Johan Cruyff 1947-2016

Perhaps it's odd to find a humble obituary for Johan Cruyff appearing on a Manchester United blog. Or perhaps it isn't.  Cruyff was one of those few footballing greats whose significance went well beyond footballing loyalties.  You didn't have to be Dutch or a Barcelona fan to appreciate his legendary status in the game or his importance.

Cruyff and the Ajax and Dutch national teams of the early seventies were a body of people who changed football very much for the better.   Before them, there were only stark or dreary alternatives: the dull, spirit over style of the English game modified only slightly by the more successful Germans or the dreary, stifling tactics of the Italians, poorly imitated by the Spanish.   Only the Brazilians had lifted us beyond all that and now, post-Pele, they were only a pale shadow of themselves.

When I saw Cruyff and Holland in the 1974 World Cup was when I became a true football fan.   I was nine and, until then, my general interest in the game hadn't yet morphed into support for a particular team.  It was in Tommy Docherty's young United team that I found in England something that bore resemblance to the flair and style I'd seen displayed by Holland in that tournament.   In Buchan and Greenhoff, United possessed two ball-playing central defenders when such a thing was still pretty much unknown in England at the time; Lou Macari and Sammy McIlroy would both be transformed from forwards to form the central midfield.  We were different and we were experimental.

Aside from the second division championship and one glorious day at Wembley against Liverpool, we weren't successful, of course.  The attacking flair and the adaptability were there but, of course, we had no Cruyff.  No one did.  After Best, he was the second real rock star footballer, enigmatic and undefinable.  Had Best been born a few years later or had Willie Morgan been as good as he and his mum thought he was, you wonder what heights the Doc's Reds might have scaled.

But that's missing the point.  Holland showed us a path that, at the time, no one else seemed truly equipped to follow. Sometimes I think the remarkable fluency and flair they showed is exaggerated by those of us who witnessed it, then I look at an old youtube clip and see that it really was that good, that different and that special.

There were other great players in that side: Neeskens and Krol deserve their own places in the pantheon of footballing greats.  But there was only one Johan Cruyff.   And what he gave to football will never be truly matched and never forgotten.