The Church of Cruyff
Forever Spreading the Football Gospel
by David Winner
March 8, 2016
“THE HOLY APOSTLES AND DISCIPLES OF OUR SAVIOUR WERE DISPERSED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.”
THE CHURCH HISTORY BY EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA
Jesus was the inspiration, but it took a small army of evangelists to turn his radical ideas into a big religion.
This model—of a towering central figure and a host of followers and interpreters—is still a pretty good way to transform the world. It works in small ways as well as big ones.
For example, Sigmund Freud and his students, rivals and successors changed the way we understand the mind. Karl Marx and his readers shaped the 20th century. Surreal modern British comedy wouldn't exist without Spike Milligan and his host of admirers and successors.
As in life, so it is in football. There have been lots of brilliant football figures down the years, but none has been as significant as Johan Cruyff.
As a player with Ajax, Barcelona and the Netherlands, he put himself in the pantheon along with greats such as Pele, Diego Maradona, Ferenc Puskas, Lionel Messi and Zinedine Zidane. As coach at Ajax and Barcelona, he built thrilling sides, nurtured a remarkable number of genius players and influenced many of the most important teams in the world.
The all-conquering Spain and Barcelona of Xavi and Andres Iniesta, brilliant Bayern Munich and Germany of today, AC Milan of the late 1980s and many other memorable champions would have been unthinkable without Cruyff.
Once radical and revolutionary, Cruyffian principles have become standard throughout the modern game. His blueprint for developing young players has been copied all over the world.
Cruyff's 20-year playing career ended in 1984. He hasn't coached a major team since 1996, when he reinvented himself as a guru, philanthropist, commentator and power behind the scenes.
Last year, at the age of 68, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and withdrew from public to fight the disease. In February, he announced his treatment was going well.
While the game prays for his return to health, it's Cruyff's apostles and disciples, dispersed everywhere from the Holy Land to the South Pacific, who are carrying on his work and reshaping football.
Cruyff 's admirers don't just like the way he and his teams played. They believe the world could be a better place if his vision of football prevailed. Cruyffian football, they feel, is more beautiful, more fun and more spiritual than other approaches.
Perhaps that's because Cruyff's career echoes what Joseph Campbell, the American writer and academic, called the "monomyth."
In 1949, two years after Cruyff's birth in a blue-collar district of south-east Amsterdam, Campbell published his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell had studied myths and religious stories from across the world and noticed they were all essentially the same.
They feature an ordinary-seeming boy (it's usually a boy) from a modest background who is "called to action." The young hero travels from his humdrum little world to a "region of supernatural wonder" and encounters fabulous forces, has various helpers and wins a great victory. He then returns to "bestow boons" on his home community.
Fairy tales tend to be structured in much the same way. As are many adventure films. Star Wars, for example, was built on explicitly Campbellian lines, George Lucas designing Luke Skywalker to be a classic monomythic hero.
Sport is a world rich in symbolism and metaphor, too, so our favourite stories about sporting heroes tend to follow the same pattern.
Johan Cruyff ticks most of Campbell's boxes.
His beginnings were humble, and his talent made inevitable his call to a lifetime of action in various sporting arenas designed for wonder. His football career was one long, challenging journey, during which he endured many great trials—not least from the vicious defenders of his day. And he brought back loads of "boons," including 14 league titles, cups galore and the gratitude of the planet for lighting up the 1974 FIFA World Cup.
But the end, when it came in 1978, was cruel.
Cruyff hung up his boots at Barcelona and agreed to play one last farewell match in Amsterdam, for Ajax against Bayern Munich. Bayern won 8-0. At the end of the match, Cruyff was hoisted onto somebody's shoulders, and someone handed him a bouquet of flowers, but it felt more like a funeral than a celebration.
Subsequently, he journeyed in the relative wilderness of the North American Soccer League, with the Los Angeles Aztecs and Washington Diplomats, spent a brief spell in Spain with Levante, and lost all his money in a disastrous pig-farming venture. So in 1981, he put his boots on again.
His first match back at Ajax was against Haarlem. De Meer Stadion was full, but the doubters said he was too old. Everyone worried the magic was gone forever.
Early in the first half, he collected the ball, evaded two tackles and arrived at the edge of the penalty area. He then dropped his right shoulder and, without warning, produced the gentlest, most devastating chip you'll ever see. The goalkeeper could only stare in amazement as the ball sailed over his head and into the net.
Cruyff went on to play for three more astonishing years, inspiring a new generation of future stars, such as Marco van Basten, Ronald Koeman and Dennis Bergkamp. After that, as coach, he founded two rather heavenly new football kingdoms: first at Ajax, and then at Barcelona.
No wonder devotees slip naturally into quasi-religious language when they talk about Cruyff.
His first manager at Ajax, the gentle English exile Vic Buckingham, called him "God's gift to football". Pep Guardiola, upon taking charge of Barcelona in 2008, explained the genesis of the team, per Daniel Storey of Football365: "Cruyff built the cathedral; our job is to maintain it." Dutch soccer writer Arthur van den Boogaard argued Cruyff discovered the "metaphysical solution" to the game.
Cruyff doesn't speak in parables, though he did once say: "In a way, I'm probably immortal."
And there's something guru-like about his many enigmatic pronouncements, delivered in a version of Dutch so strange as to almost constitute a separate language:
"If you can't win, make sure you don't lose."
"Every disadvantage has its advantage."
"If you're not there, you're either too early or too late."
"If I wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better."
On the other hand, he is not the least bit religious. In Spain, he noticed every player made the sign of the cross and commented that if it worked, every game would end in a draw.
There is a piece of black-and-white home-movie footage shot of Cruyff in the late 1950s.
A skinny, lively little boy with a side parting is kicking a ball around on pavement on the outskirts of Amsterdam. The ball seems almost as big as he is. He is neatly dressed with leather shoes, roomy shorts and a sensible jumper with a pale hoop across the chest.
We first see young Johan playing keepy-uppy with his head. Then, he's with an older friend whom he nutmegs and darts past toward the camera. All the graces of the adult are suddenly visible in embryo: the quickness of mind and foot; the agility and perfect balance; the taut, arched bow of his legs and arms.
Like all the greatest footballers, Johan's talent developed on the street with countless hours of joyful practice and play.
"There was Johan and the ball," a childhood friend remembered. "And the ball and Johan."
The street scene was filmed in the model garden suburb built in the 1920s for the city's workers, and the cameraman was the boy's father, Manus Cruyff, who ran a small grocery store from the family home on Akkerstraat. Within a couple of years, he would be dead of a heart attack, the defining tragedy of the boy's life.
The suburb is still distinctive. Each little house has a little garden. There's a little library and a little church too. Over time, the district acquired a typically practical, no-nonsense Dutch name: Betondorp, meaning "concrete village." Ajax's stadium was barely 400 yards from the Cruyff home.
After Manus died, Johan's mother worked as a cleaner at the stadium. Johan took to hanging out there. Everyone at the club got to know him. Six months after his 17th birthday, Buckingham, who'd become something of a father figure, gave the boy his first-team debut.
Ajax were one of the Netherlands' biggest clubs. But the Netherlands was a third-rate footballing nation, its tactics and facilities stuck in the 1930s. Yet within a decade, the club and country had become the most important and admired in the world. Cruyff was the man who made it happen.
Coached by the great Rinus Michels and led on the field by Cruyff, Ajax developed an astonishing new playing style called totaalvoetbal—Total Football. Since the Barcelona of today is largely modeled on that team, it seems reasonable to call them the Barca of their time.
Ajax won the European Cup every year from 1971 to 1973. At the 1974 World Cup, playing an even better version of the style, the Netherlands national team, led by Cruyff, dominated the tournament with extraordinary, exhilarating attacking football but failed to win the final against West Germany.
The disaster was caused by Dutch overconfidence. In the second minute of the final, before any German had even touched the ball, they had scored with a penalty after a 17-pass move and a penetrating Cruyff run.
For the next 20 minutes, instead of going for a second goal to seal the game, the Netherlands played keep ball, unwisely mocking their opponents. The Germans fought back bravely and scored twice. In the second half, try as they might, the Dutch couldn't make up for their mistake.
Losing the World Cup final was the greatest disaster and disappointment of Cruyff's playing career, but he's always made light of it, pointing out that while the Germans won the trophy, it was the Dutch who are loved and remembered.
"There is no better medal than being acclaimed for your style," he said after watching the Dutch win a thrilling match against Argentina and then lose to Brazil on penalties at the 1998 World Cup.
In big tournaments for the next three or four generations, the Netherlands usually had the best players and played the most mesmerising football, yet they found strange ways to fail at the vital moment—usually by losing on penalties.
But faith in the virtue of playing creative and exciting football remained the cornerstone of Cruyff's footballing beliefs.
It marks him out from the vast majority of other coaches who, to a greater or lesser degree, think winning is more important.
Being pragmatic is often a euphemism for winning ugly, and Cruyff has never signed up for that cynicism.
In the 1960s, the win-at-all-costs mentality was epitomized by the Italian teams who played catenaccio, the Italian system focused on defending. Cruyff and his fellow Dutchmen became the heroes of those who wanted football to be more uplifting.
These days, Jose Mourinho is the high priest of pragmatism. He learned some of the Dutch secrets in his time at Barcelona in the 1990s before, as Cruyffians see it, turning to the dark side. The contempt is mutual: Mourinho seems to reserve special loathing for Barcelona, Arsenal and other bastions of Cruyffianity.
Cruyff is ferociously competitive. He sees winning and beauty as inseparable. He was once asked whether he'd be willing to play with a mainly defensive system to win the league. He said no because it would be too boring. Imagine having to sit through a season of ugly football—and you might not even win the title! The whole season would then have been wasted.
What was Cruyff like as a player? If you never saw him, a good place to start is on YouTube with "Johan Cruijff Is Art," a fan video reverentially edited to 14 minutes (14 is the number synonymous with Cruyff).
All his virtuosity is on display: the uncanny control and whiplash elasticity, the surging, darting dribbles, his curves and straights, the way he passed the ball at strange and unexpected angles. Lithe and quick, he gave the impression of being a hyper-intelligent greyhound.
English football writer David Miller called him "Pythagoras in boots." Dutch writer Nico Scheepmaker considered him "four-footed." The Dutch choreographer Rudi van Dantzig considered Cruyff a better dancer than the great Rudolf Nureyev.
One favourite Cruyff move was to stop dead, then accelerate away. Few defenders could cope. Another was the famous Cruyff turn, captured close up during a 1974 World Cup match against Sweden. He would shape to cross, and if the defender attempted a block, he would turn himself inside out and dance free in the opposite direction.
He was never particularly interested in heading the ball, though he could do it well when necessary. He preferred to deploy his agility and invention. Barca fans still remember his "impossible goal" against Atletico Madrid, when he leaped like an Olympic gymnast, pirouetted in mid-air and used the outside of his foot to drill the ball high into the goal from an acute angle.
And most of all, he would point. Especially later in his career, Cruyff seemed to spend much of his time on the field telling teammates where to move. Watching in person, you saw he wasn't just playing his own game but controlling the entire team.
No player has had a more subtle or deeper understanding of the geometry of the entire pitch. He was like a chessmaster, seeing several moves ahead, switching his pieces around the board to produce an irresistible, flowing geometry.
It was a unique fusion of energy and thought.
"Don't run so much," Cruyff said. "Football is a game you play with your brains."
In fact, he and the other total footballers ran around plenty, overwhelming opponents with energy and aggression as well as skill and baffling patterns of movement.
So did Cruyff invent Total Football? Not quite. It was a shared achievement with at least half the credit due to Michels, who replaced Buckingham in 1965. It was Michels who brought drive and professionalism to what had previously been an amateur club. And it was Michels who guided the tactical development.
But without Cruyff, it would have been inconceivable. And without Cruyff, the "total" philosophy would have died in the early 1980s, a time when most total footballers had retired and defensive football had become fashionable—even in the Netherlands.
At Ajax, Cruyff reinstated the principles and added a few flourishes of his own. Over time, his ideas became the new orthodoxy in the Netherlands. He reorganised the Ajax youth system to educate players to play his style, then repeated the trick with a bigger budget at Barcelona.
We take it for granted now that Spain is the land of elegant, thoughtful, creative football. It was Cruyff who made it that way.
When he first moved to Spain in 1973, Barcelona were suffering a title drought. By the end of the season, they were champions for the first time in 14 years. In the Netherlands, it's often said Barca fans dubbed him El Salvador (the Saviour) for this achievement, though this is disputed in Catalonia.
But this was not the moment Spanish footballing culture changed. The country was still ruled by fascist dictator Francisco Franco, and football was informed by the spirit of La Furia. Passion and effort were the most prized qualities, and defenders such as the Butcher of Bilbao, Andoni Goikoetxea, reflected the national football psyche.
By the time Cruyff returned to the club as coach in 1988, Franco had been dead for 13 years and Spain was a democracy. Over the next few years, he built the extraordinary Dream Team using foreign stars such as Hristo Stoichkov, Ronald Koeman, Romario and Michael Laudrup and locals such as the young Guardiola. The thrilling team won La Liga four years in a row from 1990/91 to 1993/94 and won their first Champions League. Suddenly, all of Spain wanted to play like Barca.
It is important to remember how radical a departure Total Football was from earlier ideas about the game.
In the 19th century, the English invented football as a chivalrous substitute for war and played in straight lines with fixed formations. Brazilians thought of football as a platform for individual artistry. Italians obsessed about tactics, mainly defensive ones. The Germans had their kampfgeist (spirit of struggle), which stated undying effort, physical power and teamwork were the keys to success.
Cruyff and Michels reimagined the game as a highly skilled, swirling spatial contest in which whoever managed and controlled the limited space on the field would win.
In this, they had unconsciously drawn on wider Dutch culture. For centuries, the people of the Netherlands had been finding clever ways to think about, exploit and control space in their crowded, sea-threatened land. The sensibility is apparent in the paintings of Vermeer, Saenredam and Mondriaan. It's present in Dutch architecture and land management. It was a small step to make it part of football too.
The point dawned on me when I visited Cruyff's old home in Betondorp in 1999. The family had long gone, and the new owner was a lovely woman who ran an ambulance service for pets. From the outside, the house seemed much as it had been in the 1950s but, she explained, almost everything had changed.
"This was the Cruyffs' living room, but we put the wall here...and the kitchen was here, but we made it larger," she said.
A Dutch home, like the Dutch football field, is a flexible space.
Was Total Football a tactical system or an ideal? Arguments continue to this day. Like a religion, it has had to adapt to changing circumstances.
In the early 1970s, one of Michels' key innovations was a formal pattern of position-switching. His attackers, midfielders and defenders exchanged roles continuously as the team rotated down the middle and on both wings. The shape of the squad remained a relatively constant 4-3-3, but the men in those positions varied repeatedly.
Over the years, as the game became faster and space became harder to find, a new type of flexibility was needed. The Dream Team played in relatively fixed positions, though there was still considerable flexibility.
The Danish Dynamite side, probably the best team at the 1986 World Cup (despite losing 5-1 to Spain in one of the oddest games in history), deployed raiding wing-backs rather than thrilling wingers. But the effect was much the same.
Some of that team's key men, such as Jesper Olsen, Soren Lerby and Jan Molby, played with Cruyff at Ajax, while captain Morten Olsen was influenced by him from afar. Olsen later managed Ajax, coached the Denmark national team and did much to convert the country to Cruyffianity.
Over the years, dribbling has also gone in and out of fashion. Cruyff himself was an electrifying runner with the ball who could slice through teams, creating havoc and blasting holes for others to exploit. Co-stars such as Johnny Rep, Rob Rensenbrink and Piet Keizer were good dribblers, too.
But by the time Ajax won the Champions League in 1995, coach Louis van Gaal had switched the emphasis to possession, high speed and ball circulation.
Cruyff and Van Gaal hate one another, though no one quite knows why—especially as they have so much in common. They both grew up near each other, emerged at Ajax and their best teams' football looks similar. Philosophically, one key difference is Van Gaal, who sees himself as more of a disciple of Michels than of Cruyff, puts his faith in the system, whereas Cruyff entrusts his most talented creative players.
Dennis Bergkamp, one of Cruyff's most important proteges and kingpin for the Netherlands throughout the '90s, went so far as to say he "didn't believe" in dribbling. Bergkamp and the national team of his era preferred to create space through movement and passing.
By the late 2000s, the game had become quicker still, so Barcelona's tiki-taka developed. In 2008, the Spain national team belatedly followed suit, ditching the last vestiges of Furia and converting to Cruyffianity. The rewards were enormous. Spain had never previously been one of the game's great powers, but they were suddenly the world's dominant force, winning three major tournaments in a row: the 2008 and 2012 European Championships and the 2010 World Cup.
This new variation on Total Football made the 1990s guys look slow. The team barely gave the ball away, and midfielders such as Xavi, Iniesta and Sergio Busquets moved it at dizzying speeds and incredibly close range. Yet, as their coach, Guardiola said it was still "Cruyff's cathedral." Creating space for your team while denying it to the opposition remained the central principle.
These days, pressing has come to seem as fundamental a part of the game as grass, white lines and goal nets. But this, too, was a Dutch invention.
It developed at Ajax in the late 1960s because of one of Cruyff's energetic and ferocious teammates, Johan Neeskens, whose job was usually to harass the opposition's playmaker. Neeskens' victims usually tried to escape by retreating ever deeper into their own half. Neeskens, following his instincts and the emerging spirit of the team, followed. Michels, noticing this, incorporated it into his developing philosophy and told the whole team to follow.
Ajax began hunting in packs deep in the opposition's half of the field. Playing a high offside line inevitably followed. If the whole team was camped in the opposition's half, the last thing you wanted to do was to run all the way back to your own half if you lost possession.
Taking the idea one stage further, Cruyff invented the sweeper-keeper. In old football, a goalkeeper's job was to stay on his line and stop shots. But in the run-up to the 1974 World Cup, Cruyff persuaded Michels to pick Jan Jongbloed, a goalkeeper who liked to roam far from his line and was unusually good with his feet. His style, now routinely copied by goalkeepers around the world, allowed the Netherlands to press even higher up the field.
Football is too often discussed purely in terms of formations. Cruyff has long favoured the 4-3-3. But this doesn't tell us much. There are many ways to deploy that formation.
Thierry Henry, a passionate admirer of the Dutch style who played Cruyffian football at Arsenal and Barcelona, advised us not to get hooked on numbers. Total Football, he told me, is a state of mind.
"The formation doesn't matter," Henry said. "Whatever way [we played at Arsenal] the mentality was Total Football. If it's 4-3-3 or 6-4-0 with no strikers, I don't care about that. It's still Total Football. Attack at any time. Everybody attacks. Everybody defends. That's the Dutch idea. At Arsenal we used to play 4-4-2 ... sometimes it was 3-4-3 or whatever. But along the way, you make it your style of Total Football."
This brings us back to Van den Boogaard's claim Cruyff had solved the metaphysical puzzle of the game.
Cruyff has had many enemies and critics over the years. He has been accused of being too idealistic, too stubborn, insufficiently interested in defending and simply too difficult a personality. He loves an argument, and his conflict-model method of working can be bruising.
Van den Boogaard's response is that those who attack Cruyff fail to understand him. He argues almost any team with sufficiently talented players who follows a Cruyffian path is pretty much guaranteed to have an advantage over non-Cruyffians.
What would happen if all teams were Cruyffian? We haven't quite reached that stage, but in some places, we're close. Just as Christianity spread almost everywhere and adapted to fit local cultures, so too entire countries have adopted Dutch methods and added a few characteristics of their own.
Germany went Cruyffian after the national team was humiliated in the European Championships of 2000 and 2004. They're now world champions. Teams from countries as diverse as Belgium and New Zealand have followed similar paths.
Semi-pro Auckland City, perennial OFC Champions League winners and bronze medal winners at the 2014 FIFA Club World Cup, are coached by avowed Cruyffian Ramon Tribulietx. He grew up a Barcelona fan and was inspired by watching the Dream Team. Despite never working at Barca or with the Dutchman, he has his teams playing in the Cruyffian style.
Until relatively recently, English football was synonymous with long balls, bad ball control and big, clumsy centre-forwards charging into lumbering centre-halves.
Now, most of the top coaches at the Premier League's biggest clubs are either Dutch or heavily influenced by the Dutch. There's Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, Van Gaal at Manchester United and Guus Hiddink at Chelsea. Roberto Martinez at Everton and Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool are devout Cruyffians. Next season, Pep Guardiola will start converting Manchester City to tiki-taka.
Even Newcastle United—where another Cruyff man, Ruud Gullit, was considered too alien in the late 1990s—have a team full of Dutch players and, in Steve McClaren, a coach who used to manage FC Twente in the Netherlands.
In the Netherlands and Spain, countries he considers home turf, Cruyff fights for his vision. Further afield, he's not always pushy. Asked, for example, why he had never become a manager across the North Sea, he said the English seemed happy with their kick-and-rush style and didn't want to change them.
His admirers and disciples have no such inhibitions and happily evangelise their faith throughout the world.
Cruyff's friend Hiddink is revered as a footballing saint in South Korea for guiding the nation to the semi-finals of the 2002 World Cup. He also had spells teaching the Russia, Australia and Turkey national teams.
Arie Haan, his fellow total footballer from the 1970s, ran the China national side. Wim Jansen coached Saudi Arabia, and has worked in Japan and Scotland; Ruud Krol, captain of the 1978 World Cup team, in Egypt and South Africa. Cruyff's son Jordi, named after the Catalan saint, has taught in Cyprus and Malta and is now sports director at Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv.
In our own age, the success of anyone trying to spread the Total Football idea depends to a large degree on the strength of the native football culture.
In Italy, for example, Arrigo Sacchi, backed by future Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's billions, had huge success in converting AC Milan to Total Football in the late 1980s. Sacchi had fallen for Ajax and the Netherlands in the early '70s and travelled to Amsterdam to see Cruyff and his teammates train.
As a young coach, he put his Dutch-influenced ideas into practice. He recruited Cruyff proteges Gullit, Van Basten and Frank Rijkaard and taught local boys such as Paolo Maldini, Franco Baresi and Carlo Ancelotti how to press, attack and use space. Hey presto, Milan became the greatest team in the world.
Almost overnight, every team in Italy wanted to be like Milan, but Italian football culture did not change. This was because it wasn't the beauty of Milan's football they admired. It was their success.
Soon afterward, Bergkamp signed for Milan's city rivals, Inter. Inter was the spiritual home of catenaccio.
Bergkamp's two years in Milan were a disaster. He was mocked by the Italian press and dissed by some of his teammates.
But things were different when he moved to Arsenal in 1995. The club were notorious for tedious defensive football and desperate for change after a string of scandals. Moreover, England was just beginning to open up to new ideas, players and coaches.
Instead of demanding Bergkamp adopt English ways, Arsenal were eager to learn from him. They didn't resist change but rather embraced it. In 1996, Arsene Wenger arrived, and Arsenal soon became an English version of Ajax.
And what of the Netherlands? The turning of the football world toward Cruyffianity has been a problem because the Dutch have now lost their footballing edge over everyone else. Their competitors have copied their methods and overtaken them.
The Netherlands' failure to qualify for Euro 2016 reflects the facts that the Dutch system has atrophied and the nation—in stark contrast to neighbours Germany and Belgium—is no longer producing world-class talent.
Cruyff identified the problems and, in 2011, led a coup that resulted in old players taking control of Ajax.
His plan was to revamp the youth system and turn it into a hothouse for nurturing a new wave of exceptional players. It hasn't worked so far—and just before he became ill, Cruyff fell out with his former allies and distanced himself from the new regime.
Elsewhere, though, his legacy is secure, and even the greatest of today's players and coaches acknowledge their debt to him.
The recent Messi-Luis Suarez two-man penalty for Barcelona against Celta Vigo is a case in point.
In December 1982, Cruyff took a penalty for Ajax against Helmond Sport. He usually hated penalties and left them to others. On this occasion, however, he stepped up and played a little sideways pass for Olsen. Olsen drew the startled Helmond goalkeeper before slipping the ball back to Cruyff, who nonchalantly passed the ball into an empty net.
In 2005, Robert Pires and Henry (wearing No. 14) tried it for Arsenal and made a complete mess of it. But on Valentine's Day, Feb. 14 (there's that number again), Messi and Suarez demonstrated their love for Cruyff in a 6-1 victory over Celta Vigo. Messi (La Masia's greatest graduate) stepped up and slipped the ball sideways for Suarez (an Ajax old boy) to run in and score.
It was a memorable moment. Cruyff, via a friend, let it be known he'd loved it.
Actually, Messi and Suarez's trick was problematic. They'd narrowed the shooting angle and given the goalkeeper a chance. In Cruyff's version, the goalkeeper was helpless.
It was like Lady Gaga's tribute to David Bowie at the Grammys. The technical quality of her covers was splendid, and there was no mistaking the love.
But the act of homage just made you appreciate the original all the more.
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