Rinus Michels confronted a major tournament for the last time at Euro 92. Holland, steered by him, had won the competition four years earlier, but it was not pride alone that made him defend the title. He was 64 then and, having undergone heart surgery in the 1980s, knew that he should sidestep the stress of the finals. None the less, he still led the squad to Sweden that year.
Johan Cruyff might have taken over from him but he was with Barcelona and, in any case, never has been an easy man with whom to negotiate. Michels therefore
decided that he himself was the man for the job. Years later he would explain that only a coach bolstered by wealth and previous triumphs could ever hope to win the respect of Dutch footballers, who are famed for being intractable and egocentric.
This was the explanation of a person with rugged confidence in his status. He could be severe and other people in football generally addressed him as Mr Michels.
It feels incongruous that this austere individual, nicknamed ”the Sphinx”, will be remembered as the inventor of Total Football, the most intoxicatingly liberated style of play the game has yet produced.
In reality, there is no contradiction at all. This approach, in which players were free to swap positions, demanded practice and discussion to prevent it from collapsing into confusion. Piet Keizer and Sjaak Swart, members of the European Cup-winning Ajax team of 1971, disagree as to whether there were four or five sessions a day when pre-season training reached its climax. I once asked Michels about this. He did not deny the cruel schedule but said regretfully that it was not easy to squeeze in that amount of work.
Michels was a lucky man. This former Ajax forward became the club’s coach in 1965 and, before long, found players like Cruyff and Johan Neeskens emerging. None the less, Dutch football was only just becoming fully professional in that period and Michels had to ensure a remarkably accelerated development for the best players and for the club itself.
Total Football, which called for supple minds and flexible performers who understood how to find and use space, was seductively smooth, yet it also reflected the aggression of Michels’s personality. The opposition could not settle when the threat was constantly changing as, for instance, the left-back Ruud Krol took up Keizer’s role for a spell while the winger dropped deep.
The relentlessness of Michels’s approach cannot be underestimated. He used to explain on coaching courses that his Ajax team was schooled to charge forward en masse whenever an opposing full-back had been forced to turn towards his own corner flag. This was, in embryo, the pressing game that Milan, employing three great Dutchmen, would perfect in the late 1980s to pin down their rivals.
Michels favoured football without compromise and the public were infatuated with the attitude of his team. Having gone down 3-1 to Benfica in the home leg of their 1969 European Cup quarterfinal, the side won the return match in Lisbon by the same score and 40 000 Dutchmen then travelled to Paris to watch Ajax come through a play-off.
With more caution in his nature, Michels, as Holland coach, might have had a team that could hold its lead in the 1974 World Cup final instead of sinking to a 2-1 defeat by West Germany, but it is impossible really to wish he had been more conservative. Jubilation was all the greater when, calling on the next generation of Dutch stars that included Marco van Basten and Ruud Gullit, he won the 1988 European Championship with the audacious ball-playing centreback partnership of Ronald Koeman and Frank Rijkaard.
Leader as he was, Michels could never hope to be an unchallenged dictator when Dutch footballers were involved. It is in their culture to analyse, question and disagree. In his best years, at the start of the 1970s, there was a moment when his forcefulness and that of his squad were in perfect balance. He surely guessed it could not last. That realisation, and a lucrative offer from Barcelona, persuaded him to depart when Ajax, in 1971, had won the first of three consecutive European Cups.
Those were intense, argumentative days. The team lost the first leg of the semifinal to Atletico Madrid that year and an incensed coach banned their wives from the hotel after the game. Rebellion was inevitable and Keizer led the squad in a sit-down protest that involved drinking in the bar all night. Greatness does not come without a dispute or two and the winger will surely have raised a glass with the rest of that side to Michels and all he achieved. — Â