When sorrow is tinged with joy at memory of Dutch master Johan Cruyff

The sad news on Thursday of the death of Johan Cruyff sent me back to David Winner’s Brilliant Orange, a book as unconventional and imaginative as the Dutch football culture which it investigates and celebrates.

Among its quirkier revelations is that, on the afternoon of their ill-fated World Cup final against West Germany in Munich in 1974, the notoriously superstitious Dutch players suffered a blow to their usual pre-match ritual, when a tape of songs by Dutch rock band The Cats, with which the squad liked to join in on their way to games, “mysteriously” disappeared.

“So, instead of their beloved Cats,” the author relates,“they travelled to the World Cup Final to the tune of David Bowie’s ‘Sorrow’.”

Pardon?

When you remember that, 30 years on, the Second World War still cast a shadow on that meeting onthe pitch of little and large European neighbours — and be assured that the Oranje, in particular, were acutely conscious of it — you have to wonder exactly what was going through the Dutch players’ minds when they opted for a song which opens with the lines: ‘With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue/the only thing I ever got from you was sorrow’.

That’s quite apart from the fact that ‘Sorrow’ is actually a pretty routine cover version to begin with, when if they’d really wanted to gee themselves up with some original prime cut Bowie, the electrifying ‘Rebel Rebel’ — and how much more Dutch could you get than that? — had been tearing up the charts only a few months before.

In a tribute to Cruyff yesterday, Ken Early beat me to the punch in print by proposing that the Dutch master was football’s answer to Bowie. I’d actually been thinking along the same lines myself since Thursday, which only made my rediscovery of the yarn about ‘Sorrow’ on that doomed journey to the World Cup final seem all the more oddly appropriate.

Consider all the words and phrases which have been applied to Cruyff this week. Iconoclast. Visionary. Revolutionary. Philosopher. Inventor. And, yes, rebel. When you reflect on the seismic impact each man made in his chosen field of expression, it’s by no means stretching things to breaking point to make a case for Johan Cruyff as the beautiful game’s Thin White Duke.

Or, at least, so it seemed to me as a music and football nut looking on from afar in the early 70s. Whether in the striking red and white of Ajax or the brilliant orange of the Netherlands — and, like the canary yellow and cobalt blue of Brazil, those colours somehow seemed to shine through even on black and white TV — there was something shape-shifting and otherworldly about the pale, floppy-haired, impossibly slender Cruyff, almost as if carved in porcelain.

But Liam Brady told me this week that when the players were exchanging shirts on the Highbury pitch after Arsenal had lost to Ajax in George Armstrong’s testimonial in 1974, he was struck by Cruyff’s “incredible” muscular definition. Indeed, after complimenting Brady on his ability — much to the then 18-year-old’s delight, as you can imagine — Cruyff made a point of advising the scrawny Dublin teenager on the importance of building himself up.

All of which makes sense when you consider that elegance alone would not have taken Cruyff very far in an era of stoppers and choppers and pitches that were often only marginally less brutal.

Teak-tough, technically gifted, a deep thinker about the game and blessed with an extravagance of imagination on the pitch which, in those days, only Pele and George Best could match or exceed, Cruyff was the complete package and, as such, made to measure for that Dutch gift to the world that became known as ‘Total Football’.

Yet, when it counted the most, even all that didn’t make him a winner.

Back to that 1974 World Cup, when the Netherlands swept to the final with the most exhilarating brand of football seen since Brazil had set a new high water mark for the game in Mexico four years before. The compensation for watching the ‘74 version of the Selecao crudely betray that fresh legacy came in the swashbuckling form of the team which beat them 2-0 in a no-holds-barred clash in Dortmund, Cruyff scoring the second goal with an unstoppable full-stretch volley.

The irresistible Dutch racked up 14 goals and conceded just one in six games en route to the final, while even the only match in which they didn’t score — a still absorbing 0-0 draw with Sweden —was spectacularly illuminated by the ‘Cruyff Turn’, that moment of jaw-dropping skill which gave defender Jan Olssen and the watching world whiplash, and which, in its now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t audacity, seemed to belong more to the world of illusion than sport.

As John Giles would one day say of Lionel Messi: “It’s not football, Darragh, it’s magic.”

The Netherlands began as they meant to go in the final against West Germany, not one member of the opposition so much as getting a touch of the ball before Cruyff was tripped in the box, and Jack Taylor immediately pointed to the spot. (A decision which provoked the famously loaded complaint by Franz Beckenbauer to the referee: “Taylor, you’re an Englishman”).

But, incredibly, with Johan Neeskens having duly converted the penalty in just the second minute, that best of all possible starts to the biggest of all football games, would be as good as it got for the Dutch on the day, the Germans coming back to win 2-1 through a Paul Breitner penalty and a trademark fox-in-the-box strike by the great Gerd Muller.

In Brilliant Orange, Johnny Rep says that the Dutch didn’t just want to beat the Germans — they knew they were good enough to do that. The problem was that they set about trying to humiliate the old enemy.

“We went on to make fun with the Germans,” he told David Winner. “We didn’t think about it, but we did. Passing the ball around and around. And we forgot to make the second goal. If you see the film of this game, you can see that the Germans get more and more angry. You can see it. It was our fault. And we came to half-time losing 2-1. In the second half we played well but it was too late.”

Beautiful losers — it’s a bittersweet tag which will be shared by that Dutch ‘74 side and those brilliant but brittle Brazilians of 1982, earning them the majority vote as the two best teams never to win a World Cup.

Happily for Cruyff, his career was not short of other glittering prizes to go with the individual plaudits which came his way, league and European Cup success a regular visitor as he moved from Ajax to Barcelona and from playing into management.

And his legacy lives on at the Nou Camp, where his late 70s vision of the ultimate youth academy resulted in the creation of the celebrated La Masia, nursery for the development of some of the greatest players in the modern game, including Iniesta, Xavi and, of course, Messi.

In my own personal all-time pantheon, Cruyff has always been part of an untouchable fab four, up there alongside Pele, Best, and Maradona. And that Messi has long been knocking, and with increasing insistence, on the golden door, is just another very good reason why all who love football played to its fullest potential, should be eternally grateful for the life of Johan Cruyff.