Beautiful Losers

How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?
—Leonard Cohen, 1966

AT THE 23RD MINUTE OF THE GROUP MATCH between the Netherlands and Sweden on June 19, 1974 at the Westfalenstadion in Dortmund, football changed. Yesterday was dead. Tomorrow had arrived without a knock on the door. Everything that had come before was passé. That hyperbole isn’t too far from the truth. Johan Cruyff, who had been patrolling the top left corner of the field where he might have had no business being but for totaal­voetbal (Total Football), had just received a diagonal pass from Arie Haan. The Swedish right-back Jan Olsson was sticking to Cruyff and would have constricted his room for manoeuvre. That’s when the Dutchman decided to become magic itself instead of just the magician.

Cryuff stopped Han’s pass with his left foot and slid it under his right. Then he turned 180 degrees, as if headed down the pitch, slightly dropping his left shoulder in evidence. Olsson, a quality defender, read all of the signals right and prepared to chase the Dutch captain down. Except, Cruyff’s real intent was only in his head. He spun the ball back, turned back through those 180 degrees and sprinted towards the Swedish goal, with Olsson los­ing a vital second or two in realising he had been fooled. In those seconds, football was gifted something new: the famous Cruyff Turn. The crowd at the Westfalenstadion couldn’t believe its eyes.

The defining image of Total Football (although the Turn had nothing to do with it) and the 1974 World Cup had elevated foot­ball to ballet thanks to a man who, in Rudolf Nureyev’s opinion, should have been a dancer. More pertinent perhaps is Cruyff’s own motto: “You play football with your head; your legs are there to help you.” Cruyff began his autobiography My Turn, published posthumously in October 2016, with the matter-of-fact state­ment: “I’m not a person with college degrees. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned through experience.” Perhaps, being Dutch made all the difference to Cruyff and coach Rinus Michels who had reinvented the Oranje after having done the same with Ajax, the most influential club in post-war football philosophy. Irrever­ence for yesterday used to be part and parcel of Dutch genius. But for all that entertainment, the sudden, swift, surprise moves with perfect control and artistic grace, the Cruyff Turn did not produce the one thing that mattered: a goal. The match ended in a goalless draw. But the Dutchmen flew; Total Football demolished Argen­tina 4:0 and a brutal Brazil 2:0 on the way to the final where Cruyff & Co arrived with a sense of entitlement. Having qualified for the World Cup through a questionable referring decision against Belgium, they had since come to own it. Nobody expected them to lose to a West German team that had started as favourites but had had a rather mediocre tournament, including a shock loss to East Germany. The Dutch scored the first goal through a third-minute Neeskens penalty before a German had even touched the ball after Uli Hoeneß had brought Cruyff down. That, however, was as good as it would get. Because the Dutch didn’t understand that they couldn’t win by slowing down their own rhythm and not letting the Germans near the ball.

This was not the first defeat of aesthetics and skill to discipline and application in a World Cup final. Art for art’s sake pleases the eye and passes on to posterity but it’s not usually good enough to compete and conquer. The moral of the Dutch defeat at Mu­nich’s Olympiastadion had perhaps been miniaturised in another moment that was the antithesis of the Cruyff Turn: the Müller Twist. In the 43rd minute of the final, Gerd Müller had received the ball on the right of the Dutch 18-yard box; he “jumped” (if seeing is believing) around to reposition himself and shot the ball into the bottom left of the goal to make it 2:1 after Paul Breitner’s 25th minute equaliser through a penalty. Nothing was beautiful about it but it did the job, most importantly by providing what frustrated coaches like to call “finishing”. But to say Müller’s trick had no skill would be a gross injustice to the clinical German. There would be no other goal scored that day despite the Dutch pulverising the German six-yard box in the second half, with Sepp Maier pulling off save after save and an equally determined Franz Beckenbauer neutralising any threat from Cruyff.

If Holland in 1974 were the best team not to win the World Cup, the world’s heart was broken next by Telê Santana’s Brazil in 1982. The aftermath of losing in football, especially on the big­gest stage, despite being spectacular on the pitch is analogous to the Spanish Civil War: just as for once the vanquished wrote the history of a conflict, those who played beautiful football but lost became the People’s Champions, as the hipster Dutch with their long hair and love beads will always be remembered. But Santana’s Brazil fell before the final, after having quickly become the main draw of a tournament that had begun without any obvi­ous favourites although the Brazilians went to Spain confident that they were going to return home as World Champions.

This was a side that had supposedly combined the skills, cre­ativity and thirst of the 1970 Brazil team and the 1974 Dutch and were even better. And yet, they went one goal down to the disci­plined Soviets at the 34th minute of their opening match in the Seville heat that naturally favoured the South Americans. That was when Sócrates, who had given up a medical career, cigarettes and beer to be fit for the World Cup, and had caught up with Zico as the most important player in the squad, exploded. It would take till the 75th minute but that was when the Brazil captain shot a ball from 25 yards over the legendary Rinat “Iron Curtain” Dasayev straight into goal without even looking up. Years later, Sócrates would say: “I put everything I had into my shot. And the scream came: Goooallll. No, not a goal. An endless orgasm. It was unforget­table.” Like the Dutch in 1974, the Brazilians had owned the 1982 World Cup from that moment, producing a scintillating display of artistry and attacking football not seen before, nor since. Santana prized playing well above all else. There was no name for this evi­dently unscripted creative football on steroids till Sócrates called it “organised chaos”, elaborating: “Everyone has the freedom to play how they wish as long as they perform certain basic functions. As amazing as that might seem, it works.” Compare this to what Arie Haan had told the press in Munich: “People talk of total football as if it is a system, something to replace 4-2-4 or 4-3-3. It is not a system. As it is at any moment, so you play.” While Santana’s team have been stereotyped as a bunch of individual talents without a strat­egy, there is some truth to the claim that Holland’s Total Football was more individualistic than system football.

When a disgraced Paolo Rossi resurrected himself (and the moribund Italian team) to send Santana’s Brazil home in the second round, it went down in history as the “day football died”. Catenaccio had already been killed by the fluidity of Total Football in the 1970s but Enzo Bearzot’s Italy, deploying a hybrid zona mista and, of course, il gioco all’Italiana in its twilight—with still some years to go before the Arrigo Sacchi revolution at AC Milan—did not win by fluke. After Falcão drew Brazil level for the second time in the 68th minute, they should, the cliché goes, have hung back, needing only a draw to proceed to the semi-final. But they played the only way they wanted to. (Zico would recall: “He [Santana] would never tell us to hold back. Our commitment was always to go for the win. That was the true Brazilian way.”) And the Ital­ians exposed the weakness of the brilliant Brazilian midfield left vulnerable by what was behind it and in front. Three decades later, Falcão, who denies Brazil could not defend, would tell Fernando Duarte, the author of Shocking Brazil, Six Games That Shook the World Cup (2014): “In five matches in that World Cup we scored 15 goals and conceded five. Against Italy we made more tackles than the Italians and they scored their third goal when we had pretty much everybody back in our area for that corner. We lost to a team that seized their opportunities…”

But the Italians of 1982 were not the West Germans of 1974 or even 1954 who have never been given the credit they deserved for their triumphs. Beckenbauer & Co did their jobs better and it’s not as if the Germans played without flair. Scott Murray summed it up in The Guardian more than four World Cups ago: “[W]hile it’s a shame that Cruyff and Neeskens didn’t get their hands on the World Cup… the alternative would have been far worse: no World Cup winner’s medals to show for the careers of Beckenbauer… the ridiculously good Muller, Breitner, [Berti] Vogts or Maier.” The West German team of 1954 didn’t have the pedigree of the 1974 team and Ferenc Puskás’ Magical Magyars should have won in Switzerland. Yet, what’s forgotten about the Miracle of Bern is that the team that had thrashed the West Germans 8:3 in the group stages, beat Brazil and the hitherto unbeatable Uruguayans, did not have a good final by their own standards. Hungary had peaked too soon and the magicians were nearing the end of their careers. They might be forgiven for ‘relaxing’ after going 2:0 up in the final (a sin against a German team anywhere, anytime) but they also had a genuine goal disallowed. The Germans won because they capitalised on Hungary’s exhaustion and optimised their own tactical plan.

But the Magical Magyars weren’t the first great team not to win the World Cup; nor were the Brazilians in 1950. That honour, for what it’s worth, would go to Austria, a football powerhouse in the 1930s that nobody remembers anymore. The 1934 World Cup could easily have been Austria’s had they not been cheated out of it by a Mussolini-manipulated semi-final.

“Everyone can play football but those values are being lost. We have to bring them back,” Cruyff had remarked in an interview two years before his death. Football needs the beauty, without which it’s not football as we know it. Yet it’s also a contest, and the back of the opponent’s goal must be kept in sight. One team that successfully married entertaining football to winning were perennial underachievers Spain in the nearly six years (2008-14) they ruled world football. Cruyff, indisputably, was the absent presence that had loomed over what Alan Shearer has called the greatest national football team ever—the Luis Aragonés- Vicente del Bosque Spanish sides built on the philosophy and style of Cruyff’s Barça which was built on the Ajax model. And Cruyff went public in supporting Spain in the 2010 final against the Netherlands whose muscular game he didn’t like at all. Spain fell when they forgot that a system is only a means to an end and needs to be overhauled when everybody gets its measure.

It’s not enough to be beautiful losers. But one could do worse. Yesterday is a song. It shouldn’t become a burden.

1982 World CupArgentinaBeautiful LosersFIFA World Cup: Qatar 2022HungaryJohan CruyffSpain