Groomed for greatness

AS Ajax manager in the 1980’s, it was not unusual for Johan Cruyff to attend youth training at the club’s famous Watergraafsmeer football school.

After all, his son Jordi was a rising talent, but it was a frail teenager playing for one of the lesser-ranked youth teams, away from the eyes - and the instruction - of the club’s professional coaches, that continually caught his eye.

“Why is the blond boy on the wing not playing for one of the top youth teams?” he asked the coaching staff. Come Monday morning, they had a new pupil. It was the start of Dennis Bergkamp’s glittering career.

Indeed, Cruyff was so impressed by what he later called “the pace, skills and intelligence” of the teenager he was elevated to the youth squad elite and allowed to train with the first team alongside the likes of Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard.

By Christmas 1986, at the age of 17, Bergkamp made his first-team debut, scoring his first goal four weeks later. By early spring, Ajax had written to Bergkamp’s school asking if he could miss three days of the Dutch equivalent of A-level studies. He was wanted by Cruyff for a European game in Sweden.

“I was too fragile, too soft, too lightweight and I don’t know what else they claimed was wrong with me,” Bergkamp recalled yesterday.

“I think I was lacking mental toughness as well! But they did forget I knew how to touch the ball, how to play football and how to use my pace.

“They could not take away my joy for the game, either. I just carried on, hoping that one day someone would spot my talents.”

That ‘someone’ was Cruyff and the pair forged a relationship of mutual respect that has survived the years. Indeed, Cruyff once talked Bergkamp out of a move from Ajax to Real Madrid.

“A few years after I joined the first team at Ajax, I telephoned Cruyff who was then in charge at Barcelona,” recalled Bergkamp. “I wanted his advice because Real had come in with a huge offer. It was mind-boggling for a young man like me. He told me not to join Real as they were in turmoil and the move would not suit me.

“Even in my first years at Ajax, I was continually advised to be tougher. I had to be dirtier on the pitch,” he said.

I took no notice of that at all. I just thought all that will come later. Let me enjoy my football. All I wanted was to use my skills. I got much more pleasure from tricking a player by putting the ball through his legs than from beating him in a 50-50 challenge for the ball . I had my own philosophy of how to become a world-class player.”

Bergkamp has subsequently learned to look after himself - as the collection of three red cards have proved - although he insists his early approach was correct.

“I still watch a lot of Dutch football on satellite television and follow the games of both Ajax and Feyenoord whenever I can,” he said.

“From what I have seen, Ajax have a very good team at the moment but you never know how good a team is until you have played against them. There are a lot of young players in the squad, which is typical Ajax. Their youth system has been the benchmark for clubs around the world.”

Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Hossam Ahmed Mido have the combined age of David Seaman but they are also scoring goals with such abandon as to cause Arsene Wenger more than a little consternation tonight.

Especially when you recall that in December 2000, when Ibrahimovic was playing at home-town team Malmo, Wenger prepared a

No 9 shirt with his name on it but failed to persuade him to move to Highbury.

The 21-year-old, who now wears the modest moniker of Zlatan on his shirt, already has 15 caps for the Swedish international team and 20 goals from 27 starts at club level this season, including the goal in Valencia’s Mestalla stadium which, along with a victory over Roma, moved them equal with Arsenal with four points from two games.

Mido, whose record is a hardly paltry 18 from 23, is an Egyptian international, but the two strikers will carry the hopes of their adopted home of Holland tonight.

“In every aspect Arsenal are a very special team,” Ibrahimovic says. “They have great skill and mental ability. They have many quality players but I like Robert Pires the best because he is so unpredictable in his style of play.”

If Ajax can get anything at Highbury, in one sense it will be a minor miracle. The club are currently denied the talents of Rafael van der Vaart, Jari Litmanen, Victor Sikora and US World Cup defender John O'Brien due to injury, not to mention Wamberto, the prodigiously-talented midfielder, who will also be out of action for at least two months.