Joga Bonito
The Art of Football
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A great article on Cruyff with some cracking anecdotes and quotes
https://www.fourfourtwo.com/features/johan-cruyff-icon
https://www.fourfourtwo.com/features/johan-cruyff-icon
Cruyff didn’t only take responsibility for his own performance. Michels had told him, “If a team-mate makes a mistake, you should have prevented it.” Frank Rijkaard, later a team-mate of Cruyff’s and opponent of Maradona’s, said that Maradona could win a match by himself, but didn’t have Cruyff’s gift of changing the team’s tactics to win it.
His personality was so outsized that Michels hired not one but two psychologists to understand him. Cruyff, always open to new thinking, was happy to talk to them. One shrink, Dolf Grunwald, blamed everything on Cruyff’s father fixation. “Really [he] denies all authority because he – subconsciously – compares everyone to his F. [Father]… If he can stop seeing in Michels the man who is not as good as his f. [father], we’ll have moved on a lot.”
After Grunwald fell out of favour with Michels, Cruyff was sent to Ajax’s other shrink, Roelf Zeven, where he lay on the sofa and talked incessantly about his father-in-law Coster. Here was the missing link in Freud’s work: the father-in-law fixation.
The transfer fee Barcelona paid for Cruyff was so big – five million guilders (£1 million) – that the Spanish state wouldn’t countenance it. Barça finally got him into Spain by officially registering him as a piece of agricultural machinery.
As ever, there were irritations. In Washington, he drove his British coach Gordon Bradley and his team-mates mad with his fancy ideas. Once, after Bradley had given a team talk and left the room, Cruyff got up, wiped the blackboard clean and said, “Of course we’re going to do it completely differently.”
One of the Brits, Bobby Stokes, said that when the ‘Dips’ bought Cruyff they should also have bought a year’s worth of cotton wool to block the players’ ears. At one point Cruyff grew so despairing of the others that he announced he would limit himself to scoring goals, and did.
The US years provided perhaps the most characteristic Cruyff story: Cruyff and the Florida Bus Driver. What seems to have happened is that just after the Dips landed in Florida for a training camp, the bus driver got lost. Cruyff had never been to the place before but went straight to the front of the bus and dictated the right route. Apparently he often used to direct taxi drivers in cities he didn’t know. He was usually right.
Cruyff had opinions on everything. He advised Ian Woosnam on his golf swing. He said the traffic lights in Amsterdam were in the wrong places. His old team-mate Wim van Hanegem recalls being taught how to insert coins into a soft-drink machine. He had been wrestling with the machine until Cruyff told him to use “a short, dry throw”. It worked.