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Fcuk me, was he the coolest player ever to play the game?
Everything about that 74 Dutch team was just cool. The way they invented this totally new brand of football and took teams apart with it.
The way they took Argentina to the cleaners in the p*ssing rain and still looked totally cool soaked to the skin. Those marvellous orange and white shirts sporting the three adidas lines, without doubt the coolest football shirts ever. The Neeskins goal against Brazil and his punching the air celebration The Cruyff goal to seal the win and how the Brazilians were made to start playing like the rest of the South American teams, was mesmerising. Even the way they were by far the best team in that tournament but yet contrived to find a way not to win it... was kinda cool.
Totally agree. The '74 Dutch team is still my 2nd all time favourite team (after our 75-76 side).
That 1974 WC was the first one I really watched and properly remembered (I was 5 in 1970 so memories of that are hazy) and those orange shirts really stood out as different. If only they hadn't got cocky in the final and tried to humiliate the Germans after going a goal up and just carried on playing the football that got them to the final.
I remember when he played for Ajax against Liverpool at Anfield, when no one had heard of him. I think Tommy Smith was marking him, and Cruyff tore him a new one. Bill Shankly took Tommy smith off because, as he put it... 'He was suffering from twisted blood.'
In February there was an interesting 15-minute interview with David Winner about Cruyff's current thinking (Cruyff wants to encourage individualism in youth training). Well worth listening to as it covers the issues we're concerned with, such as how to develop youth talent, and what role ex-footballers should have in a club.
The best complete player I agree, who needs a manager when you have Cruyff on the pitch, he coached the players on the pitch, when things didn't go as plan HE and not the manager changed the formation of the team.
On a par with the Brazil team of 1970, the best two teams I have ever seen.
To think that Johnny Rep was the weakest of the outfield players! Poland played really well in those finals as well & performed far better than we would have done!
Cruyff grew up near the Ajax stadium. His mother was a cleaner at the club. His father died when Cruyff was twelve, so the club became a surrogate father for Cruyff, as he describes about 3 minutes into this video:
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