Category: WC1974

Cruyff: no striker in the box!

H all, a personal note before I start this JC article… I will be traveling in the coming month as one of my dear family members in Europe will need support :-(. I will be posting less regularly, but will do my best to keep the good stuff coming.

May I ask you to have a look at the donation options on the site? Traveling to Europe is pretty expensive these days ;-).

JC: “You can only rotate when one position is not taken. That position needs to be the central striker.”

It was the time of Denis Law, the agile Scot who scored 237 goals for Man United. The times of the golden left of Gigi Riva, scoring one goal per match for the Italians or Der Bomber, Gerd Muller, scoring 500 goals for Bayern Munich! It was the early 70s, a great time for goal scorers. Strikers who only needed one or two touches to tap a ball in. The Dutch had a number of them: Dick van Dijk, Ruud Geels, Willy van der Kuylen, Dick Nanninga…

There were three types of strikers: the mercurial fast ones (Rene van de Kerkhof), the player with the thunder in the thighs (Willy van der Kuylen) and the tall lighthouse target man (Dick Nanninga). Ideally, you had one striker who had this all (Haaland).

And, a striker was always your most advanced man and he was judged on goals.

Cruyff came onto the field as a strange #9. He was never in the point. And he still scored goal after goal after goal. Between 1966 and 1972 he would never score less than 33 goals per season. But the real impact of JC was not as a goal getter of course. His biggest impact was the fact that as a #9, he was hardly ever to be found in that most advanced position.

Johan Cruyff led the line in a way that other players could flourish in the areas vacated by him. The two-footed dribble king was to be found everywhere else. As the playmaker, or as libero, or coming from the left. He called himself, the “playing central striker”. Cruyff’s ability to be that wandering striker made him crucial for the execution of Oranje’s Total Football. Oranje would play people off the pitch with any player able to play on any position. Right wingers became strikers, right full backs ended up as left winger and the central striker became the deep lying playmaker. It was all being done.

Finding the space was sacred. No one was playing on the position as laid out on the line up board in the dressing room! Cruyff would start in the #9 role but would immediately drift away. He went wherever he felt like it. “A little wander here, a little movement there, playing along a bit and then explode into action.”

Watching Feyenoord, Ajax and Oranje play in the early 70s is really fun. Opponents have no idea how to deal with it. Man markers would follow JC across the pitch and ended up leaving huge holes in their defence. Or they simply allowed JC the freedom of the pitch, which is never a good idea against someone with his dribbling skills.

Cruyff’s teams always dominated the ball. There were always ample players around the ball. Ajax and Oranje dominated in that middle zone, which is still sacred in football tactics. The maestro’s partnership with Rep, Rensenbrink and Neeskens in 1974 was phenomenal. These three could score at will helped by the open spaces left by Cruyff.

The legendary #14 explains it in 1977: “There are people who believe I should play in midfield. They don’t get it. The remarkable thing about our football is: everyone is on the move, always. And it starts with me. I start as a striker but leave that space, which starts the big rondo. The defenders of the opponent are now in trouble. Because we come at them from various angles. If they mark me, others will get more space. If they don’t mark me, well… bring it on. They end up always having one defender too few.”

The traditional #9 got replaced by the False 9. The traditional 9 was told: stay high up the pitch, hold on to the ball, go deep and mainly: score. The False 9 is a high playing playmaker, who is focused on the team rotation and performance.

When Cruyff quit his active career, it seemed the false 9 disappeared too. Strikers like Nanninga, of Kees Kist or Peter Houtman and later Wim Kieft brought Oranje back to the traditional 9. Only when Cruyff returned to Barcelona in 1988 was the False 9 back. The Dream Team.

In 1989, Michael Laudrup was seen as one of the most elegant players in football but it wouldn’t happen for him in Italy. He used to play left winger or #10. Stoichkov was Barca’s #9 but Cruyff put the explosive Romanian on the wing and placed Laudrup in the striker role.

Cruyff was obsessed with creating triangles, and we’re not talking about the musical version of it. With Ronald Koeman as libero, Guardiola as defensive mid, attacking midfielder Bakero and striker Laudrup he had a spine in his team which could pass themselves out of danger. Barca’s dream team resembles the Tiqui-Taca team of Guardiola decennia later.

It was Guardiola who used the best player ever ™ as the false striker in his team. The birth day of the Star of Superstar was May 9, 2009. In Pep’s first season, Barca was four points adrift from Real Madrid. On day 34, El Classico was on the program and the pressure on Guardiola was immense. Barca missed the title two seasons in a row now and the 2-2 at Valencia on the 33rd playing day added to the pressure. And so, Guardiola called Messi, the night before the game. Could Leo maybe drop in for a bit?

At 10.30 pm, the 21 year old Lionel Messi enters Pep’s office. Marti Perarnau, the author of “Pep Confidential” explains the situation as such: “The 21 year old enters and Pep shows him a video. He freezes the video and shows Messi the space on the pitch. He wants Messi to work in these spaces. He calls it “the Messi Zone”. And he tells Messi: “I want you to start from the wing, as per normal. But when I signal you, I want you to dart through the middle. And when Xavi or Iniesta have the ball, you go. Straight ahead, and you’ll be face to face with Casillas.”

Pep didn’t tell anyone about this. He only told his assistant Vilanova the day before the match. Xavi and Iniesta were told during the warming up. What followed was a master class of football, with a 2-6 win at the Bernabeu for Barca. Samuel Eto’o suddenly played on the right wing and Messi would drift in and out of the zone where the older and massive Madrid defence would be. Xavi would later comment: “Pep changed the whole plan. With Messi as false 9, with Henry and Eto’o in the half spaces, forcing the defenders to decide. Leo, Andres and I could dominate in this way. It was one of the best games in my career.”

Barca would win the the triple that year. In the CL finals v Man United, he used the same trick. Eto’o started centrally but after 10 minutes he switched with Messi, who would win the finals for Barca with a header!

For quite some time, the false 9 was ignored or even forgotten by the rest of the football world. Through the decennia we have seen amazing #9s, from Papin to Zlatan, from Van Nistelrooy to Benzema, from Lewandowski to Peter Crouch, from Raul to Shearer and from Berbatov to Henke Larsson… But in 2022, we do see shifts. The “playing central striker” would be a good moniker maybe? At Liverpool, their #9 ( Firmino) usually plays in service of the danger men on the wings (Salah and Mane). At Cheslea, Lukaku warms the bench often while wandering Havartz is often preferred. At City we see different false 9s all the time, from Phil Foden to Sterling to De Bruyne.

Cruyff was ahead of his time, as we all know. Every modern team these days, is looking for a type of Cruyff striker. A player who can let the team play better by being absent.

Oranje 1974

Looking ahead with memories… World Cup 1974

Nees was always polite when people accidentally bumped into him…

nees_1976

Here we go for 1974. I do surrender my age with this one  .

But, most of us will remember prolific scoring Johnny Rep, snake-man Rensenbrink, Neeskens and the blood on his shirt against the Butchers from Brazil (sorry Felipe  ), the awesome Cruyff goals, the swimming pool incident and the finals against West Germany. We lost. In case you forgot.

But not a lot of people remember the run up to the WC. In fact, Holland shouldn’t have qualified. Belgium was in our qualifications group and they needed a win against Oranje to oust us. And the match ended 0-0. Holland qualified. But…Belgium scored a goal and that goal was disallowed. Although no one knew why. The ref ruled off side, but the replays showed he was wrong… Close call, that one…

JC in typical style

JC 74In the prep for the WC, Frantisec Fardronc (?) was Oranje’s manager with Jan Zwartkruis as his assistant. In those days, Oranje wasn’t the hot. We never achieved anything before 1974 but with Feyenoord and Ajax ruling Europe and the world (Feyenoord won the European Cup and the World Cup in 1970, Ajax repeated that European feat thrice (71, 72, 73) so the players figured we might have a bit of a chance on that WC.

 

Looking back, the likes of Van Hanegem and Krol admitted never to have thought we would be contenders for the title. The KNVB feared Fardronc wouldn’t able to lead the team to success and they quickly signed Barca coach Rinus Michels as a supervisor (that was the term). He quickly realized Oranje was in trouble defensively. Killers Rinus Israel and Theo “The Tank” Laseroms were both injured, and so was Ajax defender Hulshoff. Michels tried out different things in the warm ups but wasn’t happy with the results.

Note: Israel and Laseroms were credited with the innovative “drifting” of center striker Johan Cruyff. The two Feyenoord defenders were tough as nails and mean as alley cats. Whenever JC played Feyenoord (with Ajax and later Barca) he didn’t have the guts to play upfront and stayed away from the two fearless defenders, leaving space for others (Nees, Rep) to move in to the center striker position. That worked so well, that JC promoted this tactics to standard MO.

In those days, Ajax and Feyenoord ruled Oranje. PSV cracks Jan van Beveren (Holland’s best goalie ever (debatable, I know)) and playmaker Willy van der Kuylen for instance, had trouble getting into the hierarchy at Oranje and pulled out. Feyenoord midfielders Van Hanegem and Jansen – both very smart players – recognized JC’s sublime genius and were happy to play second fiddle to Jopie.

She was there in 1974. And she hasn’t changed a bit… Good girl.

oranje_engel_159553hWith the PSV contingent out, Michels still had his defensive issues to take care of. After several experiments, apparently Cruyff whispered in Michels’ ear: try Arie Haan as central defender. Haan, a young Ajax midfielder, was a great passer and more importantly, had wonderful lungs. He was teamed up with young and ruthless Feyenoord defender Rijsbergen. Cruyff wasn’t stupid. By attempting to dominate the game, he knew that using Haan as center back would result in an extra midfielder when in possession, allowing Neeskens to make his penetration runs into the box. With Suurbier on the overlap on the right, Rep could afford to leave the right wing to come to the center up front and thus Rep became the goal scorer, with Cruyff in a free role….anywhere on the pitch.

But, the space between defense and the goalie would be huge and any deep ball over our defense would prove to be dangerous. No problems. Michels selected burgeoning FC Amsterdam goalie Jan Jongbloed. Jongbloed was a spectacular goalie with great reflexes but more importantly, Jan was fast and was a good passer. In this way, Michels added an extra sweeper to the team, Jongbloed would rule the space behind Haan.

All this was not so much strategy, it was born out of necessity and by coincidence.

The rest is history. Arie Haan would develop to become The Dutch Player with most Prizes ™ until one Seedorf started to collect cups. Wim Rijsbergen moved from Feyenoord to New York Cosmos where he’d play with Garrincha, Pele and Beckenbauer. Rob Rensenbrink was one of Holland’s first players to football himself to financial independence and John Rep became a rock star. Sort of.

Clockwork Orange was born. JC would grow into the Best Player Ever (most Brazilians or Argentinians don’t think so, by the way) and Rinus Michels felt it necessary to call his pupil Cruyff an amateur coach and psychopath in later days. But that’s another story…