David Winner > Quotes

“God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.”
― David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

“Johan Cruyff was the first player who understood that he was an artist, and the first who was able and willing to collectivise the art of sports.”
― David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

“Louis van Gaal is generally considered the creator of a football system or machine. It might be more accurate to describe him as the originator of a new process for playing the game. His underlying tactical principles were much as those of Michels and Cruyff: relentless attack; pressing and squeezing space to make the pitch small in order to win the ball; spreading play and expanding the field in possession. By the 1990s, though, footballers had become stronger, faster and better organised than ever before. Van Gaal saw the need for a new dimension. ‘With space so congested, the most important thing is ball circulation,’ he declared. ‘The team that plays the quickest football is the best.’ His team aimed for total control of the game, maintaining the ball ‘in construction’, as he calls it, and passing and running constantly with speed and precision. Totaalvoetbal-style position switching was out, but players still had to be flexible and adaptable. Opponents were not seen as foes to be fought and beaten in battle; rather as posing a problem that had to be solved. Ajax players were required to be flexible and smart – as they ‘circulated’ the ball, the space on the field was constantly reorganised until gaps opened in the opponents’ defence.”
― David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

“It should have been the epiphany of the sixties. Instead it turned out to be its requiem,”
― David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

“The ultimate space-measurer in Dutch football is of course, Johan Cruyff. He was only seventeen when he first played at Ajax, yet even then he delivered running commentaries on the use of space to the rest of the team, telling them where to run, where not to run. Players did what the tiny, skinny teenager told them to do because he was right. Cruyff didn't talk about abstract space but about specific, detailed spatial relations on the field. Indeed, the most abiding image of him as a player is not of him scoring or running or tackling. It is of Cruyff pointing. 'No, not there, back a little... forward two metres... four metres more to the left.' He seemed like a conductor directing a symphony orchestra. It was as if Cruyff was helping his colleagues to realize an approximate rendering on the field to match the sublime vision in his mind of how the space ought to be ordered.”
― David Winner

“Short, dark, and slight, he looks simultaneously middle-aged and prepubescent, a little worse for wear in any case with his black hair matted like a street cat and his eyes crusted over and bleary.”
― David Winner, Tyler's Last

“I have this instinct for knowing when a defence is going to relax, or when a defender will make a mistake,’ he once said. ‘Something inside me says, Gerd, go this way; Gerd, go that. I don’t know what it is.’ A killer who claimed to hear voices. Serial goalscorer.”
― David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

“We won’t lower ourselves to your level, but if it makes you happy to destroy our elegance, then go ahead!”
― David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

“Gerard van der Lem, Van Gaal’s right-hand man at Ajax and Barcelona, explains: ‘The main principle was possession of the ball. We trained on this endlessly. In some European Cup and Dutch League games we had seventy per cent ball possession. Seventy per cent! You need a lot of technical skills to do that. We almost always had the ball and we were always trying to find solutions. People think our system was rigid, but it was not. It could not be rigid. We could play with three strikers, or with three in midfield, with or without a shadow spits [striker]; whatever you like. The thing was to understand what consequences these formations have for the team. The players must be tactically very skilful and they have to be thinking spatially in advance. When we won the European Cup, everything fitted. Everything fell like a puzzle. Every player knew the qualities of his fellow players. Each player knew how to play a ball to his fellow players. In defence, they knew exactly how to press. They all knew the distances… Yeah, it was like solving a puzzle.”
― David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

“The defender must first think defensively, but he must also think offensively. For an attacker it is the other way around. Somewhere they meet.”
― David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

“Catenaccio is like a Titian painting – soft, seductive and languid. The Italians welcome and lull you and seduce you into their soft embrace, and score a goal like the thrust of a dagger.”
― David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football