"Rest in peace, General" - Rinus Michels dies at 77
03 March: The Ajax family suffered a major loss
today. Rinus Michels, arguably the most prominent
ambassador of Dutch football after Johan Cruyff, passed
away at a hospital in the Belgian town of Aalst this morning,
at age 77. Michels was a headstrong striker for Ajax
and Oranje in the 1950s, but became a football legend
as the architect of the 'Golden Ajax' of the early 1970s,
the inventor of Holland's 'total football' of 1974 and the only
coach to have won a major trophy with the Dutch national team
(Euro 88).
Having had a number of heart-attacks in recent years, Mr
Michels was hospitalized to undergo a heart valve operation on
18 February. The surgery was succesful according to the
doctors, but Michels remained in hospital for intensive care.
According to KNVB president Henk Kesler there were "accute
complications" during the night. Rinus Michels died
this morning at approximately 5:00 AM CET.
Rinus Michels was not only a legendary football manager, but
also an unforgettable character, dearly loved and deeply
respected by the Dutch, who knew him as The
General (because of his grim logic and
the almost military discipline he imposed on 'his'
Ajax in the late 1960s) or as The
Sphinx, because of his seemingly unmoved
appearance at the sideline. No Dutch football fan will
ever forget his creaking, high-pitched voice, his
razorsharp Amsterdam accent, his dry sense of humour, and
the way he dished up grumpy, but unforgettably ironic
one-liners -- always with a deadpan expression.
Michels was born in Amsterdam-South on 09 February 1928,
almost next door to the newly built Olympic Stadium. The
entire neighbourhood supported Blauw Wit ('Blue White'),
but Rinus' father Piet Michels was an avid supporter of Ajax,
the red and white club from Amsterdam-East. Young
Rinus watched his first Ajax home game at
age five. In 1940, at the beginning of the German occupation of
The Netherlands, he joined the club as a 'playing member',
determined to become as good as his hero, legendary Ajax
striker Piet van Reenen.
Michels made his first team début in the league game
at ADO in The Hague on 09 June 1946, which Ajax won by the
spectacular score of 3-8, thanks to an amazing number of
five goals by the physically strong, fearless 18
year-old battering ram. It was the start of a long career in
Ajax-1. Michels played 171 matches (94 goals) as an amateur
(until 1954) and another 89 (27 goals) as a professional until
his last appearance, at home against NOAD on 16 March 1958. He
was only 30 years old when he called it quits. A string
of bad and very painful back injuries forced him
to quit, having won the over-all Dutch
championship with Ajax in 1947 and 1958. Between June 1950 and
May 1954 he also played five games for Oranje.
It was no surprise that Michels became a coach. He was
a leader as a player and developed into a coach thinking along
the lines of Ajax's legendary English coach Jack Reynolds, who
introduced the tactical formation we still know as the 'Ajax
system' today and started a process of professionalization,
with a very strict training regime for the players.
Michels' coaching career started at JOS in Amsterdam-East and
continued at AFC in Amsterdam-South in 1964-1965, but
he did not need any time to think when Ajax contacted
him. He started as head-coach at De Meer on 22
January 1965, one day after Vic Buckingham's
resignation due to the team's miserably
poor results. Ajax did not get relegated from the
Eredivisie that season, but that was about it: the 13th
slot, one above the 'relegation line', of 1964-1965 still
stands as Ajax's worst season since the advent of professional
football in Holland.
Michels lifts the European
Champions Cup at Wembley in 1971. [Photo: Ajax.nl]
The rest, as they say, is history. Michels won the
Dutch championship with Ajax in his first full season (1966),
made an impression in the European Champions Cup for the first
time the season thereafter (1966-1967), made it
to the final in 1969 (AC Milan proved too strong: 4-1) and,
eventually, won the 'Big One' with Ajax in 1971, by beating
Panathinaikos in the final at London's Wembley Stadium. Michels
had built a team that is generally regarded as one of the best
in the history of the game: the 'Golden Ajax' of the 1970s,
with players such as Johan Cruyff, Piet Keizer, Ruud Krol, Arie
Haan, Johan Neeskens and Gerrie Mühren.
The General left for FC Barcelona in the summer of
1971, having won four Dutch championships, three KNVB Cups and
a European Champions Cup. He served as Ajax's
head-coach for 393 games, in which 1,099 goals were scored.
Ajax went on to win the 'Big One' again in 1972 and
1973, with Stefan Kovacs as a coach, but the Ajax team of
the 1970s is generally regarded as Michels' team.
Cruyff and Neeskens joined Michels in Barcelona in the
summer of 1973. The Dutch threesome clinched the Spanish
championship for Barça after fourteen years of
(politically controversial) Real Madrid superiority.
To thousands of Catalonians 03 February 1974 still is the
most beautiful day of their lives: the day that Barça,
coached by Rinus Michels and led by an unstoppable Johan
Cruyff, destroyed Real Madrid by the historic score of
0-5 on the pitch of their own Bernabéu
Stadium. To the Catalonians it wasn't just a football game, but
a political and cultural triumph over the military regime of
general Franco, who had officially forbidden the Catalonian
flag.
Rinus Michels was assigned by the KNVB as the 'man in
charge' for the World Cup of 1974 in West-Germany, for which a
shaky Oranje had qualified in an extremely fortunate way.
Expectations were low, but Michels - re-united with the large
part of 'his' Ajax squad - introduced a tactical system
that was revolutionary. He called it 'total football' because
none of the players seemed to have a fixed position. Everyone
showed up everywhere as Holland took the tournament
by storm, made countless fans worldwide and, eventually,
suffered a traumatic and totally unexpected defeat in the
final against hosts West-Germany (1974).
Michels returned to Ajax, as the successor of coach
Hans Kraay, who stepped down before the season had even
started. It was an unsuccesful season, followed by a
second spell at FC Barcelona (1976-1978), which brought Michels
another trophy he had not won yet: the Spanish Copa del
Rey. The now 50 year-old coach then moved to the United
States, where he coached the L.A. Aztecs (1978-1980). Back in
Europe, Michels signed a contract at Bundesliga outfit FC
Köln (Cologne). He won the German DFB Cup (1984) with
Cologne, but was eventually fired for the first and only time
in his career.
Two spells at Ajax, two at Barcelona... It did not come
as a surprise that Michels also returned to
Oranje. It was the summer of 1984, precisely ten
years after the World Cup final in Munich. Michels worked as
technical director for the KNVB, before accepting the
coaching job in 1986. Holland had failed to qualify for three
major tournaments in a row (WC 1982, Euro 1984 and WC 1986).
The man to bring the men in orange back into the spotlights
had to be Rinus Michels. Holland qualified for Euro 88
in unusually convincing style and ended up grabbing their first
and, so far, only major trophy that summer. In Munich's
Olympia Stadium, cradle of the '1974 trauma'. And: after having
booked a legendary 2-1 win over hosts West-Germany in the
semi-final. The circle was perfect.
The last years of his coaching career were not the
nicest: Michels unsuccesfully coached Bundesliga outfit
Bayer Leverkusen (he resigned in April 1989), was -
according to many - single-handedly responsible for
the fact that Johan Cruyff did not coach Holland
at the 1990 World Cup and had a third, not
very memorable spell as coach of Oranje
(1990-1992) before retiring at age 64 -- although he
continued to represent the KNVB as an ambassador. Rinus
Michels was decorated as Knight of the Royal Order of
Oranje-Nassau, was a Member of Honour of AFC Ajax and was
presented the UEFA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.
Johan Cruyff may be the number one icon of Dutch football;
the man behind his glory was Rinus Michels, the coach under
whose supervision both Cruyff and Marco van Basten had
their finest hours. With them as his finest apprentices Rinus
Michels made The Netherlands a football-mad country.
That is his inheritance to his country.
And now The General is dead. Hopefully he
has been re-united with his beloved wife Wil, whose
death in 2004 devastated Michels. Rest in peace,
General. You will be sorely missed. (MP)
Source: VI.nl, NOS Teletekst, Ajax.nl and 'De Generaal'
(biography by Bert Hiddema)
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