Stillness and Speed: My Story (20 page)

‘I love everything about Dennis,’ says Thierry Henry. ‘Every Single Thing! And you know what I love the most? The way he used to train. He is an example for me. If he missed a
control – even if the ball was impossible to control – he’d be upset. Everything had to be perfect. Even in training. We’re doing running and he has to be the one.
We’re in front of goal and every shot has to be perfect. We’re doing passes and every pass has to be perfect. It’s windy, so you see him working it out . . . “OK, if I shoot
it over there, the wind will take it in . . .” EV-ER-eee-THING!!! If you took the ball off him, he’d chase you until you gave it back to him, or he’d foul you. In training!
I’ve never seen anyone like that. Everything at one hundred per cent. He’s a very funny guy. But when he was working there was no joking. “Cross the ball properly!” . . .
the control had to be perfect. Everything had to be perfect. Never “Oh let’s have fun.” Never! It was crazy. And I was looking at him and thinking: “I guess that’s why
he’s Dennis Bergkamp.” Anything and everything: he’s on it. “This ball is too soft – change it.” He changed me too. He changed my attitude and my way of
training. Of course, as he got older Dennis was playing less. But the way he used to train! He could have been on the sidelines going: “I’m Dennis Bergkamp. I’m thirty-five now.
Why should I try hard in training? I’m not even going to play this week.” But he was always training so hard!’

Ian Wright recalls a goal Dennis scored against Spurs at Highbury [in the 1996-97 season]. On the right wing, Wright twists and turns, beats his man, then sends a high hopeful cross towards the
far post. Dennis receives it with a single touch on the half-volley, knocking the ball back and inside, beating both full-back and goalkeeper in the process before finishing neatly into the
opposite corner. More than fifteen years on Wright is still astonished by what he saw.

‘It was one touch!
One touch!
We are talking about a ball that’s just travelled
forty yards in the air
and he’s killed it
dead.
Not only that,
he’s brought it across, and he’s taken the defender and the goalkeeper out of play . . . His touch made my ball look great but, to be honest, all I did was lump it over to the back
stick. I thought: “I’m just going to hit it in his general direction. I know Dennis ain’t going to head that, but I know if I get the ball over
in his general direction
there’s a chance he’ll do something I haven’t even thought of. When you watch it again notice how perfect that touch is. He’s trapped, half-volleyed it back with the exactly
right amount of pace and all he has to do is lift it into the goal. And look at his celebration afterwards. He’s on his knees, arms pumping. That should have been the statue: where you see
he’s not ‘The Iceman’ but deep and powerful and you see the core of his passion. It’s a beautiful thing. I will always say that even with Thierry and all these people,
Dennis Bergkamp is the best signing Arsenal have made and will ever make. What he’s done for that football club . . .

‘When he passed the ball to me, oh Jesus!, it would always be . . .
in the path
. On the right side for me, the wrong side for the defender, without him even . . . I mean the ball
would come to him and,
one touch
, he would put it in to me. I found I didn’t need many touches once he played the ball. That’s something I find only the greats can do because
they don’t have to think about it. Like Zidane. And I’ll mention Gazza because I have to, and even Paul Scholes. It’s so
precise.
I remember that all the time with
Dennis. When his ball came through to me, the defender couldn’t do anything, the midfielder couldn’t do anything . . . It gave me time to do something and it was a gift. It was just . .
.
bang!

‘Even in training he was very precise. I never saw him have one where “Oh my God, Dennis, that’s way over the bar!” It was all very technical. I don’t remember many
times when you’d say: “Wow Dennis, that is sloppy work,” whereas I am sure there were many times when you could say that to me, where a ball bounced off me and stuff like that.
Now I don’t know if it’s something that happened naturally to Dennis where he didn’t give the ball away. But I don’t remember many times where his pass is wrong, his touch
is wrong. When he first arrived at Arsenal some people were thinking: “Yeah he’s good but he’s not all that, ’cos you can knock him off the ball.” But I can’t
remember too many times where Dennis’s touch was off. What was always fascinating to me was he didn’t seem to have to work very hard on the touch side of his game and the passing.
It’s obviously very natural to him. It’s something I was quite envious of because I had to work very hard on that.

‘In training he enhanced his skills, but how do you hone your skills to make sure you’ve already calculated all the angles, and you know where the defender is and where the
midfielder is? How do you get to that? Dennis made a lot of my goals. I remember one up at Everton in his first couple of games. He gets it. I make my run. He whips it into the space, and I have
one touch . . . past the defender and the next one is literally . . . in. I’m just running onto it. It’s in my path. Same with a goal I scored against Aston Villa before I broke [Cliff
Bastin’s goal-scoring] record. You don’t even need to touch it. It’s just ready to go . . . With other players you’d have to control it. But with Dennis, I never had to
worry about the ball up and around my neck, or I’ve got to fight off the defender to get it down. He passed it at the right time for me, not the right time for him. There’s nothing to
do. He knew I didn’t really want to get involved with holding the ball up and all that stuff. I don’t think that was my strength. So he’d pass it quickly into the space and
I’d be onto it. I worked hard on my game and playing with Dennis Bergkamp proved to me that I’d got to the pinnacle of where I was going to get to. He raised my game by thirty to forty
per cent.’

Thierry Henry was the recipient of many of Dennis’s perfect passes. ‘Dennis respects the game and whatever the game is asking him to do he will do it. If he has to wait one more
second to give me the perfect ball he waits one more second. If he had to put it on my left because that’s the only way I cannot lose the ball, then he puts it on the left. If it has to be on
your head, it will be on your head. If he had to play one touch straightaway, he played one touch straightaway. Everything he did was amazing.’

Some of his assists were spectacular, like against Celta Vigo in 2004: surrounded by defenders, Dennis pirouettes a full 360 degrees before setting up a goal with an exquisite reverse flick
with the outside of his right foot. Is that Thierry’s favourite?

‘No, not that one. I prefer the one for Freddie Ljungberg against Juventus by a
distance
. The Celta Vigo one is great, but, by his motion, you can see the move. With the Juve one,
Dennis is turning everywhere. Everywhere! Yet he still sees Freddie. He’s waiting for Freddie to move, and he’s toying with the defenders, but he still knows where Freddie is. And he
still knows the right pass to make. If he puts the ball on the ground, a defender can stop it, so he lifts it waist-height. As a defender, that’s the worst. You can’t lift your leg to
reach it, and you can’t bend down to head it . . . It’s perfect. For me that’s his best assist.’

Freddie seems a bit slow on the uptake. Dennis has to wait for about three seconds for Freddie to make his run.

‘That’s my point. Dennis
waits
. That’s Dennis Bergkamp. Any other player would have played the ball first touch and then screamed about it: “Hey! You
didn’t move!” But Dennis sees the player isn’t moving, so he waits and he’s toying with all the defenders around him and he’s like “Come on, Freddie . . .”
Aaaaaah, it’s so beautiful . . .!’

And these are Juventus defenders . . .

‘It’s funny how people see it like that, but for me he could have done it against Yeovil and I would still say it’s his best pass. It’s not because it’s against
Juve, it’s because of the
patience
he shows in order to give Freddie the perfect ball. A skill is a skill. And it’s not the toying with the defenders that impressed me.
It’s that he had to wait three seconds, so he waited three seconds. If he had to wait one, he would have waited one. That’s what makes the pass beautiful.’

* * *

D
ENNIS IS NO LESS KEEN
to praise the team-mates whose movement, intelligence and skill made his assists possible.

What about your assist for that Freddie Ljungberg goal against Juventus? Your best?

Dennis: ‘Yes, that one is my favourite. You create a certain relationship with players. On the pitch they know what I want to do with the ball, and I know exactly what they are going to
do. That’s the thing which in my opinion is the beauty of the game: that there can be just one look to each other, or just me controlling the ball and the body language means “Come on
Freddie, go! GO!” And then he goes, because he understands. There’s no shouting, it’s just my body language. I’m keeping the ball, meaning: “Come on, come on! What are
you doing?” And then he’s going and I flick it. I had a lot of moments with Freddie like that, and with Marc Overmars. You just know each other. They know: “OK, Dennis is always
looking for the pass so I have to go there, I have to do that.” And when that works it makes defenders look silly.’

Because it can’t be defended?

‘It cannot be defended because he’s gone with high pace and the defenders are standing still, all facing forward, and when the pass is given it is not offside, not by a mile, and he
is controlling the ball five or six yards behind the defenders, so he has plenty of time to do something . . . And that finish was nice, too. Freddie, eh? Amazing player! Very strong. Very quick.
And the things he did! Certain players have a certain style, a certain movement. With him it looked a little sloppy – with respect I say that – but he did it on purpose. He knew exactly
what he was doing! He scored a lot of goals like that. People underestimated him. But he never underestimated himself!

‘It’s true I always forced myself to make the best pass, to make it easy for the striker on the receiving end. Why? For myself, because I wanted to do the maximum. I always put
myself in the position of making the best pass possible. And sometimes it goes horribly wrong but I learned from that, from those things, and go on again. Eventually it became automatic for me,
normal to try for the best. Maybe every player does that, I’m not sure. In Holland I got accused of being an “all or nothing” player. People said: “He only wants to do the
beautiful thing.” Especially when I was younger, those “all or nothing” things went wrong. You have to put a little risk into your game. In my mind the idea is: “Make it a
fantastic pass.” But what is the best pass? For some people it’s get it over the defender and the striker can receive the ball. To me that’s not good enough. No, I have to beat
the defender, and make the goalkeeper think he can get it, so he comes out, leaving space. And I have to get the ball in front of my striker or onto his head so he can put it into the corner . . .
It’s a different way of thinking. But it also has to do with communication and knowing each other. When I started at Arsenal the other players don’t know me. They have to learn that
I’ll give the pass so they can take a little bit more risk. They have to be thinking: “I know for sure that Dennis is going to put the pass there,” so they can take another step
away from the defender . . .’

We spoke once about the way you could see into the future, rather like the clairvoyant girl in
Minority Report
. Tom Cruise and Samantha Morton are trying to escape through a
shopping mall. There’s nowhere to hide and the cops are closing in. But she’s seen the old man with the balloons so she says ‘WAIT!’ Tom Cruise doesn’t understand why
because they’re out in the open. But when the cops arrive the balloons have moved so they block the view. Tom and Samantha escape. That’s the kind of thing you did. You saw passes no
one else could see, and delivered the ball through gaps that didn’t seem to exist. How?

‘I always had a picture in my head of how it would be in three seconds or two seconds. I could calculate it, or sense it. I’d think: “He’s moving this way, and he’s
moving that way, so if I give the pass with that pace neither of them can touch it because they are moving away from my line. With the right pace, and with the right player coming in . . .
yeah!
Like with that pass for Patrick against Leicester at Highbury. I think it was our last unbeaten game. The one-one goal, or the two-one, I don’t remember. [Vieira scored to make
it two-one.] It was very crowded in the box but he just made his run and I could slip it just in between . . . I was so proud! I can enjoy it really! And the pleasure is even greater because it was
a goal that meant something as well.’

But how can you see two or three steps beyond what most people are seeing?

‘A lot of it is about measuring. Cruyff talks about that with the youth at Ajax now. Measuring offensively, but defensively as well. It’s all about distances. I know where the gap
is, I know the speed of Patrick. So I know where the space will be in two or three seconds. But he has to keep running . . .
orrrffff!
. . . or it looks like a silly pass!

‘The other thing, of course, is the pass
before
the assist. I don’t know if there is even a name for that, but there should be. Every now and then they would show one of
those on
Match of the Day
. They’d say “Look at the goal, and look at the assist, but most important look where the attack starts from.” That’s interesting. Where
does an attack start? What makes the difference in the end?’

Some of the old Arsenal players say a lot of your work was missed or was almost invisible to the cameras and the crowd. The smallest of touches, the spin you’d put on a ball . .
.

‘Maybe. But when you’re watching you have to be independent in your mind. I am not going for the goal or even the assist. But I want to make a difference with the earlier pass. The
real football lovers see that – not that I play for them. But it gets appreciated, especially by myself. I think: “OK! That was a good pass. It made the difference even if no one saw
it.”’