On Saturday Ruud Gullit (right) leads Chelsea out to face Middelsborough in the FA Cup final. But as manager he has another goal: to prove a point to those in his homeland who dismissed him as an ego in boots
SOCCER: Jim White
JUST before a recent match at Stamford Bridge, London home of Chelsea FC, a press photographer, bored perhaps by the on-pitch cavortings of a man dressed in an outsized lion costume, trained his lens on a couple of rows of seats in the main stand. The resulting picture, published in Total Football magazine, made instructive viewing.
There, in the middle of it, sitting just behind Terry Venables, was Tony Blair. A couple of seats to his left was David Mellor (remember him?). And wasn’t that Dickie Attenborough, just along from Chelsea’s chairman Ken Bates? In the world of photo opportunities, a match at Stamford Bridge is clearly the place to be spotted.
This is the same football club which, for most of its success-free recent history, has been poised on the brink of bankruptcy. Not the kind of thing the important would want to be associated with. But then those were the days before Ruud Gullit.
In a town thought to be at the cusp of hip, in a sport never reckoned so chic, Gullit is the catalyst who has made Chelsea the club of choice for the fashion-conscious. Gullit has made Chelsea swing again. Not only has he made them a persuasive team, not only has he brought players to the place capable of doing things with a football previously considered impossible in London SW12, his very presence lends the club a hint of sophistication.
Odd then, that back home in Holland Gullit is dismissed as a cantankerous trouble- maker, an inveterate stirrer, an ego out of control. “Since Chelsea got to the FA Cup final I’ve been asked by five different Dutch newspapers and magazines to explain what is it with the English and Gullit,” says Simon Kuper, author of the seminal Football Against The Enemy, a writer fluent in Dutch and football. “They just don’t get it. They figure it must be a joke.”
So what is it about Ruud and the English? Does a foreign accent merely disguise hidden shallows? Or is he the real thing, and thus a prophet without honour in his own homeland?
The truth is that Gullit arrived in England with a bit of a reputation. He was wonderfully successful over a 15-year playing career with Feyenoord, Milan and Holland. Probably the best player of his generation, on the pitch he seemed to be everywhere with his great spray of dreadlocked hair, turning up in attack to score match-winning goals and then in defence to execute pinpoint tackles. And he used to smile a lot when he was playing. Which was odd, because his time with all three employers had been punctuated by disputes and sulks.
In his home country he was known as the man who rowed incessantly with managers, who was in a state of constant battle with team-mates, who absented himself permanently from the national team when it became clear the side was not to be fashioned around him. Although savvy to his skill, the fans tired of his tantrums; the nation never forgave him for messing up their chances of retaining the European Championship in 1992 by fomenting discontent in the dressing room.
Moreover, cynics in the English game assumed that when manager Glenn Hoddle bought him to play for Chelsea in 1995, he was just another trophy signing. His talent was on the wane, punctured by injury; the bargain seemed to be that he would put a few bums on Stamford Bridge seats in exchange for a boot-load of cash and a lucrative move back home.
Coasting, however, is not in Gullit’s nature: whatever the relaxed demeanour, he plays to win. One of his many barneys with the Dutch national team, for instance, was prompted by his distaste for the laissez- faire attitude of the younger squad members.
Even if it was to be a short stay, then, Gullit wanted to make his mark at Chelsea. He quickly ingratiated himself into the dressing room by telling filthy jokes. The other players liked that in him: sure he was a star, but he wasn’t stuck up. Besides, on the pitch he played brilliantly, oozing verve and skill and versatility, transforming the team.
“It was like an 18-year-old playing in a game of 12-year-olds,” said his manager after one particularly glorious performance.
His presence seemed to lift the younger English players around him: Eddie Newton, Frank Sinclair and Michael Duberry suddenly looked a different class altogether when they were receiving his passes. You could tell the lads had taken to him for they soon gave him a nickname: Big Nose. As in Big John Wayne, there was nothing derogatory in the adjective. It was a mark of respect, a symbol of the scale of the man.
There was something else about the reception he received that pleased him. As with Eric Cantona at Manchester United, another footballer who takes himself seriously, Gullit found the lads quite happy not to get in the way of his ego, to let him be the one who called the shots. He found no rival in the Chelsea dressing room, no Baresi or Maldini to politic against him. In England players are too busy choreographing their goal celebrations or popping Deep Heat in each other’s jock straps to plot and scheme. Anyway the lads thought he was worth listening to.
When it comes to foreigners, English footballers are suffused with an odd combination of arrogance and inferiority. Of course they can’t get stuck in like we do, they haven’t got the bottle for a wet Monday in Hartlepool, but, give them their due, they know about tactics. And Gullit had played with Milan, captained Holland, won the lot: you’ve got to have respect for his views on the overlapping wing-back.
“He’s very intelligent, amusing and laid back,” says BBC Sport’s Niall Sloane, the man who first put Gullit on British television screens as a match pundit. “He comes across as very worldly, very wise.” Just right as an idol for the newly gentrified game.
It wasn’t just bandwagon jumpers who took to him. The die-hards in the Chelsea crowd loved him too. At the end of Gullit’s first season at Stamford Bridge, Hoddle departed for the England job. The strong likelihood was that George Graham, the Scots disciplinarian, would replace him as manager.
In the stands those who had seen a chink of light in the football Gullit played didn’t want to see that smothered by the master of the bore draw. At the last game of the 1995-96 season, as the players made their traditional end-of-year lap of honour, the entire ground united to sing: “You can stick George Graham up your arse.” And, showing they were not merely being negative: “Ruud Gullit’s blue and white army.” Those who were there swear they saw in Gullit’s eyes the germ of an idea forming.
Ken Bates was clearly on the same wavelength. When the chairman offered him Hoddle’s job, Gullit accepted. Though there were to be conditions – lots of money to buy the players he wanted, no involvement in the day-to-day drudgery generally plopped into the in-tray of managers of British football clubs – here was a chance at last to fashion a side according to his own ideas. He would prove to his detractors that his way was the right way after all.
Armed with a cheque book supplied by Matthew Harding, Chelsea’s late vice- chairman, Gullit went shopping. With excellent knowledge of the Continental game, he bought wisely, as with the Frenchman Franc Lebeouf. But the signings which showed he really meant business were those of Gianluca Vialli, Roberto Di Matteo and Gianfranco Zola. For the first time current Italian internationals were brought to England, plucked from the strongest league in the world.
They came, in part, because of the money. They came too because of the promise of living in London. But they mainly came because of Gullit. His charisma – according to one Italian observer, he carried himself in Italy like a character in a Fellini film – sold them on being part of the action. For Chelsea fans, to find themselves watching world-class players was astonishing: no wonder they thought Gullit a divine intervention.
One thing the newcomers found was that unlike Bryan Robson, his rival big spender up at Middlesbrough, Gullit would not become a hostage to his new star signings’ celebrity. He let them know they were lucky to be playing for him, not the other way round. None of them could guarantee a place in his team.
Midway through this season, Gullit found that, in Mark Hughes, he had a better player than Vialli in the same position. He didn’t hesitate to drop his big name (and old friend). The fall-out in the dressing room – with Vialli smarting from his humiliation – soured to the point where few could see how Chelsea would pull themselves together and win their FA Cup semi-final.
As it happened, it all turned out for the good. Chelsea won and Vialli and Gullit ostentatiously hugged on the touchline at the match’s end.
Afterwards, in the press conference, a perma-relaxed Gullit declared that rows are good for fostering team spirit, they clear the air. Besides, it gives players something to prove if they are dropped.
The English football press accepted this analysis: Gullit was presented as the master of tactical nous. How he must have loved that. It made a real change for him to be regarded as a thinker rather than the compulsive arguer he had been cast as for so long.
Given in England the platform, the adoration, the undisputed acceptance that he is special that he has always craved, Gullit has blossomed. He is happy.
Back in Holland, however, public opinion remains unconvinced: the consensus is that Gullit is not as clever as he thinks he is. Critics point out that his aphorisms which so entertain the British ear (“You win the league by beating the small teams, not the big ones”, or “There is no need to be as holy as the Pope”) are merely those Cruyff has used for the past 15 years. And, even if he has made Chelsea a better team, Gullit was starting from a low base. When he has won what Cruyff did as a manager, then they might take notice.
On Saturday, when he leads his team out for the FA Cup final, Gullit will be looking to prove his countrymen wrong by plotting the tactics which will land the oldest trophy in world football.