The European football media have dubbed him the King of Cool, which, if true, would make him the coolest guy on the planet. Meaning cooler than Miles Davis, the jazz god, even.
And there is a distinct coolness when Frank Edmundo Rijkaard, the FC Barcelona coach, walks into the Camp Nou press room for the post-match meeting with the media following his team’s 2-2 draw with Espanyol last Saturday.
The expression on his face reminds you of the images you have seen of Davis in full blow: intense.
His body language is that of a battle-hardened general who knows that he cannot, for a moment, afford to let his guard down in this encounter with an unapologetically partisan Catalan press.
What is worse is that the men and women Rijkaard is coming to meet have just seen their beloved Barca throw away victory, and possibly the championship, in the last minute of the game. It was a victory that would have all but assured them of a third successive La Liga championship under his command and their 19th overall.
His combative manner, especially the cold gaze he fixes on each journalist who is about to ask him a question, reminds me of Hugh Masekela’s account of the icy reception he got from jazz’s Prince of Darkness when the two met for the first time in New York in the Sixties.
I prepare myself for a Davis moment — arrogance that borders on the obnoxious — come the date of our meeting three days later.
”Hi, you are here, already! Can I offer you anything to drink?” he asks me, as he walks into his office in the heart of Camp Nou on Tuesday afternoon. I am awed by the occasion.
Like an old friend with all the time in the world, he helps me to recover from my nervousness and gets me to focus on the job at hand: talking life and football with one of only five men to have won the elite Champions League as both player and coach.
The man is cool, all right, albeit, in a very non-Miles-Davis kind of way. He is surprisingly humble. A relaxed smile creeps on to his face whenever his memory is jogged and he thinks of an enjoyable moment. The pink sports shirt he is wearing would not look as stylish on a million other men. He makes smoking a cigarette look so cool it could pass for an advertisement.
He also happens to be the only black person to have coached a European national team — he took Holland to the semifinals of Euro 2000. His side is said to have played the most attractive football at the tournament. And he is the only black person to have won the Champions League as coach and player.
”It should be normal for people of colour to win things,” is his matter-of-fact reason for refusing to believe that his blackness makes his achievements any more special than they are. On the flipside though, he is only too happy to see his achievements inspiring black people around the world to work harder to achieve their personal goals. Among his, he says, is to continue learning about the beautiful game.
This explains his lengthy discussion with French professional defender Lilian Thuram on the sidelines of the training session they held on the morning after the draw with Espanyol.
”I just wanted to talk a little bit and find out the way he saw things, bearing in mind that we still have to play another game.
”I think it is important to know what players with his kind of experience are thinking about the team and the way the team performs. Thuram is a very experienced player. He is also an intelligent person,” says Rijkaard of his star defender, who was capped more than 100 times by France.
I mention what seems to be a growing tendency of South Africa’s brightest prospects to end up self-destructing without achieving anything close to their true potential.
Rijkaard believes this to be a consequence of life, rather than football.
”You cannot talk about young players as if they should all behave the same way. People have different characters, different personalities. This is good. The most important thing is that youngsters break into a well-balanced team, with older players who are willing and able to guide them; players who will teach them not only to be better footballers but also to be better human beings.”
Although he agrees that the Holland team he coached to the semifinals of Euro 2000 and the Barcelona team he guided to the 2005/06 Champions League trophy played the most attractive football seen in a long time, he adds Arsene Wenger’s ”very young Arsenal” team — also from the Champions League — to the list.
He readily confesses to being a supporter of attacking football, but he is quick to add that, as a coach, one has to adapt one’s tactics to suit the abilities of the players at one’s disposal. For the first time in our conversation I get a sense that Rijkaard is selling me a line he does not genuinely believe.
I remind him of the comment he once made that added the word ‘anti-football’ to the football lexicon. ”Once Celtic got their equaliser, they played a sort of anti-football,” Rijkaard said, when asked to reflect on the game against Glasgow Celtic in the 2004/05 Champions League season. Surprisingly, he does not remember the remark.
By anti-football Rijkaard means ultra-defensive football that relies on counter-attacks for the odd goal.
It is exactly the opposite of the way Barcelona have been playing during much of the four years of his hugely successful reign. And it is that Barcelona team that he will be taking to Loftus to play South African champions Mamelodi Sundowns next Wednesday.
If only it was 1988. Then we would have known how cool the coolest man on the planet, as a player, would have felt after Harold ”Jazzy Queen” Legodi and Donald ”Ace” Khuse were done playing ”shoeshine and piano” on his half of the field.