Beautiful Bridesmaids Dressed in Oranje: the Unfulfilled Glory of Dutch Football - Book Review
Sean O'Conor
Stepping bravely into the clogs left by David Winner in his classic book Brilliant Orange, Gary Thacker has written another homage to Holland - Beautiful Bridesmaids Dressed in Oranje - the Unfulfilled Glory of Dutch Football.
Rather than another psycho-analytical musing on football and the Dutch national character, this is a 400-page ode to the Netherlands national team, specifically the mid 1970s bloom of tulips whose revolutionary Total Football and their charismatic leader Johann Cruyff took the football world by storm.
Thacker was one of those who fell under the spell. As a teenager at the time of the clockwork Oranje, he admits he was "Beguiled by beauty, smitten by dreams and hopelessly in love...(with) the Netherlands teams of 1974 and 1978".
Winner was similarly enraptured as was journalist Graham Hunter, who in the book admits, "My eye was hypnotically drawn towards Cruyff."
Thacker quotes Winner's summary of the Dutch's cultural impact on young fans in '74 as "The Summer of Love, Sergeant Pepper, Altamont and the death of John Lennon all in one four-week period."
To appreciate this adoration in full you of course had to be there at the time and probably for that reason I have never quite felt the Dutch football obsession of many non-Netherlanders, although I acknowledge the once-in-a-lifetime significance of the Seventies Oranje.
The conundrum of the Dutch's exquisite erudition yet inability to pass the final exam is one of the game's most enduring narratives. They are undoubtedly the greatest football nation to have never won the World Cup, falling badly three times at the last hurdle.
The first page mentions seduction, love, extravagant beauty, Icarus and true faith, placing us in the realm of the senses rather than the stats. The second name checks Jack Kerouac and the Beat writers' quest for meaning through exceptionalism. So far so brilliant.
After this aesthetic kickoff, the book becomes an exhaustive history of Dutch football from its birth until the present day.
The early 1970s Ajax-Feyenoord golden age of four straight wins in the European Cup when "Dutch football was becoming lord of all it surveyed" is well covered, but the meat and drink of the book are the two World Cup campaigns of the 1970s when the Netherlands were pipped at the post.
It is important to realise how ground-breaking their '74 campaign was. Before then, Holland's World Cup record was on a par with Luxembourg's and they arrived in West Germany unseeded and unfancied. Afterwards of course, the Netherlands had metamorphosed into a football power and were considered maestros.
The Cruyff Turn was born in their second match in 1974, against Sweden. It was a magic moment in football history but it is worth remembering the resulting cross was cleared and the game ended 0:0. In that sense, Thacker says, it was a microcosm of Dutch football - dazzling the world but failing to win the big prize.
"After leaving Olsson bewitched and bewildered, an outside-of-the-foot cross led to nothing. Impudent skill, balletic movement, other-worldly aura and a wanton desire to 'burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars' brought no tangible reward."
Had the fates not worked their magic, Total Football, the Cruyff turn et al might never have happened. Needing a draw at home in the decisive qualifier, Holland conceded a last-gasp Belgian goal which was wrongly ruled out for offside and the Dutch scraped through.
It is funny to think the 1974 World Cup winners West Germany have never got the credit they deserved because they dashed the dreams of so many that day in Munich. They were on the wrong side of history of course. The zeitgeist was youthful rebellion and exploration and building a new world with new ideas, not with the parents' virtues of grit, stamina and toil without beauty.
The Dutch's rotating positions, mass pressing and offside trap were novelties, if not actually inventions. The Austrians and Hungarians had revolutionised football earlier with similar philosophies but their ideas had in time been filed away.
A truly Dutch invention though was the attempt to humiliate the opponent in the first half of a World Cup final instead of finishing them off, an extraordinarily reckless tactic never again repeated.
Dutch arrogance was to blame for losing the 1974 final, a national trait which became their Achilles' heel that day.
"I think we played a little too confident," Cruyff said in atypical understatement, adding with unintentional humour, "we forgot to score the second goal."
No player has had such an influence on team selection as he did in 1974, hauling hardly-capped players he fancied into the starting lineup, keeping his club shirt number and demanding to wear two instead of three Adidas stripes because he was contracted to Puma.
The '74 World Cup final in Munich is of course centre stage in the book, the infamous 'lost game' when one of football's most mesmerising and revolutionary ensembles fluffed their big shot at glory, missing in essence, an open goal.
There is not much more to be said about those famous 90 minutes, other than its iconic status remains almost half a century after the event.
David Winner wrote that the Dutch are still traumatized by that day because they have been in denial - preferring to blame the referee (which did again in 2010) or celebrating the fact the team had played so well up until then.
A 2004 book, We Were the Best by Nico Scheepmaker Beker, calls it "Black Sunday...the end of the sixties; it is over with the illusions, a trauma with gradually mythological dimensions is born."
This reveals a downside of Dutch football. Their golden era, personified by Cruyff, bewitched many into joining a global cult, but also injected some of the team's arrogance that afternoon in Munich, leaving their acolytes defiantly blind to the side's shortcomings.
However joyously the side had entertained hitherto, forgetting the need to win the World Cup final is unforgivable. To many Oranje fans however, the lack of the biggest prize is still attributed to the failings of others.
So it was refreshing to read Rafael Honigstein's take on 1974 in the book. As a German he had never encountered this hero worshipping of the losing side until he moved to London.
Thacker places Cruyff's Holland among the tragic heroines of the World Cup alongside Hungary in 1954, Brazil in 1982 and Denmark in 1986, the beautiful bridesmaids of football.
Following a similar theme, the book Danish Dynamite said,
"The best stories in life are the ones where those involved don't get the girl, the happy ending of even the Jules Rimet Trophy."
The plight of the Mighty Magyars in '54 is the closest parallel; perhaps the Hungarians feel the same way as the Dutch about their lost final.
Tragedies are superior works of art to comedies, it is true, which may be a crumb of comfort. While everyone wants to talk about the '74 Dutch and not the '74 Germans, can it ever make up for not winning the biggest prize? Probably not. Football does not award points for artistic impression. The FIFA Fair Play award is not the same thing and is ephemeral anyway.
Had Holland won in 1978 with Rob Rensenbrink's last-gasp shot finding the net instead of the post, one wonders what history would have made of it. The universal consensus says that the '74 side was the better one, so their heroic failure has a greater romance to it as a result.
A win in '78 would have felt like a bit of a robbery without the magician Cruyff, but also an extraordinary achievement beating the Argentine junta on their home turf. As Thacker relates, the forces lined up against the Dutch then were immense, from politicians, referees and traffic policemen to the event organisers and rabid fans.
Holland in reality were in a no-win situation heading into the final. For that reason Rensenbrink's 'what if' shot is somewhat forgotten - you feel the referee would have disallowed it anyway.
Thacker certainly knows his onions, or perhaps his oranges, with in-depth studies of the Netherlands' key matches of the seventies and biographies of the protagonists. There is not much though on Total Football itself, its Austrian-inspired origins, application, longevity or influence.
While the detail on the Seventies World Cups is impressive, the 2014 World Cup, where the Dutch reached the last four, is dealt with in a single sentence, ditto Euro 2008.
The victorious 1988 European Championship campaign is well covered though, an occasion when Oranje did become the bride, albeit of their continent rather than of the world.
The great Marco Van Basten goal against the Soviet Union is described thus:
"With all the accuracy of a cruise missile, the ball flew towards goal, then dipped over Dasayev's head to find the far side of the net. It was impulsive. It was impudent. It was incredible."
True, Ruud Gullit and Van Basten were immense in the final but the team also lost to the Soviets in the group stage and came within minutes of elimination against the Republic of Ireland, so do not quite make it into the pantheon of greatest ever national teams.
The semi-final defeat of West Germany really did echo the national joy of the liberation after WWII, but as successful as the summer of '88 was, the general consensus thirty years on is that the '74 vintage leaves all others in the shade, the most beautiful of brides, jilted at the altar.
That European Championship win apart, Holland have had no joy on the international stage and failed to qualify for Spain 82, Mexico '86, Japan/Korea 2002, Euro 2016 or Russia 2018. The Dutch talent for infighting also hurt them at Euro '96 and France '98.
As Thacker says of the mess of the Italia '90 campaign, where the players got Thijs Libregts the sack, voted for Cruyff to replace him but were given Leo Beenhakker instead.
"No one can defeat the Dutch like they can themselves. Careful aim was taken and the bullet delivered directly into the foot."
Why they have this fatal flaw is not explored, which is a shame because it is something outsiders struggle to understand. From the comments of Edgar Davids at the time, some of the internal squabbling was race-related.
Mentally the Dutch are different, a product of their uniquely flat, reclaimed and watery terroir, as Winner and others have studied.
Sometimes brilliant, other times infuriating, it is hard to know which Netherlands will turn up. Most recently they collapsed psychologically to everyone's surprise at Euro 2020, losing 2-0 to the lesser-ranked Czech Republic having won their first three games impressively.
What happens next is hard to say. Since their early-mid Seventies golden age, the Dutch have intermittently bloomed, most recently in Ajax reaching the Champions League semi final in 2019 and Oranje the Nations League final the same summer.
Any English book about Dutch football will forever be in the shadow of Brilliant Orange, one of the greatest sports books of all time, so the author deserves praise for doubling the canon. It is a noble achievement, intensely researched and comes from a palpable love of the subject matter
Like David Winner, a teenage Thacker had stood up at Villa Park to cheer a Cruyff goal for Barcelona in 1978. At times, though not enough for my liking, he moves into a lyrical realm when describing them:
"At their best the Dutch play was like the hypnotic stare of a cobra, swaying gently from side to side, lulling its prey into a somnambulistic state before striking with devastating speed."
Thacker's love for the team shines through, and a poetic prose book about his fascination would be a great idea. He could call it At Centraal Station I Sat Down and Wept, after Elizabeth Smart.
Of course the beautiful bridesmaids tried to tie the knot a third time, at the 2010 World Cup final, but having mis-read the script, arrived dressed like Halloween ghouls instead.
Having beaten seven bells out of the talented Spaniards in an appalling first 45 minutes, the world fell out of love with the now bitter oranges.
After Cruyff himself called the 2010 final "ugly" and "anti-football", there were many who opined that he was ironically to blame: Holland's conquerors Spain had imbibed the Barcelona style the Amsterdammer had invented and turned it into tiki-taka.
In a surrogate way at least, the beautiful bridesmaid had at last become the bride.
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© Sean O'Conor & Soccerphile
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