Great post
@Fortitude
Re: the cog in it all. My take on it has always been Di Stéfano was the ultimate total footballer but not in a total football team. That is, it heightens his role that he was this force of nature moving up and down the spine making it all work.
On the other hand you have Cruyff at the centre of that classic total football team with insane pressing in packs and everyone capable to swap roles with others. It revolutionised football, not least because the classic man-marking details seemed to go to pot with it. Somewhat unfairly, Cruyff's standing gets watered down by the system, which blurs where the credit belongs (team? manager? Cruyff?, clearly all!).
What I've always wondered though is, which is harder? Being the orchestrator in a team with others playing conventional roles, or in a team with the complexity of that Dutch side, a complexity that baffled rivals but which Cruyff needed to be one step ahead of?
I guess a problem with this kind of question is that we only have a handful of players or teams apart from the originators who could even emulate it, and even then, they're all really pale imitators of the originals. Di Stefano was at his best over 60 years ago, and we still haven't seen another player anywhere near him for what he could do, so his scale of orchestration hasn't, and probably won't be seen again. To knit the entire central core of a side together by yourself, is
Roy Of The Rovers stuff and I can understand why people who've no interest in studying the history of the game or better learning about Di Stefano dismiss it as bollocks. Even computer games struggle to emulate the Di Stefano style and instead distribute its paramters to multiple players in multiple positions.
A question I always had in my head about Di Stefano is where he would be deployed in the modern game if you were to give him free rein to play his own game and not pigeon hole him into a set position. I mean, like Cruyff, whatever positional moniker he is given is arbitrary at best even if both were labelled as forwards.
I think the intelligence required and the encompassing comprehension of the game as a whole, from back to front makes what Di Stefano did more difficult and so impossible to replicate in any other single player. To always know: where to stand; where to
not stand; to move to; to enable others; to take on the responsibility by oneself; to shoot; to pass; to run your man/men or drag them away so others could play... and to do it throughout a career to the highest possible standard is straight out of a comic book. Like I said, a Roy Race made flesh - it's playing the game in a totally different way to everyone else
and scoring at a rate that also makes him one of the greatest outright goalscorers of all time that really is baffling when you think about it. Even if you took the goals away, or made the strike rate unspectacular, you've got a player who is still parring with with other all-timers in any other central position bar striker or centre-back, for me, that's insane and even if it doesn't make him the greatest player of all time, it certainly makes him the most unique.
As for Cruyff and the system issue. It's an interesting one because Holland went straight to another final without him, and he didn't do as spectacularly well at Barcelona as he did at Ajax. He was a sublime footballer with or without the system, but the facts do speak for themselves in that the Borg-like efficiency of the system carried on undisturbed in his absence for the NT, whereas Ajax came to a jarring halt without him. Perhaps Cruyff's legacy would be even greater if the NT had faded into nothingness without him as it's fundamental cog? I'm sure it would, as we do tend to see that when the truly great leave a winning club, said club often tend to drop off the map (relative to what they once were) for a while until they get their bearings back. Pele has this going for him with the NT and Santos, same for Maradona with Argentina and Napoli, and same too for Real Madrid and Di Stefano (to a lesser degree, as they did continue to win league titles without him and also another EC, but they weren't the same unstoppable force as they were with him), but I'm digressing a little with this line of thought.
Bottom line is, I reckon if you could get all those perfect, smaller cogs in the machine assembled again (Neeskens and co.), a Cruyff-less side would still have an impact, but that there's only one Di Stefano and if he was removed from his side, it couldn't function as it once did.
Spot on. The lack of 'flash' was something that surprised me too when watching him. He really was intelligence personified.
Although, I'd say when it comes to separate categories he has to be amongst the best when it comes to technique (hard to define the scope of discussion when it concerns technique but Di Stefano could manoeuvre the ball brilliantly/play those nippy one-twos, possessed immense link-up play etc). He might not have the extravagant technique of the likes of Maradona, Zico and Cruyff for example but his technique in its own unique way, was up there with the very best.
When I said outside of the top 20, it wasn't to be disrespectful and if we do consider what a top 20 of straight up technicians and wizards on the ball looks like, it's tremendously esteemed company and no slight on Di Stefano to say he was less than them. He was still so far above the average player that this could be seen as splitting hairs, but you're just not going to hear of his technique over and above players like: Maradona, Messi, Zico, Zidane, Platini, Ronaldinho and so on and so forth. Where on a 100 point scale, these are guys hitting 100's and 98's+, Di Stefano is around the 90 mark, imo, across a broad spectrum that when tallied up still marks him out as a top echelon player, just not the very, very top.
