Brilliant Orange by David Winner

Author:David Winner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

The mild-mannered Gerrie Muhren, one of the greatest technician’s of all the Dutchmen of his era, says opponents often tried to make Ajax play on a bad pitch. ‘At De Meer it was like a billiard table, the pitch was perfect. And we always liked to play with the Derby Star ball. With this ball, you can give a centre with love. You can chip a high ball over ten metres. If a ball is too hard. You can never give a short ball over the opponent from the ground. We could do everything with that ball. We never had words with it.’ Sometimes, bad weather and rotten pitches would be turned to advantage. For example, Piet Keizer often calculated the strength of the wind, precisely over-hitting the ball in the knowledge that it would be blown back to the correct position. In a famous 1968 European Cup match on a swamp of a pitch in Istanbul (the ‘Hell of Fenerbahce’, as it became known), Keizer created one of the greatest Ajax goals ever by lobbing a high ball into the thickest mud on the field. The Turkish defenders, expecting a bounce, were wrong-footed as the ball stuck where it landed. Cruyff also read the conditions perfectly and glided on to the ball without breaking stride, flowing on to score gracefully. (After the game a watching Kuwaiti emir was so moved by Keizer’s performance that he gave him the gold watch from his wrist.) In another match, this time against Panathinaikos, on a pitch damaged by rain, the Ajax players continually played passes into pools of water in the middle of the field. It took a while before the crowd or their opponents understood what was happening: the Ajax players knew the ball would stop in the water but the Greek defenders continued running to where the ball would have been if it had been dry.

Sculptor Jeroen Henneman believes, ‘With the Dutch, the beauty is in the pitch. In the grass, but also in the air above it, where balls can curl and curve and drop and move like the planets in heaven. It is not only the field. The folding of the air above it also counts. That is why the Arena stadium is so horrible. It is ugly and it seals off the heavens.’ Cruyff has been known to pass footballing judgement on the basis of sound alone. Ajax historian Evert Vermeer remembers him criticising a player’s technique while looking away from the pitch. ‘He said: “His technique is no good.” “How can you tell?” Cruyff said: “It’s obvious. When he kicks the ball, the sound is wrong.”’ Henneman reckons that without knowing it, what the average Dutch footballer most wants ‘is silence, a kind of quiet on the pitch, to feel the beautiful green grass and fresh air and the passes he receives. When you kick well, you have to touch the ground, to dig a little under the ball as in a golf shot. And you hear it.

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