Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Certainly there was distaste. I lived in Holland for ten years, in Leiden near the North Sea, and I could see that our German tourists were not greatly popular. “How do the Germans celebrate the invasion of Europe?” “By doing it again every summer.” But I also remember that when England played West Germany in 1982 most of the teenage boys in my class wanted Germany to win. Jaap de Groot’s poem in Holland-Germany recalls that not only he but the whole world mourned the German defeat in the World Cup final of 1966. Even the World Cup final of 1974 passed off calmly, though the war was then still quite fresh. Van Hanegem did leave the field in tears, and the match meant more to him than just any old World Cup final, but the mood of 1988 was absent. In 1974, the players of both teams seemed of a kind. Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff, the two captains, were friends, and Rep and Paul Breitner thwarted the FIFA ruling against shirt-swapping on the pitch by trading jackets and ties at the post-match banquet. Jan Jongbloed, the elderly Dutch keeper, wrote in his diary afterwards: “A short disappointment which slowly passed into a being-satisfied-with-silver.”

  The euphoria after Hamburg took even the Dutch by surprise. The national transformation that occurred that day (June 21st, to be precise) is best observed in Jongbloed, who said on the day before the match that any feelings between Dutch and Germans had evaporated. The day after, on behalf of the 1974 team, he sent the 1988 team a telegram that read: “We have been released from our suffering.” After Hamburg, whenever Holland met Germany the Dutch erupted.

  It seems that on the evening of Hamburg, Dutch views of Germans changed for the worse. The evidence supports this. In 1993, the Netherlands Institute of International Relations “Clingendael” produced a report on Dutch teenagers’ attitudes to Germans. Asked to rank EC countries in order of affection, the teenagers placed Germany bottom. (The Republic of Ireland finished second last, probably because the Dutch think that that is where the sectarian murders are. Britain came third last. Spain was the most popular nation after Holland, with Luxembourg in third place.) The report showed that Dutch teenagers hate Germans far more than most adult Dutchmen do. Only those who lived through the Occupation are as antagonistic. “There is reason for concern,” the report concluded. A change had taken place, and its cause lay in soccer itself.

  In his poem “How Deeply It Runs,” Erik van Muiswinkel wonders how to explain good and evil to his daughter: Look, darling, look at the TV:

  Adam, Eve, apple?

  Hitler, Florence Nightingale?

  I don’t know, I’m agnostic.

  And preferably amoral.

  Good and Evil

  Look, darling, look at the TV:

  Orange, Gullit, White.

  White, Matthãus, Black.

  The German players were evil and the Dutch were good. Or: the Germans were German and the Dutch were Dutch.

  This had become plain long before kickoff. Bild, Germany’s answer to the Sun, placed a reporter in the Dutch hotel to dig out undermining gossip. In 1974, before Holland and Germany met in the World Cup final, Bild had run a story about goings-on in the Dutch camp, under the headline, “Cruyff, Champagne and Naked Girls.” Cruyff was distraught, Germany won the final, and the Dutch captain decided to skip the 1978 World Cup. In 1988, to keep out of Bild’s way, the Dutch barely left their hotel rooms. Even so, there was no peace to be had. Dutch FA officials had blithely agreed to a German request for the two teams to swap hotels, and so the Dutch had ended up in the noisy Intercontinental Hotel in the center of town.

  At 1 A.M. on the night before the match, a German journalist rang Gullit, the Dutch captain, in his room to ask which club he had played for before joining AC Milan. Later that night the phone rang again, and, as Gullit reported, “someone made a ridiculous remark.” Then a German journalist knocked at his door.

  The next day, as the two sides inspected the pitch before the match, the Dutch players noticed their opponents sneaking awed glances at Gullit. When the German fullback Andy Brehme, who knew Gullit slightly, went up to talk to him, the other Germans gaped at their teammate. “They’re definitely worse than us,” said Ronald Koeman. But he added gloomily, “It’s when you have to play them that it gets difficult.” We (my sympathies were not with the Germans) shared his foreboding.

  In the first half, Holland played some of the best soccer seen in Europe that decade. They treated the Germans as if they were Luxembourgeois, but failed to score. The Germans came out for the second half with a new tactic: kicking Dutchmen. The Dutch retaliated and the match grew even tenser. Then Jürgen Klinsmann fell over Frank Rijkaard’s legs—it would flatter the clumsy Klinsmann to say that he dove—and Ion Igna, the Rumanian referee, gave a penalty. “Were the Rumanians wrong in the War?” a reporter from Het Parool found himself wondering. (They were.) Matthãus, grey, po-faced and a diver, scored. Germany 1-0 up thanks to a lucky penalty, taken by their most German player: we had seen it all before.

  But minutes later, Marco van Basten collapsed in the German box and Igna gave a penalty. UEFA should have spotted the referee’s deficient powers of observation before, for when they had mistakenly given him and his linesmen plane tickets for Stuttgart instead of Hamburg, the trio dutifully flew to the wrong city. They reached Hamburg only just in time to distort the game.

  Then in the 87th minute, in the phase of a match when Germany typically score the winning goal, Van Basten scored. “Justice,” as Gullit said, had unexpectedly been done. Don Howe had a heart attack watching the match, at which point I do not know.

  Holland vs. Germany, good vs. evil. Our shirts were bright, if unfortunately striped; the Germans wore black and white. We had several players of color, including our captain, and our fans wore Gullit-hats with rasta hair; their players were all white and their fans made monkey noises. Our players were funny and natural; A Thousand Years of German Humor is the shortest book in the world, and Rudi Völler had that absurd perm. Our players were individuals; the Germans could barely be told apart by their numbers. They dived. Two days after the match, a German journalist confronted Ronald Koeman with a statement he had purportedly made about hatred of the German people. “I never said that,” responded Koeman. “It’s about players in the German team who constantly ask the referee to give yellow cards, who provoke, roll on the ground for nothing—that irritates us.” But in a way the journalist was right: these were ancient German customs Koeman was insulting.

  The two teams, in short, summed up the way the Dutch wanted to see themselves and the way they saw the Germans. We were like Ruud Gullit and they were like Lothar Matthãus. There were obvious flaws in this notion, and so, to make it fit, the Dutch briefly forgot their own discipline, their own staidness, and their own intolerance of Turks and Moroccans and Surinamese like Gullit. “We should really explain to the Germans that we hate all foreigners,” suggested Vrij Nederland, but no one did. The Germans were evil and we were good.

  The contrast was perfect in 1988, which is why Holland vs. Germany never used to be a grudge match: never before had our players been so much more noble than theirs. True, in 1974 Holland was the best team in the world. (“I liked very much what my chauffeur said. He said, ‘The best team didn’t win.’ the Dutch Prince Bernhard, a German who fought in the Dutch Resistance, told Cruyff after the final.) True, even then the Dutch were individuals. But the Germans of 1974 had charm too: Hamburg, by contrast, was World War II all over again.

  Germany occupied Holland for five years in the war, and as the Dutch tell it, they were all in the Resistance. Naturally then, on the night of Hamburg the decades seemed to fall away. The Germans even still wore eagles on their chests. The Dutch players were the Resistance, and the Germans the Wehrmacht—these comparisons are absurd, but they occurred to most Dutchmen. It was Gullit who noted after Hamburg that though the Dutch had played as dirtily as the Germans, the stern Dutch press had for once made no complaints. (Never before had Dutch journalists been seen hugging players and sobbing, “Thank you.”) The fouls were sanctioned, even blesse
d, because they were acts of Resistance. Here is Vrij Nederland interviewing the full-back Berry van Aerle:“In the match against Germany, you pulled the injured Völler’s hair.”

  “Did I pull his hair? I can’t remember that. I patted him on the head. I didn’t pull his hair.”

  “No?”

  “No. I patted him on the head and he got angry. I don’t know why either. He reacted quite strangely, suddenly jumped up to chase after me, but when Ronald stopped him he fell again and started rolling about. I thought that was strange behavior.”

  Both the journalist and Van Aerle knew what really happened, but a Resistance fighter never discusses his heroics. He hints at them, using irony, which Germans cannot understand. As Van Basten said of the Dutch penalty: “Kohler brought me off balance, after which the referee pointed to the spot. And then I just had to bow to his judgment.” The Dutch journalists laughed.

  But Wehrmacht against Resistance was not the only metaphor for the match. Hamburg was also a reversal of the invasion: an orange-clad Dutch army drove its cars into Germany and defeated the inhabitants. (In the era of regular England vs. Scotland games, the Scots would come down and conquer London for the day.) The Germans, typically, had allotted the Dutch just 6,000 tickets, but even so the Volkspark stadium was full of Dutchmen. “It would have been better to have played in Germany,” commented Frank Mill, the German striker, in what was really quite a good joke, for a German. People in Holland sang: In 1940 they came

  In 1940 they came

  In 1988 we came,

  Holadiay,

  Holadio.

  Hamburg was not only the Resistance we never quite offered but also the battle we never quite won. It reminded us of the war in yet another way: briefly, after Hamburg, all Dutchmen, from captain of the national team to fan to prime minister, were equal. The players set the tone. After the match they danced the conga and sang, “We’re Going to Munich,” a fan’s song, and “We’re Not Going Home Yet,” a popular drinking song, while at the Intercontinental, Prince Johan-Friso, the queen’s second son, joined in for, “O wat zijn die Duitsers stil,” the Dutch version of “Can you hear the Germans sing?” Gullit said he would have liked to have been with the crowds on the Leidseplein square in Amsterdam: “After all, you can hardly have a proper party in Germany.” He coined the noun bobo to describe a useless official in a blazer, and the word has passed into the language. Every day now, people in Holland call each other bobo.

  As we were egalitarian, the Germans had to be arrogant. “The way those guys treat you, a colleague, is unacceptable. If they meet you in a corridor one meter wide they can’t even summon the decency to greet you,” complained Hans van Breukelen, the Dutch goalkeeper.

  True to type, the Germans completely (but completely) missed the moral of the match. Even Beckenbauer, the good German, who boarded the Dutch bus after the match to congratulate his opponents, called the defeat “undeserved.” (He then weakened his argument by adding, “But on the other hand Holland played so well that I can hardly detract from their success.”) Matthãus thought the referee should have added on more stoppage time. Völler said weirdly: “The Dutchmen have been praised into heaven as though they came from another planet.” (Not from another planet! From another country.) Only Bild got it right: “Holland Super,” said their headline.

  The two nations next played each other in Munich, in October 1988. The German players (newspaper readers to a man) met and decided not to exchange shirts after the match. In Rotterdam, in April 1989, a banner in the stadium likened Matthãus to Adolf Hitler.

  Holland and Germany qualified for Italy, and met there in the second round. They always meet at World Cups and European Championships, or at least they do when Holland manages to qualify. In Milan, the Germans won 2-1, but that was the least of it. Rijkaard fouled Völler, who dived; the referee showed Rijkaard the yellow card, which meant that he would be suspended for the next match; Rijkaard spat at Völler, ran after him, and spat again. The whole world, the Netherlands apart, was disgusted. Both players were sent off, Völler for obscure reasons. There were riots along the Dutch-German border.

  The spitting has been badly misinterpreted. People outside Holland seem to think that Rijkaard is a temperamental character, a kind of Dutch Paul Ince or Diego Maradona. In truth, he is one of the mildest soccer players around. So why did he spit?

  Some of the Dutch players claim that Völler made racist remarks to him. Certainly, TV pictures show Völler shouting at Rijkaard after the initial foul. Völler claims he was asking, “Why did you foul me?,” and just conceivably he was. But the main flaw in the German-as-Nazi theory is that Rijkaard disputes it: he insists Völler said nothing racist. Perhaps he is protecting Völler, or defusing the row. (Rijkaard, unlike many Dutch players, does not enjoy rows.) Perhaps he is telling the truth, and the Dutch players who accuse Völler are being hysterical. The Dutch press probed the spitting until Rijkaard said: “Looking back, it’s really quite funny, isn’t it?”

  This was sacrilege. Here was the nation, trying to prove that Germans are racist and the Dutch good, and then Rijkaard goes and turns the whole thing into a joke! It turned out that he really meant it when he said he did not hate Germans. And the same is true of most Dutch West Indians.

  Gullit, beyond all doubt, hates Germans. But then Gullit has a Dutch mother and a Dutch West Indian father, only found out that he was black when he was ten years old, and once caused a furor among Dutch West Indians by saying that he feels Dutch. Rijkaard is different. His father and Gullit’s father came to Holland together, to play professional soccer, but Herman Rijkaard married a Dutch West Indian woman and Frank Rijkaard always knew he was black. Like Rijkaard, Stanley Menzo, Holland’s third goalkeeper in 1990, born in Paramaribo, Suriname, said he could live with the German victory. “What bothered me most,” Menzo added, “is that Aron Winter, Rijkaard and later Gullit too were whistled at a couple of times when they had the ball. On the other hand, I heard Dutchmen shouting all sorts of things at Germans. It’s all absurd, but I’m powerless to stop it.” The Dutch West Indians are out of this game. They spent the war in the Dutch West Indies, and Dutch patriotism is more likely to worry than enthuse them. When Rijkaard spat the general hysteria had plainly got to him, but he regretted it later. For him spitting was not Resistance, just plain bad manners.

  All the same, the incident made the next Holland vs. Germany a bit tenser. The teams met on June 18, 1992, in Gothenburg, at the European Championships, and Ronald Koeman said it was the devil who had brought the two together again.

  This time, Matthãus, the arch-German, was out injured. De Telegraaf complained that his stand-in, Andy Moller, was an unsatisfactory stand-in symbol, for “how can a true Dutchman decently hate a German who has even been rejected by his own country?” The Dutch fans managed somehow. It hardly mattered who played for Germany. As Van Aerle said before the match: “Riedle, Doll, Klinsmann, what’s the difference? They’re all dangerous. All Germans are dangerous.” And, he meant, they are all the same. Ten million Dutchmen watched the match, a new Dutch TV record, and the Ullevi stadium was packed with Dutchmen.

  German fans were less interested. Holland vs. Germany had become special to them too, but not that special. After all, Holland was not the only country Hitler had invaded. The Dutch hysteria rather bewilders the Germans. It seems to them just another kind of racism, which, I suppose, it is. “What can my little daughter do about the fact that some people in the past hurt Jews?” Bild writer and former soccer manager Udo Lattek asked Vrij Nederland. Völler blamed the rivalry on “outsiders.” “I’ve got nothing against Dutchmen,” he insisted, missing the point again. “I’ve been to Amsterdam as a schoolboy.” Beckenbauer said, “Matches against Holland have cost me years of my life. But I wouldn’t have missed them for anything. Those matches always breathed soccer of class, emotion, and unprecedented tension. Soccer in its pure form.” To Beckenbauer, the match is just a great derby: it’s what soccer’s all about. To the Dutc
h, it is a darker affair.

  In Gothenburg, as the Dutch team were leaving the changing-room, Michels stopped them and said: “Gentlemen, what I’m going to say now I have never said before. You will score three goals today, our midfield players will score two, and the Germans will score either one or two. I wish you a pleasant match.”

  Rijkaard, playing in midfield, scored after two minutes, and two Germans threw a small fragmentation bomb into a Dutch nightclub, wounding three people who for some reason were not watching the match. The nightclub stands in the Dutch town of Kerkrade, on a street called the Nieuwstraat that starts in Holland and ends in Germany.

  Then the Dutch lefthalf Rob Witschge scored from a free kick, his shot skidding under Riedle in the German wall, who jumped upwards and sideways. “You make plans for free kicks,” Michels said later, “but you never know whether the players will stick to them. Fortunately, the Germans did.” Klinsmann scored for Germany, and then Dennis Bergkamp, playing upfront for Holland, made it 3-1. With a couple of minutes to go, Michels and his assistant Dick Advocaat tried to bring on Peter Bosz for Wouters. Wouters refused to leave the pitch, and so did several other Dutch players. In the end the coaches had to take off meek young Bergkamp. “Dennis, we’re giving the fans a chance to clap you,” said Advocaat. Bosz had had to promise his brother not to swap his shirt with a German. The score stayed 3-1, as Michels had said it would. Holland vs. Germany activates supernatural powers.

  After the match, at the border by Enschede, and in the Nieuwstraat in Kerkrade, Dutchmen and Germans pelted each other with beer glasses and stones. Five hundred citizens of Enschede crossed the border and started taking apart the German town of Gronau. It was as close to war as things get in the EC. Holland’s highbrow daily, the NRC Handelsblad, complained that the young fans “were using an indignation to which they had no right, and that borrowed moment of indignation has to justify a moment of tasteless bad behavior”—but in fact World War II was not the issue. War, Resistance, and Wehrmacht were just words with which to say that our players were quintessentially Dutch and theirs typically German.