Stillness and Speed: My Story (7 page)

When Van Gaal first started out as a young trainer under Cruyff, the two football men who grew up near each other in east Amsterdam understood and were intrigued by each other. But that changed.
Differences in character gradually drove Louis and Johan unimaginably far apart. A reconciliation between two forceful and stubborn personalities seems impossible, particular after the coup and
counter-coup at Ajax during 2011.

Philosophically, the key difference may be that while Van Gaal advocates the same football as Cruyff, he remains convinced that his players need him to play it. If football is physical chess,
then Louis sees himself as the grandmaster and his players as pawns. Cruyff, by contrast, aims to educate intelligent, talented players to become independent-minded individuals who will then
instinctively make the right choices and collaborate efficiently with team-mates. In other words, while Louis sees the role of the manager as supreme, Johan wants to develop footballers who make
the manager superfluous.

Dennis entirely prefers Cruyff’s approach and is in turn precisely the kind of player Cruyff holds up as an example. Indeed, the whole Cruyffian plan at Ajax now – as Johan might put
it – is to create new generations of Dennis Bergkamps.

4

I. The Religious War

S
IGNING FOR ONE
of Italy’s biggest clubs seemed the smart move. But Dennis’s decision to join Internazionale in
1993 plunged him into a whirlpool of confusion and stress. He became a victim of broken promises and cultural misunderstandings, fell out with his coach, found himself mocked both by his own fans
and by the Italian press and was even dubbed ‘strange and solitary’ by his striking partner, Ruben Sosa. By the end, his experience of football in Italy turned so bleak that Dennis
considered retiring early. But what was it precisely that made the two years at San Siro difficult? ‘We were in the middle of a religious war,’ explains Tommaso Pellizzari, renowned
sports writer of Milan’s main newspaper,
Corriere della Sera
. Dennis had unwittingly stepped into the middle of a battle between Italy’s future and its past.

The immediate cause of conflict was one that outsiders might consider a minor doctrinal matter. But since Italian football is dominated by tactics, the issue was profound. It was this: should
Italian teams stick to their traditional man-marking methods or follow the example of coaches elsewhere and switch to zonal defence? Beneath this technical issue lay a philosophical question: was
defensive football really superior to the attacking game? And lurking deeper still was the yet more complex issue of identity. Should Italians continue to be Italian? Or should they try to become
Dutch?

The seeds of strife had been planted in the mid-1980s when an emerging media tycoon called Silvio Berlusconi, owner of AC Milan, the lesser of Milan’s big two football clubs, began to take
an interest in the ideas and methods of an obscure young coach called Arrigo Sacchi, then at little Parma in Serie B. Sacchi himself had been incubating heretical ideas since his youth. The
official creed of Italian football had long been defensive security. The country’s footballing greatness had been built on
catenaccio
, the ‘door-bolt’ system whose key
feature was a belt-and-braces approach to stopping other teams from scoring. The strategy was to build an impregnable fortress in central defence, with two midfielders shielding two man-markers and
a free man, the
libero
, sweeping behind. Writer Gianni Brera may have claimed that perfection in football was a 0-0 game in which neither defence made a mistake. But even the dourest
defensive coaches preferred to deploy at least one free-spirited attacker whose job was to grab a goal so the rest of the team could defend the lead.

Many foreign observers were appalled by the Italian approach, which was rooted in their historical sense of weakness. (One notable exception was Stanley Kubrick: he preferred the dark neuroses
of Italian football to the ‘simplistic’ pleasures of the Dutch or Brazilians.) It should be noted that defensive football had not always been the Italian way. In the 1930s, teams
representing Mussolini’s Italy had won two World Cups with a style based on the WM formation of Herbert Chap man’s Arsenal. But, much as Total Football became the official creed of the
Netherlands, so post-war Italy turned devoutly Catenaccist. The system made the two Milan clubs, Inter and AC Milan, into European champions in the 1960s. Italian defenders were recognised as the
best in the world; and
catenaccio
had proved time and again that it worked. Only now it didn’t.

As a young man, Arrigo Sacchi had worked as a salesman for his father’s shoe factory but his real passion was football. Despite the prevailing orthodoxies, he was instinctively drawn to
attacking teams like Pele’s Brazil and the great Hungarian and Real Madrid sides of the 1950s. But the style with which he fell most deeply in love was Dutch Total Football. In the early
1970s, as the golden Ajax of Cruyff and Johan Neeskens approached perfection and won the European Cup three years in a row, Sacchi found himself visiting Amsterdam with his father on business.
While his dad attended trade fairs, Sacchi headed to the Middenweg to watch and learn from the great Ajax team’s training sessions.

Sacchi was not the only Italian to be enchanted by the Dutch. In 1972, Ternana, a small team from Umbria, reached Serie A with an Italianate version of Total Football dubbed the
gioco
corto
(short game). Ternana’s coach Corrado Viciani recited Camus to his players and drilled them to previously unimaginable levels of fitness. And when Ajax played Inter in the 1972
European Cup final, Viciani appeared on TV to declare that, for the good of Italy, Inter should lose by three or four goals: ‘The Dutch play real football, but in Italy managers are
interested in playing defensively, in playing horrible and un-aesthetic football.’ In the event, Ajax outclassed Inter, but only won 2-0, and the defeat, like Ajax’s 1-0 victory over
Juventus in the following year’s final, failed to shake fundamental Italian faith in their ‘horrible’ – but still rather successful – style.

Meanwhile, Sacchi had turned his back on the shoe business and gone into coaching, starting with his local team and working his way up to Parma. Central to his vision was the abolition of
man-markers and
liberos
. Instead, he deployed ‘The Zone’, a flexible four-man defence moulded to play as part of a fluid, compact Dutch-style formation which pressed high up
the field. His defenders, midfielders and attackers were required to move as one unit and concentrate on offence. At a time when most Italian teams trained only once a day, Sacchi insisted on two
sessions, so his players ran further and faster than anyone else. Silvio Berlusconi recognised the potential of this kind of entertaining football and in 1987, after Parma had beaten Milan in two
Cup games, he recruited Sacchi. To help him, he went on to buy the three greatest Cruyff protégés of the day: Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard became the three most
important players in the Italian league. Thus was born ‘Il Grande Milan’, one of the great teams of history. Sacchi’s Italo-Dutch fusion swept all before it, and in the process
thoroughly eclipsed neighbours Inter, which remained a bastion of the old ways under coach Giovanni Trapattoni, a veteran of the glory days of
catenaccio
.

In the six years leading up to Dennis’s arrival in the city, then, the two Milan football clubs were locked in a theological as well as tribal conflict. And the contest became
embarrassingly one-sided. Pellizzari, a lifelong Inter fan, recalls the shock of witnessing Milan’s era-defining destruction of a great Real Madrid side in 1989. ‘People remember the
second leg, when Milan won five-nil, but the one-one away draw was more astonishing to us. For the first time we saw an Italian team go to Madrid and play as if they were in the San Siro. Milan
went to Madrid and attacked! Traditionalists said, “No, we cannot play this way because we are Italians.” It was even seen as a betrayal of our identity. Trapattoni and Inter
represented this view.’ Even when dour Inter won the
scudetto
in 1989, they were promptly overshadowed by Milan’s dazzling 4-0 victory in the European Cup final.

In light of what happened to Dennis at Inter, it’s worth stressing that even Sacchi’s revolution almost failed before it started. In his first months, the Milan old guard were
suspicious and defenders like Franco Baresi and Mauro Tassotti found it difficult to understand what was being asked of them. In the autumn of 1987, when Milan were knocked out of the UEFA Cup and
lost a league game at home to Fiorentina, the atmosphere turned mutinous. ‘Every body thought Sacchi was finished, but then Berlusconi made his famous intervention. He goes to the dressing
room and says to the players: “I want you to know that Sacchi is the trainer for this year and also for next year. As for you guys, I don’t know.” Then everything
changed.’

Italians in general, and Italian trainers in particular, are cynical, Pellizzari observes. They rarely think about aesthetics and care only about results. ‘The real revolution of Sacchi
was not that The Zone game looked good but that it
worked
. Sacchi showed you can win this way. That’s why one of our great football writers, Mario Sconcerti, says that Sacchi is for
Italian football what Kant is for philosophy: there is before Sacchi and after Sacchi. He changed us and all Italian coaches now are his heirs. Actually, I don’t think Sacchi invented
anything. He borrowed it from Holland. But he is treated as if he was the inventor because nobody imagined we could play this way in Italy before.’ Even so, there is still resistance to Total
Football. ‘Earlier this year a journalist called Michele Dalai wrote a book about why he hates Barcelona’s football. It was called
Against Tiki-Taka
and it did quite well. He
doesn’t like Barça’s passing, pressing and attacking. He calls that “masturbation football”. He wants to score one goal, then defend.’

Meanwhile, back in the early 1990s, Inter were in trouble. After Trapattoni left for Juventus in 1991, Inter president Ernesto Pellegrini, painfully aware of the superiority of Milan, tried to
replicate Berlusconi’s revolution. He lighted upon Corrado Orrico, another philosophical coach, who had brought attacking football to Lucchese in Serie B. But Orrico was no Sacchi, and the
Inter old guard, not least key defenders Giuseppe Bergomi and Riccardo Ferri, were unimpressed. Orrico failed and was replaced by the veteran Osvaldo Bagnoli, a much-loved, old-fashioned coach
best-known for winning the championship with outsiders Verona in 1985.

By the time Dennis Bergkamp had decided to leave Ajax and half of Europe and all the top Italian clubs wanted him, the picture had shifted once more. Sacchi was now running the Italian national
team and his successor Fabio Capello, while keeping most of Sacchi’s tactics and squad, had made Milan less flamboyant but impossible to beat. Between May 1991 and March 1993 Capello’s
team pre-emptively eclipsed Arsenal’s Invincibles by going a staggering 58 games without defeat. By the beginning of the 1993-94 season, though, their Dutch trio was no more. Ageing Ruud
Gullit had fallen out of favour and gone to Sampdoria, Rijkaard had returned to Ajax, and Van Basten’s career was nearing its premature end because of his injured ankle. Pellegrini spotted an
opportunity. Inter had finished the 1992-93 season second to champions Milan. Surely a sprinkling of magic from the Netherlands would be enough to win back the title? Inter went a-wooing and soon
Dennis Bergkamp and Wim Jonk were posing for photographers in their new black and blue shirts. The Italian press hailed the signings as a
nerazzurro
masterstroke.

* * *

O
F ALL THE GIN JOINTS
in all the towns in all the world, Dennis, you walk Inter theirs?! You were the hottest young talent in Europe! Everyone wanted
you! You could have gone to Barcelona, or Milan, or Juventus. Yet you picked the world headquarters of defensive football. It’s still hard to understand.

Dennis: ‘Well, promises were made and it felt like the right move. I think there’s been a thread running through my life which is that I’ve made a lot of big decisions on
feeling, on instinct. And that was one of them. And, you know, maybe it was the right decision in the end. I didn’t enjoy it, but I learned a lot at Inter. It was the making of me in a way. I
would never have had the career I did at Arsenal if I hadn’t been there. You mentioned that I could have gone to Barcelona. Well, yes, I sort of knew Johan [Cruyff] wanted me to go there. He
would drop hints about it. But he never said anything directly, so I was like “OK, if you don’t ask . . .” Anyway, at that time Spain had the rule of only four foreign players for
each club, and Romario, Koeman and Hristo Stoichkov were already at Bar celona so I’d have been the fourth one. But that wasn’t really why I chose Inter. For a long time my heart was
set on Italy because it was absolutely the best football country then. Italy, Italy, Italy . . . it’s all I was thinking about.

‘In the end, it came down to a choice between Juventus and Inter. My agent and my brother were talking to Juve and phoned me from Turin and said: “Dennis, we really don’t have
a good feeling.” I said: “Well, you two guys are my eyes and ears so I believe you, I trust you.” So I chose Inter.’

Didn’t you think to ask the AC Milan Dutch guys for advice? You were close enough to Rijkaard and Van Basten from Ajax and Gullit from the national team . . .

‘I didn’t feel I could pick up the phone and call them. More importantly, I didn’t want to. I was thinking: “I can go for the comfortable options of Milan, or Barcelona,
or I can make my own adventure.” I wanted to do something new, go somewhere no one from Ajax had been. Guys like Johan and Frank and Marco want to let you make your own decisions. They want
to help you, but if you want to make the decision yourself, that’s better, even if it’s the wrong decision.’