, because the penalty didn’t go in, so it wasn’t good enough. I was so disappointed with that. And then the Leeds game. It was just disappointing, especially after doing the Double in ninety-eight.’
People say that was the decisive moment when you could have broken United. Not only would they have missed the Treble, but a second Double for Arsenal might have established dominance.
‘Well, I’m not sure you can hang all that on one kick! I’m not sure if it’s that big an influence. From the inside, I would say it hurts your team, but it’s not like: “Oh, we have to start all over again.” You’re very close and you realise that. For the next few years we’re first or second. And at least ninety-nine showed that ninety-eight wasn’t a one-off, a fluke. We were good enough to compete with them now, which wasn’t the case before. In my first and second seasons we were nowhere near. So we were making steps, and that was all through the club. The idea was, “We’re not that far off now.”’
LOOKING BACK, IT seems odd that even during the best years of Arsenal, say from 1998 to 2004, United are a bit ahead. They win the league four times, Arsenal three. And they’ve won more since, of course. I asked some of the old players about it. Patrick Vieira says: ‘I think first you have to give credit to United. They came back stronger every time we won the league. But what is really difficult is not just to do it once, but to win the league two or three times in a row. We didn’t know how to keep doing it. We were missing something and we lost games that we shouldn’t and small details . . . The difference was that as a club United had been doing it for years. If you think you are a winner, you can win. And it is not just the leading players. It’s the whole club, all the way down to the ground-staff, from the bottom to the top. United knew how to win and we were behind them in that. We were striving to be successful, and that is not the same. We were building a domination and United had it already. So we were a few steps behind.’
Thierry Henry points out the economic mismatch: ‘At that time everyone within the club knew we had to keep the team we had in order to have the new stadium. Basically, everything went towards the new stadium. We didn’t do badly in the meantime, but Man United always added one or two or three players a year. And we were losing one or two or three every year. Marc Overmars and Manu Petit went together to Barcelona. Later, Robert [Pires] went to Villarreal. Patrick went to Juve. David Seaman went to Man City and retired. Lee Dixon retired. Nigel Winterburn went to West Ham and retired. Freddie went to West Ham, the MLS, came back . . . I don’t like to talk about stuff I don’t know about, and I don’t know what was going on with the board. But I’d say Arsene has done extremely well in the last few years. If you compare it with Manchester United then maybe you’d say: “Oh, maybe not.” But given the limited resources, Arsene hasn’t done badly.’
And, as Ray Parlour says, United were really a top team, too: ‘Look at their midfield: Keane, Scholes, Beckham, Giggs in his prime. Then you add the strikers: Cole, Yorke, Sheringham comes into the side, and Van Nistelrooy. And Stam at the back . . . Quality. It’s a hell of a team. We had a very good team ourselves, but you can see why they did dominate a little bit as well. They were such a force and the games with them were massive, massive. As soon as that fixture list comes out, the first team we look at – “When have we got ’em? Where have we got ’em?” – is United. Season 1997-98 was amazing because we were twelve points behind, but we knew if we beat them at Old Trafford we could go on a good run. Little Overmars scored and we beat them one-nil and I think we won ten in a row. We won the l
eague with three games to spare in the end. We knew we had a good side then. We knew we could compete for many years, because we were all quite a good age. And now we knew Man United would be looking over their shoulders. Because they used to walk it some seasons too easily. But now Alex Ferguson was like : “Wooah . . . this team’s strong. This team is the one to beat.” We pushed them close every single season.’
* * *
DENNIS: ‘WINNING IN football is sometimes about habit. We were close enough to compete with them, but to change that habit? That’s history. Not only in my time, but with the whole history of Man United.’
I wouldn’t say that.
‘Wouldn’t you say that Man U is a bigger club than Arsenal?’
Depends how you look at it. In the 1930s, Arsenal were giants and United nowhere. In the 1950s United had the Busby Babes, who were wonderful and died. Then ten years later their resurrection team – Charlton, Best, Law – won the European Cup, which the Babes had been trying to win when they died. That’s where the club’s mystique comes from. But then they went into a long decline and didn’t win the league for 25 years.
‘But on average? I mean, weren’t they second all the time?’
I don’t think so. Let’s look it up . . . OK . . . between 1968 and 1992 United were second . . . four times. And won some Cups. And got relegated one year. For a few years Leeds were the giants. Then for 20 years Liverpool were the giants. And when you arrived, the reigning champions were Blackburn Rovers. Admittedly, United were on a roll. They became champions in ’93 then did the Double the next year. And in your first season they did the Double again. But the idea of them being this mega-club who won all the time was recent.
‘It’s strange because I had a different impression. When I first came here, it felt like it’s a big achievement to compete, not only with them but other teams as well. In my first season we qualified for the UEFA Cup. Everyone was happy about that. And United had everything to be a successful team for many years. I didn’t feel that at Arsenal. We didn’t feel we could compete for the championship. It wasn’t normal. In my first season it was like “UEFA Cup! Yay!!” And where did we finish? Fifth? But the steps we made afterwards . . . In my opinion, in those years, those five, six, seven years, we were really equal to Man U and even in a few of those we were better. In the Invincibles season, definitely, and maybe one or two seasons before and after that. Those were big steps, big steps.’
Stillness and Speed: My Story Page 20