Johan Cruijff

Ziggo Dome is in the shadow of the Johan Cruijff Arena, home of Ajax football club.

In my youth I was (and I remain) a terrible football player. The relative success of the Scottish national team and Scottish clubs in the sixties and seventies was a defining element of cultural identity and in East Kilbride being good at football was the one and pretty much the only necessary requirement for being a cool twelve year old.

But my father John had a life long, exuberant passion for the game—he coached school football teams throughout his teaching career and into his retirement. I went with him to see Scotland and Glasgow Celtic and East Kilbride Thistle play and in spite of my complete lack of talent for the game—which if it was a disappointment to my father he never let me see—I inherited his passion.

John's hero was Johan Cruijff. Cruijff was the icon and protége of the Dutch system of 'total football' that took the Netherlands to the 1974 World Cup Final and my father's hope, belief even, was that Scotland would adopt this system of playing and coaching and the national football team would rise to it's rightful place as a real contender on the world football stage along side Germany and Brazil—and The Netherlands. (The English national football team was only ever referred to in derisory terms.)

While being no good at football felt like the ultimate social handicap and meant, in my head at least, that any interest in girls was pointless to think about never mind pursue, it did leave space for other stuff: specifically, spending hours in my bedroom listening to, and trying to copy the guitar playing on records by Free and Status Quo and Eric Clapton and Fleetwood Mac borrowed from the local library.

In his autobiography Cruijff lists 'being yourself' and 'taking care of things as if they were your own' in a list of axioms for getting on in sport and in life in general. Seeing his picture one hundred feet high on the stand across the plaza from Ziggo Dome I wondered if somehow, without realising it, my twelve-year-old self had learned something about myself from watching Cruijff play in that 1974 world cup: it was a remarkable thing to witness that still resonates when I re-watched clips of it today that might have, in a complex way, guided me to the path that had brought me here. We shall not see his like again.