The flower and the glory

No one says the word ‘Yes” quite like Ruud Gullit. His neck stiffens a little, his head nods, he gains in stature, he adds extra consonants to the word. Are you happy to be back in football management? ‘Yeshh!” Is it true you once had a friend called Ronnie Pinas? ‘Yeshh!”

But he is also practised at saying no.

‘No,” he says in Dutch to his six-year-old daughter Joelle as she climbs over him and starts kneading his face. ‘Just sit down for a minute. Papa’s doing an interview.”

Joelle is on her way to school, but there is a little paternal promotion to endure en route.

‘I’d been away for 16 years,” her father says, ‘but my mother’s here, my friends. When I came back to Amsterdam I had my social life back. Before that, abroad — No! No! In a minute [Jollele starts unbuttoning his shirt and playing with his nose] — I would have acquaintances and only occasionally someone would become a friend. And there would be some who I thought — in a minute! — were friends who were not friends.”

He’s looking good, even at 8.35 in the morning. He has short hair, a dark jacket over jeans, the sort of untroubled face that confirms he’s been out of full-time management since quitting Newcastle in 1999. A short while ago he said he didn’t think he would be coming back.

‘Being a football manager is no fun at all,” he reasoned. ‘You have to put up with all the hassle. It is not surprising that so many turn grey or have heart attacks.”

He said he enjoyed working with the players, ‘but all the rest I hated”.

But a few weeks ago he accepted the coaching job at Feyenoord, the currently underachieving club in Rotterdam where he confirmed his talent as a player. The stuff he hates — the administration — will be handled by greyer men upstairs.

‘I will be training the players, making the team.”

He’s been coming back slowly: he’s been training Holland under-19s, and has found no problems linking up again with Dick Advocaat, the first-team manager with whom he quarrelled during his playing career. Gullit, now 41, believes he has matured since those days. He says he has gained a new perspective on his role in the world. Surprisingly, some of this has derived from his interim job as a television chat-show host.

According to its host, this programme, Gullit, was not the normal sort of promotional yak-fest where a celebrity comes on for 10 minutes with a rehearsed anecdote and a record to plug. Instead, this was the celebrity stripped bare.

‘I wanted to show how famous people really are,” Gullit says. ‘Often there is a wall between the journalist and the star because there is usually not much time to get to know a person, and the star is always asked the same questions, and may be defensive.”

He looks at me.

‘But I know what famous people go through. If I ask a question and I see the person is uncomfortable with it, I stop. That gives the person a good feeling, because the star knows he’s safe, and then sometimes he tells you other stories.”

This sounds like he had several days with those he interviewed — Antonio Banderas, Victoria Beckham, Tommy Hilfiger, Nelson Mandela, Kylie Minogue. How long, for instance, did he have to get to know Beckham?

‘One hour. After our hour, we chatted for another hour, even though her management wanted her to leave very much.”

How was she?

‘Nicer than people think. I came to see the real Victoria. Victoria is a woman who knows what she wants. She was very interested in what it is to be a football player living abroad. She was very lovely, very caring, not the person I see in the media.”

And Nelson Mandela?

‘He has something you cannot touch, an aura.”

Ruby Wax?

‘Thank Ruby Wax again, because she was the first one and she made it very easy for me. Good person.”

How Chelsea changed

We are both relieved when the conversation switches to his time at Chelsea, and how things have changed.

‘It’s very strange — all these players.”

In Gullit’s time as manager the club signed Gianluca Vialli, Frank Leboeuf, Gianfranco Zola, Roberto di Matteo, Tore Andre Flo, Celestine Babayaro and Gustavo Poyet, a bunch of flair players comparable in talent but not cost to the more recent arrivals.

‘Now it doesn’t fit for some reason,” Gullit says. ‘It hasn’t taken yet because there hasn’t been the time. It’s lovely to watch sometimes, but you can see that it’s difficult to do all the time. I feel that it’s like a bomb, a time bomb that can explode, the good or the bad way.”

Before there is a chance to consider how a time bomb may explode in a good way, it is time to go to school.

Joelle proudly unfurls her plastic umbrella, and we walk out into the rain. Gullit says people didn’t recognise him after he cut his hair short a while ago — ‘It was like when the moustache went.” People certainly recognise him now, and with gratitude. He nods to people on the way, and talks to parents as he hangs his daughter’s coat on a peg and she trots into a classroom.

Gullit’s passport calls him Rudi Dil, the name given to him by his mother. He changed it in his mid-teens when he judged it an uncool name for a footballer. He was born in the Jordaan, a working-class suburb in the west of Amsterdam, from where his mother set out each morning to clean the Rijksmuseum. Gullit took the name of his father, an economics teacher.

His football skills were first noticed when he played on a concrete pitch with Frank Rijkaard. After playing with two amateur teams, he made his debut with the professional club Haarlem at 16. Three years later, when he signed for Feyenoord, his name was being mentioned in the same breath as his Feyenoord’s Johan Cruyff.

But he looked different.

‘When I was young I was one of the second generation of black people in Holland,” he says. ‘My father was the first. My mother was white, and living with a black man at that time and having a how-you-say half-caste boy is not easy. So early on as the only black guy I was taking more attention than the rest. If people were racist, I took energy out of it. They were afraid of me.”

His club career was hugely impressive. On the world stage his abilities inspired awe, but his temperament may have deprived him and the Dutch of the biggest prize of all. When he made his international debut on his 19th birthday, the Seventies ideal of ‘total football” was already a tarnished concept.

The idea of a team made up of footballers who could play anywhere, moving around the pitch as the game and their colleagues demanded, now seems quaint and fanciful. Its most able exponents were Cruyff, Wim van Hanegem and Johan Neeskens, but at times Gullit outshone them all. He could play central or wide, up or back, and that was only half the story. He would seem to cover an entire pitch in six elegant strides; when he hit the ball about 27m on to Marco van Basten’s chest, the ball just sounded right.

You could tell who the other players on the pitch thought was the greatest among them by the determined rush for Gullit’s shirt at the end of the match.

‘When he gets mine home, he’ll wonder who the bloody hell’s it is,” said a proud Mick McCarthy on one occasion.

In 1988, as reigning European and World Footballer of the Year, Gullit captained Holland to victory in the European Championship and scored in the final.

But there would also be tantrums and displays of monumental ego. The Holland team had been riddled with factionalism for years and Gullit did his best to uphold the disruptive tradition. He walked out of the training camp for the 1994 World Cup finals in the United States after tactical and personal disagreements with coach Dick Advocaat and several Ajax players he perceived to be dominating the team.

His father, George, said: ‘My boy won’t even think about playing for a team where the stupid ones and inexperienced ones are in charge.”

‘Gullit has never really been forgiven for that,” says David Winner, author of Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer.

‘Dutch fans are strikingly warmer to the other players of that era such as Rijkaard and Van Basten, than they are to Gullit, whereas in the rest of the world Gullit has always been the star. In Holland they like their players to be the boy next door. Gullit was never like that, and why should he be? He was the best player in the world. His sheer energy could create chances.

‘But the price to be paid for being perceived as arrogant is much greater in Holland than it is in England,” Winner continues. ‘In Holland you are expected to be modest with success. Arrogance has never gone down well there. They are resentful of it.”

By the mid-Nineties, Gullit had more than his fan base to worry about. He had four children by two marriages and the second relationship was falling apart.

‘I have failed as a father,” he was reported as saying in 2001. ‘I cannot make up for that. Leaving my children was the most horrific thing in my life.”

London

London looked like a way out. When he arrived at Chelsea on a free transfer from Sampdoria in 1995, he said he felt free, delighted with the prospect of a fresh start away from the Italian press.

Player-manager Glenn Hoddle said that signing Gullit showed that Chelsea were serious about winning again, and David Baddiel said that at last his team had a player he could worship. At his first press conference Gullit did his best to please. Asked how he was looking forward to playing at Wimbledon, he called the crumbling Plough Lane ground ‘one of the most important stadiums in the world”.

Almost nine years later, it is possible to forget what a remarkable thing had happened to the English game: Cantona, Klinsmann and now Gullit. No matter how many times the phrase ‘Ruud awakening” appeared in match reports, Chelsea fans still found it crazy to see him in that tangerine and concrete away shirt up at Grimsby in the Cup.

Frank Sinclair and Eddie Newton must have thought so too: we are playing with the coolest man in the world. Gullit himself achieved what he set out to: he reinvented himself abroad and found a new partner to share his success — Estelle Cruyff, niece of Johan, soon to be the mother of Joelle and, recently, a son. When it went sour, the Chelsea chairperson Ken Bates would accuse him of being an international playboy. Of course he was.

‘I had a fantastic time at Chelsea,” Gullit says on the way back to the Hilton. ‘I loved the place, the players. A mixture of the English and the foreigners and I think we played some good football then.”

He became player-manager not quite a year after he arrived, when Hoddle left to coach England. His success will be remembered primarily for the FA Cup victory in 1997, the first significant trophy Chelsea had won since 1971, and the first time the Cup had been won by an overseas manager.

But fans will remember him more for other things: the 4-2 victory against Liverpool in the fourth round, coming back from 2-0 down at half-time; the way he managed to get the best from young players such as Michael Duberry and seasoned ones such as Steve Clarke; his lyrical, meandering talk of his ‘sexy football” and his ‘lovely boys”, a phrase he picked up from Windsor Davies in It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. He began the rotation era at Chelsea, causing much consternation when Zola or Vialli was benched in favour of Flo or Mark Hughes.

Asked recently on Chelsea TV how he felt about this, Vialli said he was perturbed by the lack of communication. He added: ‘To say it how Wisey would say it, I was very pissed off.”

Gullit says that his philosophy as a manager was simple and will hold true in his new job.

‘Only thinking of the team. I know what it’s like to win things. You need a certain type of player with a determination to win. You see it in the eyes. The worst thing as a manager is to see a player who can do it, but doesn’t have it. Only certain players have, and you try to get them as soon as you can. Some players only think about themselves. These are the players who every year get top scorer, but they don’t win anything. They are selfish. These players you don’t need.”

His second managerial season at Chelsea had complications.

‘I stopped doing so much training. I needed to focus on the team. When there were games I was needed for and I said, ‘I can’t do it,’ some people got upset. I had to say, okay, I’m going to stop. It’s not possible to be a good coach and play as well.”

And in this way one of the great playing careers came to a halt, and perhaps one of the most promising managerial ones as well.

‘Ruud is the perfect diplomat,” Ken Bates said in an interview a few months after Gullit’s arrival. Bates was particularly impressed with his nonchalant approach to money, remarking how he was in no hurry to open an English bank account and preferred to keep his cheques in the care of Colin Hutchinson, the club’s managing director. But things changed.

When the discussions over his contract renewal began in February 1998, Chelsea were nicely poised: second in the league, semifinalists in the Coca-Cola Cup, progressing soundly in the European Cup-Winners’ Cup. But within a few days of negotiations, Gullit was sacked.

The club argued he was being greedy: he had asked for £2-million a year, a wage twice as high as Sir Alex Ferguson’s and Arsène Wenger’s combined; Gullit said this was a negotiating ploy and he expected to be bargained down.

There was disquiet that he had barely played all season and it became clear that his value to the club was far less as a manager alone. Bates claimed that he was sometimes absent from training, and then there were other complaints: he had ‘lost the dressing room”; he was too concerned with the details of his divorce from his second wife; his head was in the pages of Vogue.

‘Ruud was fantastic for Chelsea,” Bates concluded a while later. ‘But we had to move on. Towards the end we were never quite sure where he was or what he was doing.”

‘I understand a little bit more now about what happened,” Gullit says. ‘But it’s old stuff. It happened. Unfortunately it happened with me. It was a lesson in life for me. Ermmm. Some people had to leave the club and now I know why.” So it wasn’t the money? ‘No, not money. That was the smokescreen.”

His departure from Newscatle in August 1999 was a simpler affair. The excitement generated just a year before was not maintained by results: his league record was 11 wins, 13 draws and 18 defeats. It helped a little that he had taken Newcastle to an FA Cup final, which they lost to Manchester United.

But there were other problems, too: he refused to give Rob Lee a squad number and had a running feud with Alan Shearer, which culminated in his dropping the England striker to the bench for a midweek home game against Sunderland. Newcastle lost 2-1; Gullit resigned three days later, on August 28, blaming poor results and scrutiny of his private life.

‘It just hadn’t worked,” Gullit says of his time at Newcastle. ‘You can’t be successful all the time. I wanted to leave. I loved the people there and the fans. But the press felt, ‘Oh, you’re that boy from the city — so you’re going to have to tell us what to know, city boy.’ Like I say, I know what it takes to win things. You have to get also players who know how to do that.”

‘There weren’t enough of those sorts of players there?”

‘Like I said, I know exactly what it is to win…”

‘Ruud wanted our supporters to love him more than Alan,” Rob Lee has said. ‘But he didn’t realise the exceptional support Alan has here.”

He left the job with no compensation, which may explain why he remains friendly with chairperson Freddy Shepherd. ‘He certainly didn’t set out to fail at Newcastle and he richly deserves another chance,” Shepherd said upon Gullit’s appointment as Feyenoord coach.

I ask Gullit why some also cast him as arrogant.

‘I don’t know. I have a friend who lives in London and he always says, ‘If people really knew you, they wouldn’t believe it.’ I’ve confidence about what I’m doing, but I’ve never been arrogant. I’ve always been humble.”

‘It’s funny,” Gullit says, ‘because in Holland a lot of people call me preserved.”

‘You mean reserved?”

‘Yeshh! Reserved … they say I don’t express everything I’m feeling. But you can’t — you have to protect yourself.

‘The fans have a totally different view of me than journalists. Everywhere I go people are really, really, really grateful. They’re thankful. You do it for them … Why should I care when other people say nasty things about me? You care when you’re young. When you’re older you realise you can’t win everyone.

‘Life has gone how it is. Of course you make a lot of mistakes in your life.

‘But afterwards the worst moments are always the best moments … You think, ‘What has gone wrong, who can I trust, which path do I take now?’ It makes you even stronger. From the beginning, if people had a negative attitude, I took advantage. I said to myself, ‘Hey Ruud, you have to work harder than the other guys,’ to show them that I’m better than the rest. And that attitude I took with me through my whole life.” —