Johan Neeskens, the most complete player of the Total Football era

How should we remember Johan Neeskens? Three years ago, Ajax released a video to celebrate the 70th birthday of one of their famous sons. The clip mostly consists of three things: Neeskens tearing around the pitch clattering into others, Neeskens tearing around the pitch getting clattered by others and Neeskens absolutely leathering the ball into the net.

It’s important to clarify that one doesn’t become the midfield linchpin behind Johan Cruyff in three of the most iconic teams – Ajax, Barcelona and the Netherlands – just by being a midfield enforcer that likes to kick lumps out of his opponents and kick the spots off an Adidas Telstar. But there is a special kind of love from football fans for someone that masters both the beautiful and ugly sides of the game, someone who perfectly walks the line between artist and soldier. “If something is really broken, then I’ll tell you not to do it,” Neeskens once explained with a straight face. “But you can always play with pain.” If that Dutch side was famous for its Total Football, then Neeskens was their most complete player, a Swiss-Army knife of a midfielder that could do a bit of everything. Cruyff could only be Cruyff if he had the ball, and it was one of Neeskens’ many jobs to win it. “If someone passes me, he’s basically walking away with a chunk of my salary,” Neeskens later remarked.

Nicknamed “The Dutch Lung”, “Johan the Second” and at Barcelona, “El Toro” – Neeskens can claim to be the godfather of modern pressing alongside his former Ajax midfield partner Velibor Vasovic. Given the job of shadowing the opposing playmaker, Neeskens would relentlessly and unusually pursue his prey deep into enemy territory. Almost accidentally in 1970, the rest of Rinus Michels’ Ajax team started to follow Neeskens, compressing the pitch. “Without studying it, they started to play offside,” revealed Bobby Haarms, Ajax’s legendary assistant manager. “It was a kind of miracle. Michels saw it and said: ‘Yes! This is how we have to do it.’ One minute we were playing the old system and the next the new way was there.”

There are plenty of reasons to love Neeskens: his working-class roots, the three consecutive European Cup triumphs with Ajax (1971-73), the sideburns, the tackles, the impressive goal return from midfield, that 1974 World Cup final penalty (and rebound!) past Sepp Maier that fleetingly released a wave of catharsis for a nation, the sneaky cigarettes during Michels’ team talks, the achingly cool holiday snaps with Cruyff, his knack of scoring spectacular diving headers, his adoption of a local Argentinian boy (the son of the barman at the Netherlands’ hotel) as the team’s inseparable mascot (and the team’s “12th man”) during their run to the 1978 World Cup final, his coaching career with Barcelona and Australia, the kindness, humility and a reluctance to take the limelight that meant he was universally liked and respected by all. Yep, Neeskens will be remembered for many great things but his statue at the KNVB Campus, now fittingly adorned with flowers, and that Ajax video do a good job of remembering one very important point that should not be understated: that he could welly a football into the net like almost nobody else. RIP.

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To July 1980 and Guus Hiddink playing for NEC Nijmegen. He might be one of the most successful Dutch managers of all time, but things could have been so different with Nijmegen nearly tempting Hiddink from his coaching role at PSV to become the club’s manager in 1985. Hiddink decided to stay at PSV and what a prudent decision that proved, taking over in Eindhoven two years later. Come 1988, PSV and Hiddink were not only Dutch champions but kings of the continent, having beaten Benfica in the 1988 European Cup final.