.................................... Team Onenil ................................................Team harms ......................
Team Onenil
The 1970s were fast times of wild and memorable characters. Before the era of big money but after the first round of televised World Cups, the North American Soccer League embodies much of fun and eccentricity of this beautiful era. Boasting the best players of the decade like Cruyff and Beckenbauer we return you to these wild and fun times. A time before cynical monetization where you can connect with your inner child and just root for your favorite players who played for pure passion for being the best not being the wealthiest.
Our defense of Nílton Santos, Der Kaiser and his trusted lieutenant Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck, and Carlos Alberto forms an extremely accomplished platform for the team, with three or the quartet being enshrined in the World Team of the 20th Century (and considered among the greatest in their respective roles):
In goal, Sepp Maier was the core of Germany’s World Cup and European Championship winning defense and Bayern’s trio of European Cups with Beckenbauer and Schwarzenbeck — and was voted 4th in the World Keeper of the Century poll.
In total, they have won 6 World Cups between them — 2 of them as captains (in 1970 and 1974), and as such, they can handle a variety of potent attacking combinations thrown at them by the opposition team.
Our midfield of Falcão, Neeskens with Jansen is one of the best all-around trios possible in this draft or others — offering a heady blend of technique, tactical intelligence, industry...and proficiency in just about every of the games. Johan Neeskens reprises his fabled right-sided point forward role for Ajax and the Netherlands — allowing him to irrepressibly dovetail with Johan I in a re-enactment of one of the most successful and most exhilarating forward-midfielder acts in football history.
Like Beckenbauer in defense, Paulo Roberto Falcão is going to be the primary playmaker of this portion of the pitch given his box-to-box movement, determined dribbling, exemplary range of passing (long and short) and overall architectural ability. Supporting the base is Wim Jansen performing the holding role he perfected with Feyenoord and the Netherlands, allowing Falcão and Neeskens the freedom to exert maximum influence on the match as twin box-to-box shunts — with Jansen and Neeskens' chemistry with Cruyff being a sweet bonus.
Johan Cruyff, the Clockwork Orange and the quintessential False 9, leads our attack as the primary playmaker of that portion of the pitch — constantly probing the opposition defense for passing/dribbling/goal-scoring opportunities and trying to disorganize the backline with his elaborate movement, and is complemented by two Dutch players in Rob Rensenbrink (aka Slangenmens, Dutch for Snake Man)...who famously excelled with Cruyff for the Oranje and then subsequently the nation to another final in 1978:
And Arjen Robben...whose rapid and incisive playing style complements the older Dutch players impeccably — synergizing the attack into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and that is true for other parts of the pitch, too — considering the commonality in approach and overall ideology, as well as the fact that 9 of the Starting XI have played with each other (which should enhance their interpersonal chemistry).
Team harms
The ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes, everything else is just theory. We all love this game, and one of the best things about it is its unpredictability. Cruyff himself knows all about it — two of his biggest losses, that came 20 years apart, were the perfect illustration of how reality doesn't care about the odds. 1994 CL final would be my template for this game — not tactically, but ideologically. And it's not a surprise that the star of that evening is given the central role here.
"Barcelona are favourites," Cruyff said. "We're more complete, competitive and experienced than [in the 1992 final] at Wembley. Milan are nothing out of this world. They base their game on defence, we base ours on attack." To illustrate the point, Cruyff noted that while he had signed Romário, the Brazilian who had scored 30 in 33 games, Milan had spent the same on Marcel Desailly. "That," he said, "is telling." "Cruyff's words were inappropriate and really struck the team," Billy Costacurta recalled. "Had they not been, things might have been different."
The comedy show Crakovia does a satirical sketch of that final. In it, Cruyff's tactics board has no tactics, just a message: "Barcelona, champions." It's not a million miles from the truth. "We went there to collect the cup, not to compete for it," recalls one member of the backroom staff. Charly Rexach, the assistant coach, is explicit: "We didn't prepare; we lacked concentration. Athens was the beginning of the end."
Cruyff's team talk at Wembley had been: "Go out and enjoy yourselves". His team-talk in Athens was: "You're better than them, you're going to win." In 1992, he was hailed as a genius. In 1994, he was derided as a fool.
While Johan Cruyff was busy creating images of his own, famously posing with the trophy in the lead-up to the match, Savićević was silently plotting and would emerge the other side of that tense night with his hands firmly wrapped around the silver trophy for real and not as part of a misguided stunt. Because that was the sort of character Savićević was – he believed in his own ability.
“The press, especially the foreign media, had given us no hope,” Maldini said when reminiscing about the game, per Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid. “Barcelona were certainly a good side, but we knew they had weaknesses and how to exploit them and we went for it, ruthlessly.”
Dejan Savićević — the mercurial genius.
For this game, Savićević moves to the number 10 position, where he had played the best football of his career. Despite his heroics in 1994 final, his Milan form was inconsistent — and his real peak came a bit earlier, when he shined as the biggest star of Crvena Zvezda team that won the European Cup in 1991. The Montenegrin relished the free role magnanimously given to him by his manager, causing havoc with his movement, control and sublime dribbling — and finished as a runner up for the Ballon d'Or that year.
I've made a compilation of his amazing performance against Manchester United in the European Supercup — and I strongly suggest that you should watch it, not even because of this game but simply because it's sublime:
The art of defence.
On paper, in Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini I have a half of the best defensive unit of all-time, but we all know that those two were more than that. In Baresi I have the best defensive organiser and the best defender of all-time — and Maldini can probably rival him in both categories. Costacurta and Tassotti were great players, but you could've put pretty much anyone with those two and they'd make an impregnable defence. Parker is a definite downgrade, but Chiellini fits like a glove here — I'm not sure that Costacurta was a better individual player, personally, and he can showcase his physicality and aggression with the Milan duo covering his back. Valery Voronin is probably the best defensive midfielder left in the draft with the scalps of the likes of Eusebio and Florian Albert in his trophy cabinet — Cruyff will found a difficult opponent in him.
Electric duo up front.
In George Weah and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge I have the perfect counter-attacking duo. Rummenigge was one of the best ever in finding the space behind the defenders and then finishing the attack in a spectacular fashion — that's why his partnership with Breitner was so effective. Weah was a different player, who combined incredible pace and dribbling ability with the physique of a heavyweight boxer. As Thierry Henry said: "In the history of the game, I have never seen power and speed like George Weah". But the goal that I want to show is not his goal — it's a goal by a certain Franco Baresi:
Although even with Bergomi I would’ve probably lost it, their team is just too good.
