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Authors: Dennis Bergkamp
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grandmaster and his players as pawns. Cruyff, by contrast, aims to educate intelligent, talented players to become independent-minded individuals who will then
instinctively make the right choices and collaborate efficiently with team-mates. In other words, while Louis sees the role of the manager as supreme, Johan wants to develop footballers who make
the manager superfluous.
Dennis entirely prefers Cruyff’s approach and is in turn precisely the kind of player Cruyff holds up as an example. Indeed, the whole Cruyffian plan at Ajax now – as Johan might put
it – is to create new generations of Dennis Bergkamps.
4
INTERMEZZO
I. The Religious War
S IGNING FOR ONE of Italy’s biggest clubs seemed the smart move. But Dennis’s decision to join Internazionale in
1993 plunged him into a whirlpool of confusion and stress. He became a victim of broken promises and cultural misunderstandings, fell out with his coach, found himself mocked both by his own fans
and by the Italian press and was even dubbed ‘strange and solitary’ by his striking partner, Ruben Sosa. By the end, his experience of football in Italy turned so bleak that Dennis
considered retiring early. But what was it precisely that made the two years at San Siro difficult? ‘We were in the middle of a religious war,’ explains Tommaso Pellizzari, renowned
sports writer of Milan’s main newspaper,
Corriere della Sera
. Dennis had unwittingly stepped into the middle of a battle between Italy’s future and its past.
The immediate cause of conflict was one that outsiders might consider a minor doctrinal matter. But since Italian football is dominated by tactics, the issue was profound. It was this: should
Italian teams stick to their traditional man-marking methods or follow the example of coaches elsewhere and switch to zonal defence? Beneath this technical issue lay a philosophical question: was
defensive football really superior to the attacking game? And lurking deeper still was the yet more complex issue of identity. Should Italians continue to be Italian? Or should they try to become
Dutch?
The seeds of strife had been planted in the mid-1980s when an emerging media tycoon called Silvio Berlusconi, owner of AC Milan, the lesser of Milan’s big two football clubs, began to take
an interest in the ideas and methods of an obscure young coach called Arrigo Sacchi, then at little Parma in Serie B. Sacchi himself had been incubating heretical ideas since his youth. The
official creed of Italian football had long been defensive security. The country’s footballing greatness had been built on
catenaccio
, the ‘door-bolt’ system whose key
feature was a belt-and-braces approach to stopping other teams from scoring. The strategy was to build an impregnable fortress in central defence, with two midfielders shielding two man-markers and
a free man, the
libero
, sweeping behind. Writer Gianni Brera may have claimed that perfection in football was a 0-0 game in which neither defence made a mistake. But even the dourest
defensive coaches preferred to deploy at least one free-spirited attacker whose job was to grab a goal so the rest of the team could defend the lead.
Many foreign observers were appalled by the Italian approach, which was rooted in their historical sense of weakness. (One notable exception was Stanley Kubrick: he preferred the dark neuroses
of Italian football to the ‘simplistic’ pleasures of the Dutch or Brazilians.) It should be noted that defensive football had not always been the Italian way. In the 1930s, teams
representing Mussolini’s Italy had won two World Cups with a style based on the WM formation of Herbert Chap man’s Arsenal. But, much as Total Football became the official creed of the
Netherlands, so post-war Italy turned devoutly Catenaccist. The system made the two Milan clubs, Inter and AC Milan, into European champions in the 1960s. Italian defenders were recognised as the
best in the world;
instinctively make the right choices and collaborate efficiently with team-mates. In other words, while Louis sees the role of the manager as supreme, Johan wants to develop footballers who make
the manager superfluous.
Dennis entirely prefers Cruyff’s approach and is in turn precisely the kind of player Cruyff holds up as an example. Indeed, the whole Cruyffian plan at Ajax now – as Johan might put
it – is to create new generations of Dennis Bergkamps.
4
INTERMEZZO
I. The Religious War
S IGNING FOR ONE of Italy’s biggest clubs seemed the smart move. But Dennis’s decision to join Internazionale in
1993 plunged him into a whirlpool of confusion and stress. He became a victim of broken promises and cultural misunderstandings, fell out with his coach, found himself mocked both by his own fans
and by the Italian press and was even dubbed ‘strange and solitary’ by his striking partner, Ruben Sosa. By the end, his experience of football in Italy turned so bleak that Dennis
considered retiring early. But what was it precisely that made the two years at San Siro difficult? ‘We were in the middle of a religious war,’ explains Tommaso Pellizzari, renowned
sports writer of Milan’s main newspaper,
Corriere della Sera
. Dennis had unwittingly stepped into the middle of a battle between Italy’s future and its past.
The immediate cause of conflict was one that outsiders might consider a minor doctrinal matter. But since Italian football is dominated by tactics, the issue was profound. It was this: should
Italian teams stick to their traditional man-marking methods or follow the example of coaches elsewhere and switch to zonal defence? Beneath this technical issue lay a philosophical question: was
defensive football really superior to the attacking game? And lurking deeper still was the yet more complex issue of identity. Should Italians continue to be Italian? Or should they try to become
Dutch?
The seeds of strife had been planted in the mid-1980s when an emerging media tycoon called Silvio Berlusconi, owner of AC Milan, the lesser of Milan’s big two football clubs, began to take
an interest in the ideas and methods of an obscure young coach called Arrigo Sacchi, then at little Parma in Serie B. Sacchi himself had been incubating heretical ideas since his youth. The
official creed of Italian football had long been defensive security. The country’s footballing greatness had been built on
catenaccio
, the ‘door-bolt’ system whose key
feature was a belt-and-braces approach to stopping other teams from scoring. The strategy was to build an impregnable fortress in central defence, with two midfielders shielding two man-markers and
a free man, the
libero
, sweeping behind. Writer Gianni Brera may have claimed that perfection in football was a 0-0 game in which neither defence made a mistake. But even the dourest
defensive coaches preferred to deploy at least one free-spirited attacker whose job was to grab a goal so the rest of the team could defend the lead.
Many foreign observers were appalled by the Italian approach, which was rooted in their historical sense of weakness. (One notable exception was Stanley Kubrick: he preferred the dark neuroses
of Italian football to the ‘simplistic’ pleasures of the Dutch or Brazilians.) It should be noted that defensive football had not always been the Italian way. In the 1930s, teams
representing Mussolini’s Italy had won two World Cups with a style based on the WM formation of Herbert Chap man’s Arsenal. But, much as Total Football became the official creed of the
Netherlands, so post-war Italy turned devoutly Catenaccist. The system made the two Milan clubs, Inter and AC Milan, into European champions in the 1960s. Italian defenders were recognised as the
best in the world;
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