THE OTHER JOHAN
The late Johan Neeskens was almost as crucial to Total Football as his more celebrated team-mate and namesake, writes Keir Radnedge
WORLD SOCCER - December 2024
WORLD SOCCER - December 2024
When Gianni Rivera European Cup in Madrid in 1969 he was apparently confirming Italian rule over European club football. As Milan celebrated their 4- 1 victory over Ajax, the Dutch team slipped away, written off by the media as naive interlopers in a tough new world of tactical cynicism.
How wrong could the cognoscenti have been. Within a few more years, it became clear that Milan’s triumph had been a swansong for Calcio’s pride and the mere presence of Ajax at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium a portent of better days to come through the concept of Total Football.
Football’s tactical progress has been all about evolution rather than revolution. Hence, Total Football can be traced back to what Willy Meisl forecast as “The Whirl” in his seminal book Soccer Revolution in the mid-1950s. The noted sports journalist and younger brother of the Austrian Wunderteam supremo Hugo Meisl envisioned how improving levels of tactical creativity and fitness would open up an era marked by positional fluidity.
Total Football was Meisl’s Whirl brought to life, itself paving the way for further tactical legacies such as
today’s inverted full-backs. The enabling factor was not only imaginative coaching but also the coincidental emergence of appropriate talented players such as not only Johan Cruyff but team-mates including most notably Johan Neeskens.
Rinus Michels was the coach who owns much of the credit. Michels had been a bullish centre-forward for Ajax in Dutch football’s part-time days of the 1950s who then built on the standards and ideas of English coaches/managers such as Vic Buckingham and Jack Reynolds. It was Buckingham who handed a debut to Cruyff and “Iron Rinus” who duly succeeded him in the top job at De Meer in 1965.
Michels had his own ideas about how modern football should – and could – be played. He possessed a sharp eye for the right players and characters to enrich his evolving team and style. Hence the signing of Yugoslav central defender Velibor Vasovic, a European Cup runner-up with Partizan Belgrade in 1966, to be his captain. Michels needed a lieutenant after his own mind to maintain discipline among his lively youngsters, many of whom had grown up as teenagers in the same Amsterdam streets and were eager to bring the spirit of the Sixties into their football.
Neeskens was another outsider. He had built a multi-talented reputation across various sporting disciplines in his home town of Heemstede in the north but settled to football with local club Racing from whom Michels signed him in 1970.
At first Michels was uncertain how best to deploy Neeskens but his stamina, energy and sure-footed tackling soon saw him established in the team that won Ajax’s first European Cup against Panathinaikos at Wembley at the end of his first season.
The Ajax midfield was perfectly balanced with the playmaking talent of Gerrie Muhren, the metronomic power of Arie Haan and the aggressive energy of Neeskens. Michels enforced high standards of fitness, which fuelled the fluidity of left-back Ruud Krol plus centre-backs Barry Hulshoff and the German Horst Blankenburg, successor to Vasovic. When one of them roamed forward, Neeskens was often the man, unnoticed, to cover back and fill the space. Ajax team-mate Sjaak Swart described him as “worth two men in midfield.”
Nothing complicated about it, Neeskens insisted: “Apart from the goalkeeper , you attack with the whole team and then you defend with the whole team. When the opponents have the ball, you try to find their weakest link, press, try to win the ball and then play it forward as quickly as possible.”
To Cruyff, as often as not.
Cruyff was ever present to lead, inspire, demand and paint audacious new patterns across the pitch. But Cruyff’s genius could not have shone as brightly without the protection Neeskens provided. This was why Michels, having left for Barcelona in 1972 and helped bring Cruyff along in 1973, went back to Ajax for Neeskens in 1974.
By that time Neeskens, with his self-caricatured flowing locks and rangy sideburns, was ready for a change. With Cruyff, Ajax had won two more European Cups as well as the World Club Cup, two European Super Cups plus two Dutch leagues and cups, but his departure had punctured the bubble.
Neeskens, in the meantime, had enhanced his own reputation in the Netherlands’ run to the 1974 World Cup final. He took a battering in the second group-stage win over outgoing champions Brazil. Knocked unconscious in the first half by an off-the-ball elbow from (Francisco) Marinho Peres – his future Barcelona team-mate – Neeskens struck the crucial opening goal in a 2-0 win after an exchange of passes with Cruyff. Later it was for a rugby-type tackle on Neeskens by Luis Pereira that Brazil were fatally reduced to ten men.
Cruyff’s genius could not have shone as brightly
without the protection Neeekens provided
In the final Neeskens opened the scoring again, this time from a second-minute penalty before any West Germany player had even touched the ball. He appeared nerveless but later Neeskens would admit to uncertainty and a change of his mind. Not that it mattered. Goalkeeper Sepp Maier dived right as Neeskens blasted down the middle. His fifth strike of the finals was one of his seven successful penalties
among 17 goals in 49 appearances for his country between 1970 and 1981 .
At Barcelona, Neeskens found greater qualities of leadership expected of him but he, Cruyff and Michels were unable to recreate the Ajax magic. Catalan fans called him Johan Segundo, Johan the Second, and his five years brought success in the Spanish Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup but nothing to compare with the Dutch days or to match Barcelona’s initial expectations.
Speculation swirled that the two Johans were no longer as tight as in the Ajax days and the distance widened with Cruyff’s withdrawal from the 1978 World Cup finals in Argentina. This placed more attacking responsibility on the shoulders of Neeskens, but he found Austrian Ernst Happel a far more rigid and restrictive coach than Michels. The Dutch side who finished runners-up to their hosts for a second successive time were no longer the free-flowing total footballers but more physical and less fantasist.
Neeskens returned to Barcelona from his post-World Cup holiday to find Cruyff gone. He lasted only one more season, signing off with success in the European Cup Winners’ Cup in a roller-coaster extra-time final against Fortuna Dusseldorf in Basel. Only his team-mates knew, but Neeskens had been told before the game that Barca would not renew his contract after a falling-out with club president Josep Lluis Nunez.
Midfield partner Juan Manuel Asensi recalled: “It was a bittersweet final for us and for him. Imagine, before the match, the club telling him they won’t renew his contract. Then he amazed us because he still put a lesson in what a great team player he was. He ran more and put in tackles like never before, not worrying about getting injured and spoiling his chance of a contract with another club: a perfect example of professionalism.”
Neeskens ended his national team career two years later in a World Cup qualifier against France. The World Cup defeats remained regrets but Barca assistant… Neeskens worked alongside Frank Rijkaard for two seasons in Spain balanced, as time went on, by his pride in “our beautiful football.”
By then, he had headed off to the United States. Six years with Cosmos in New York brought two NASL titles, before Neeskens gradually wound down his career with Groningen, Kansas City Comets then Baar and Zug in Switzerland.
Football remained his life. He stayed in the game as a coach. He was assistant to Guus Hiddink and Frank
Rijkaard in two spells with the Dutch national team between 1995 and 2000, had a short spell as head coach at NEC Nijmegen and another spell as assistant at Barcelona, again under Rijkaard.
Passing on his enthusiasm for the game was an enduring pleasure for Neeskens, tutoring eager youngsters in its tactics and techniques. He died as he had lived, after being taken ill during a Dutch Federation coaching course in Algeria.
Among the stream of tributes was one in particular Neeskens would have appreciated. Ronald Koeman, current Netherlands coach, called him “a small man who was my big idol.” Koeman added: “ As a young boy you played football on the street and you asked: ‘Who wants to be Cruyff? Who wants to be van Hanegem?’ I always wanted to be Johan Neeskens.
***
From the archives
In August 1975, Neeskens explained his midfield role to World Soccer …
In the old days, the role of the midfield provider was straightforward. His job was to supply his front-runners with long through-passes and the like. If he did happen to score, it was always more the exception than the rule. Basically, he relied on other people to put the ball into the net. But nowadays things have altered, and life for a midfield operator has become that much more arduous.
When I began my career with Ajax, I was what could be termed a “forager”. My job was to create chances for my old pal Johan Cruyff. But as new tactics and formations evolved during the middle and late 1960s, I became compelled by the course of events to adopt a more flexible approach to my game. I had to learn, and learn quickly, the art of long-range shooting from all angles. I realised that with the advent of 4-3-3, 4-2-4 and 4-4-2, I would be required to not only make incisive runs for goal, but also at the same time make sure that I was always there lurking behind the main front-runners, waiting to pounce if the defence failed to clear the ball properly. So, as football developed tactically so did my approach.
Initially I found this transition a difficult proposition, but thanks to many friends – notably Rinus Michels – I eventually overcame my apprehensions and became what is to all intents and purposes an extra attacker .
Although I have been described by numerous pundits throughout the footballing world as a “midfield roamer”, I’m not one of nature’s born runners. I believe that if you are to create openings for your team-mates it’s not the amount of running you do that counts, it’s how accurate and penetrating your passes are.
During the World Cup finals last summer, Cruyff and I often had long detailed conferences about how I should combine with him, Rob Rensenbrink and our main striker Johnny Rep. Finally, after much thought and deliberation, we decided that the best, and in fact the only, method we could utilise, which would both confuse and deceive our opponents, would be to employ on the face of it only one out-and-out striker , namely Johnny Rep.
Several respected pressmen called this tactic revolutionary, and if you look at our policy from our opponents’ point of view, they must have wondered how on Earth they would be able to blot out a striking force which, on paper anyway, didn’t really exist.
I have made these points because I feel that by doing so you should begin to appreciate how I tackle the job of being not just a conventional linkman, but I hope a complete forward in every sense of the word.
To say that I’m a convinced and committed advocate of Total Football would be an understatement. Even when I joined Ajax as a raw youngster I was not happy with the almost stereotyped attitude of coaches who believed that each player had only one role to fulfil. As such, I was always at odds with this regimented ideology, so you can imagine how pleased and satisfied I became when the new more sophisticated tactics I have been talking about were introduced into Dutch football.
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