That '70s show

The last tournament on German soil witnessed the birth of ‘Total Football’ and brought Johan Cruyff and Franz Beckenbauer face to face in the final. The careers of two great players were to mirror each other in the years that followed, but only one of them lifted the World Cup. Emmet Malone looks back

His feet are slower now and so the brain that is perfectly attuned to the needs of football expresses itself in a different way.

These days Johan Cruyff talks about the game and what he has to say, good or bad, is almost always considered news in Holland and Barcelona.

When he wishes he can be a ruthless critic, making life distinctly uncomfortable for those who have succeeded him in the national team or his adopted home of Catalonia. Some of what he says is, on the other hand, dismissed light-heartedly as slightly nonsensical. "Cruyffisms", they call them back at home.

But much else is subjected to sombre scrutiny and occasionally he can touch a raw nerve amongst his countrymen, as when the former Ajax skipper observed that "every disadvantage has its advantage." At first glance, it might look like more fodder for the collectors of football quotes but in Holland nobody old enough to remember the traumatic events of July 7th, 1974 was laughing.

No team had ever started a World Cup final the way the Dutch did that day in Munich against their bitter rivals, West Germany.

From the kick-off they completed 17 passes before Cruyff floated past Berti Vogts and towards the German box. The then 27-year-old was just inside it when Uli Hoeness tripped him to concede a penalty. After Johan Neeskens calmly converted it, Sepp Maier became the first German player in the game to touch the ball as he picked it out of the back of his net.

For the next 20 minutes the Dutch - already a sensation at the tournament with their "Total Football", a style of play based on intelligent passing and constant movement - underlined their status as purveyors of truly beautiful football.

As indecision gripped them, however, what they didn't, simply couldn't, do was score again to consolidate their lead, and when Germany equalised against the run of play after a dive inside the penalty area by Bernd Holzenbein, their world began to come crashing down around them.

Paul Breitner scored from the spot and, suddenly, it was the home team that started to take control. Just before half-time they took the lead. It was Gerd Muller who scored, the striker converting a cross from Rainer Bonhof in the most remarkable fashion after what had initially looked a terribly poor first touch.

The Dutch pressed relentlessly after the break but Cruyff's vital influence in midfield was lost as Vogts forced him much deeper than he liked to play. Neeskens did draw an astonishing save from Maier late on but it was the Germans who found the net again, Muller this time beating the Dutch offside trap only to have his goal mistakenly ruled out by Jack Taylor, the English referee.

For the first time since the "miracle of Berne", the 1954 final in which they came from 2-0 down against a brilliant Hungarian side that had beaten them 8-3 in the group stages to win 3-2, the West Germans were world champions. The Dutch, meanwhile, were left to ponder a bewildering defeat.

History has perhaps been a little unkind to that German side. Two years previously, as they romped to victory in the European Nations Cup, they had been the ones to dazzle with the quality of their own "total" football. During the intervening period they had been deprived of their most charismatic figure, the flamboyant attacking midfielder Gunter Netzer, who had defied the wishes of his national team coach by moving abroad, to Real Madrid. Without him the team's coach, Helmut Schon, sought to adapt his side's tactics. For the World Cup, the approach would be more - though far from ultra - defensive, with the Germans seeking to contain teams and pour forward on the break.

Central to Schon's blueprint was the inspirational 29-year-old skipper Franz Beckenbauer, who had reinvented the role of sweeper at Bayern Munich so as to make himself the springboard for his team’s every venture forward. Now, in his third World Cup, he was to be given the same level of influence for his country. All around him there were players of exceptional talent but “Der Kaiser” was a born leader and he would be the one with the responsibility for pulling this German side together and driving them on to victory.

With Brazil missing Pele and other stars from the great 1970 side, Italy perceived to be in decline and England having failed to qualify, the Germans started the tournament as favourites.

By contrast, the Dutch were lucky to be there. They had only twice before played at a World Cup finals – in 1934 and 1938 – and on each occasion had managed just one game before returning home. Holland’s recent record at club level was outstanding. Feyenoord had won the European Cup in 1970 and the Uefa Cup four years later. In between the two successes, Ajax had dominated the game’s most prestigious club competition, winning it in 1971, 1972 and 1973 before Cruyff left for Barcelona and the team assembled by Rinus Michaels began to disintegrate.

The national team had the likes of Johnny Rep, Ruud Krol and Neeskens from Ajax, but their attempt to qualify for the 1974 finals was something of a mess. They could beat Belgium neither home nor away and only topped their group after a perfectly good goal by their old rivals’ striker, Jan Verheyen, was disallowed in Amsterdam.

Though he was the team’s most talented star, Cruyff was not liked by many of his team-mates and he certainly did not provide the sort of leadership his rival did in the German camp.

Still, when Michels was drafted in to replace Frantisek Fadhronc as coach three months before the tournament, things started to look brighter. The Feyenoord players adapted well to his style and confidence within the squad grew steadily. When they beat Argentina 4-1 in their final friendly the expectations of the outside world belatedly began to catch up.

During the build-up to the tournament the Germans came to hear that both the Dutch, after an acrimonious dispute with their own association, and Italians had been promised DM 100,000 (£16,500) each if they became world champions.

They demanded a similar amount from their federation, the DFB, who offered less than a third as much. The attitude of the players was hardened by what they perceived as abysmal treatment. Far from a luxury hotel, the squad was put up in a sports campus near the Baltic Sea resort of Malente where they slept three to a room and queued to use communal phones and other facilities.

Beckenbauer was added to the players’ team of representatives as negotiations got tough. Schon was dismayed by their stand and at one point packed his bags to leave. In the end it was Beckenbauer who had to talk the 58-year-old out of going, just as it was the team’s captain who instructed the rest of the players to accept the promise of a DM70,000 bonus after a vote on the offer had resulted in an 11-to-11 tie.

THE TOURNAMENT was also the backdrop for the latest round in the battle between the different wings of the Dassler family and their respective sportswear firms, Adidas and Puma.

Cruyff had been tied in with Puma since his mother signed him to the company for an annual fee of 1,500 Guilders when he was 20. Their relationship had its rough patches, with the company forced to sue him at one point over his continued insistence on wearing their rivals’ boots.

By the summer of 1974, however, he was receiving 100 times the original sum and, such was his loyalty to his benefactors, he refused to wear the national team’s official Adidas jersey.

The Dutch federation was forced to have one with two rather than three stripes made especially for him and when the official squad photo was taken Adidas’ promotions man covertly placed a company sports bag in front of the star’s boots. Beckenbauer, meanwhile, had signed a deal with Adidas that entitled him to a share of the profits generated by sales of boots, shorts and shirts bearing his name. His payments became so large that Horst Widmann, Adi Dassler’s personal assistant, had to hide their scale from his boss.

Most of the other German players ended up receiving significant payments for wearing Adidas boots during the tournament but members of rival squads weren’t all so lucky. The Scots played their three games with the markings on their footwear blacked out after turning down what they felt was a “derisory” offer from Adidas.

The tournament itself was a rather raw product of its time. Security was tight, with the Germans desperate to avoid anything like what had happened during the Munich Olympics two years earlier when 11 Israeli athletes had died following an attack by Palestinian group Black September.

The quality of the games varied wildly, not least because of the weather. The Germans had employed a somewhat primitive computer to predict when it would be best to stage the competition but torrential rain made the conditions almost impossible on a number of occasions. One game particularly affected was the meeting of Germany and the tournament’s surprise package, Poland, in the final game of the second group stage. A place in the final was at stake and the rather selective efforts to clear the surface water, it was alleged afterwards, had served to aid the efforts of the Germans.

The competition’s two rank outsiders were Zaire and Haiti, and neither fared well. The former’s President Mobutu promised his country’s players cars and holidays if they could avoid humiliation, but they couldn’t. After a 9-0 defeat by Yugoslavia in their second match, soldiers sealed off their hotel as players were told that if they lost heavily again (against Brazil) they would not be allowed to return home.

A 3-0 defeat to the defending champions was, apparently, deemed acceptable. Haiti, meanwhile, had only qualified after a tournament held on home turf in which their 2-1 defeat of rivals Trinidad and Tobago had been secured with the help of an El Salvadorean referee who disallowed four goals for the visitors. The match official was subsequently banned by Fifa.

In Germany, the Haitians started brightly with Emmanuel Sanon scoring the opening goal in his side’s game against Italy. It was the first time Dino Zoff had been beaten in 1,147 minutes of international football and even after the Italians came back to win 3-1, the minnows departed as heroes.

When Ernst Jean-Joseph subsequently failed a drugs test and the team’s French doctor publicly dismissed the player’s explanation of the problem, things quickly turned sour.

After a couple of days hanging around the team hotel Jean-Joseph was abducted and beaten up by officials from his own country before being flown home. When a German “attaché” to the Haitians revealed what had happened to the media he was sacked by the tournament organisers.

THE EVENTUAL finalists initially enjoyed differing fortunes, with West Germany struggling to find form early on while Holland excelled. The hosts beat Chile and Australia rather unimpressively before suffering a painful 1-0 defeat in their first ever meeting with East Germany.

Schon, a defector to the west, was devastated. There was even talk that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and from that point on Beckenbauer exerted a far greater influence on team selection and tactics. The defeat, though, meant that West Germany faced Poland, Sweden and Yugoslavia in the second phase rather than Argentina, Holland and Brazil. It allowed them to steady themselves and over the three games they finally started to look like potential champions.

The Dutch, on the other hand, shone at every opportunity. Michels’ enforced revamp of the team before the tournament looked inspired as improvised sweeper Arie Haan, his replacement on the right side of midfield, Wim Jansen and just about all of the team’s attacking stars, most notably Cruyff himself, rose to the occasion.

Even 34-year-old Jon Jongbloed, who had not played an international since the 4-1 defeat by Denmark 12 years previously, was outstanding. In the second phase Cruyff scored twice as the Dutch swept the Argentinians aside and after East Germany had been beaten, Michels’ men showed their mettle by defeating Mario Zagallo’s Brazil in a particularly tough encounter. The win put them in the final. The way they achieved it ensured they would start as favourites.

On the eve of the game, the Dutch became targets of the German media with Bild Zeitung running a story about a late-night romp around the team hotel pool involving four players and two local women on the eve of the Brazil match.

Cruyff was said to have been involved but while the paper claimed to have pictures the only one ever published was of a deserted swimming pool. Still, difficulties ensued for the Dutch. Haan first heard of the story when Cruyff told him, “there is a big problem”. “We were a little bit surprised,” recalled the man who was subsequently to serve as Michels’ assistant when the Dutch won the European Champinships in 1988. “Then came the pressure and stress.”

Those came in the form of calls from the players’ wives back at home, with Danny Cruyff allegedly keeping her husband on the phone for most of the night. In Holland the incident is now widely held to have influenced the result of the final but as kick-off time approached, the Dutch still managed to retain the upper hand.

“They really were the best team in the tournament,” admits Maier. “But they were arrogant, they wanted to show us up and they didn’t succeed.” Hoeness agrees, although he admits to having felt intimidated immediately before the kick-off.

“Their attitude was, ‘How many do you want to lose by today, boys?’ While we waited to go on the pitch I tried to look them in the eye but I couldn’t do it. They made us feel small.”

After the early goal, Breitner concedes, the Germans might have been broken but the Dutch, he feels, passed up the opportunity to put their rivals away. “For a moment we were paralysed. The didn’t realise how down we were, how demoralised.”

According to Wim van Hanegem, whose father, sister and two brothers were killed during the Second World War, the Dutch became divided over whether to toy with the Germans or finish them off. “It would have been better if it had been West Germany who scored in the first minute,” observed Johnny Rep. “As it was, we wanted to make fun of them and if you watch a film of the game you can see them get more and more angry.”

The hosts channelled their anger well although even they dismissed their successful penalty claim with amusement afterwards. Beckenbauer remarked that the incident was a “speciality” of Holzenbein while Maier observed that the player “simply flew over”.

The quality of the winner was undisputed although no player’s words in relation to it are nearly as well remembered as those of the Dutch television commentator who cried out despairingly, “They’ve tricked us again.”

Despite their disappointment the Dutch, with the exception of van Hanegem, attended the post match banquet while most of the Germans left to celebrate at a local bar when it emerged that wives weren’t invited and Hoeness became involved in a row with federation officials after his partner, Susi, was told to leave.

Muller, aged just 28, followed the lead of Italy’s Angelo Schiavio 40 years earlier, by announcing his retirement from international football on the night he celebrated scoring the winner in a World Cup. He had scored 68 goals in 62 games for West Germany and his 14 goals in finals tournaments was a record.

The Dutch suffered an even more devastating blow when Cruyff said he would not travel to the 1978 finals in Argentina as he did not wish to leave his wife for as long again. Four years later, despite many efforts to change his mind, he remained true to his word and the Dutch were again beaten in the final.

His career, though, continued to mirror Beckenbauer’s over the years that followed. Just as Cruyff had played a key part in Ajax’s three consecutive European titles, so the German helped Bayern Munich to achieve the same feat between 1974 and 1976.

Beckenbauer was first to make a lucrative move to America where he helped the New York Cosmos to three NASL titles in 1977, 1978 and 1980. In 1979 Cruyff almost joined his old adversary at the club, for whom he even played two exhibition games. Ultimately, though, he signed for the Los Angeles Aztecs instead and won the league’s Most Valuable Player award that season.

Back in Europe, both went on to become highly successful managers, with the Dutchman leading Barcelona to four successive league titles and a European Cup while the German won the Bundesliga and Uefa Cup with Bayern after overseeing his country’s success at Italia ’90. This time round Cruyff’s involvement is likely to be limited to television punditry, while Beckenbauer will oversee the running of the tournament.

Reflecting on their careers once, Beckenbauer’s conclusion was simple. “He was the better player,” he said. “But I won the World Cup.”