It is hard to overstate just how big a deal it was for an 11-year-old football fan to know that Johan Cruyff was coming to play in Scotland.
Even the name alone: JOHAN CRUYFF. It was like BRUCE LEE or JR EWING in the pantheon of transcendental legends that a kid born in the early 1970s couldn’t even get close to getting close to.
At this point in my life, my knowledge of “foreign” footballers was fairly rudimentary, at best. The only time I’d ever seen other international teams in action was at World Cups. Well, actually, the 1982 World Cup, which is the first one I can remember. Set against the backdrop of incessantly energising and other-worldly Spanish sunshine, for people of a certain age this was the moment in time when all the lights switched on simultaneously.
Brazil. Impossibly cool and glamorous. The most Brazilian they have ever been or ever will be. Lithe, sexy Rock Gods. Socrates, Zico, Eder, Falcao, Junior. Yellow shirt, blue shorts. Perspiring manfully in the cauldrons of Seville and Malaga, swatting aside a Scotland team who had the effrontery to take the lead through Dave Narey’s greatest goal of all time.
Then you had the French. Platini. Bossis. Giresse. Tigana. Rocheteau. The second-coolest team in the tournament after the Samba Superstars.
The best that ever were or ever would be
Italy. Rossi bouncing back from a match-fixing ban to fire his country to the top of the world. That Tardelli celebration. Dino Zoff lifting the trophy at 40. It’s still my favourite World Cup by a distance, even if it subsequently emerged that in reality it was an organisational fiasco and impossibly corrupt.
The big miss from Espana ’82 was the Dutch team who had apparently been the best side at the 1974 West Germany version and Argentina ’78, even if Cruyff was posted missing at the latter. Yet somehow Cruyff had entered the national and international consciousness.
I knew who he was at the age of 11, even if I had never seen him play or read about him in the newspapers. You just knew. Like Pele or George Best or Denis Law. You didn’t have to have ever seen these icons play to know they were the best that ever were or ever would be. It was almost as if the information was atomised and added to the reservoirs, along with fluoride and particles of lead.
MEMORABLE GAMES: St Mirren 0 Feyenoord 1 (Gullit, 29)
Love Street, Paisley, September 14, 1983
UEFA Cup, first round, first leg
St Mirren
- Thomson
- Clarke
- Fulton
- McAveety (Walker 46)
- McCormack
- Richardson
- Alexander
- Fitzpatrick (McDougall 68)
- McAvennie
- McDougall
- Scanlon
Feyenoord
- Hiele
- Duut
- Troost
- Van de Korput
- Wijnstekers
- Cruyff
- Gullit
- Hoekstra (Stafleu 65)
- Nielson
- Houtman
- Vermuelen (van Til 75)
Cruyff was in that elite club. And in September 1983 he was coming to Scotland to play a team I had barely heard of – St Mirren, who might as well have been Romania’s Arges Pitesti for all I knew about them.
The enigmatic and headstrong genius was spending season 1983/84 at Feyenoord, the arch-rivals of the Ajax team he had spent most of his career with, conquering Europe in the process. Ever the contrarian (he was also widely known as an idealist, libertarian, romantic and purist), he had jumped ship from cosmopolitan Amsterdam to gritty Rotterdam in the swansong season of his beyond-incredible playing career after Ajax refused him the contract he wanted.
And here he was in Paisley. As you’ll have gathered already, I’m not a St Mirren fan, but these were more ecumenical times and when my friend’s dad asked us if we wanted to go and watch Johan Cruyff play, we were more than happy to travel in his car from Airdrie to, well, anywhere.
Cruyff was the image of cool
I seem to remember on the morning of the game that the tabloids had a photo (black and white, natch) of Cruyff arriving at Glasgow Airport the day before. He may or may not have been smoking a cigarette in the image. Different times. I remember being excited to the point of projectile vomiting on the day of the match and a primary school day had never lasted as long.
Eventually, after what felt like a week in jail, the school bell rang. Straight home, quick change, stare out the window and wait for Raymond and his dad to park up outside the house.
It was a cool autumn evening, sparks of nuclear-generated electricity in the air and a first ever trip to Love Street, or Paisley for that matter.
Obviously, the arrival of the most influential figure in the history of football had caught the imagination of the whole country and the old stadium was totally sold out. I wasn’t quite used to this – rattling around the stands at Broomfield every second Saturday was very much my lived experience. But so what? I mean Johan fecking Cruyff.
Just found this @nirvanadiary a belter of a photo from the Feyenoord v St Mirren UEFA Cup first leg, the master @MaccaFrank and Johan Cruyff!! 😜 pic.twitter.com/amSjKQ1qSs
— Martin McNelis (@GTDT42) April 5, 2021
There he is, ambling on to the pitch (only people that confident can truly amble) and I was in the presence of probably the coolest man on the planet. I would love to provide a blow-by-blow account of the on-pitch action, but I was fixated on what Cruyff was doing (effortlessly gliding around the pitch without breaking sweat, mainly) although my attention was occasionally grabbed by a young dreadlocked winger who was making the left flank his own personal domain. He had just turned 21. That man was, of course, Ruud Gullit, in his second season at Feyenoord, the team he had grown up supporting. The future and past of genius Dutch football in Paisley in September.
Both Cruyff and Gullit are regarded as being among the greatest players of all time, and both are idolised by fans of clubs outside their homeland (Cruyff at Barcelona and Gullit at AC Milan). Two geniuses from the Netherlands showing off their incredible talents in the same place at the same time. It was more Louvre than Love Street. And it felt like a torch was being passed. It was like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan (before he became really famous) coming to your local karate club to give a wee demonstration.
And then it was over
In the event, Gullit scored the only goal of what was a stuffy kind of game, and Feyenoord won their home leg 2-0. The Dutch side didn’t go on to win the UEFA Cup that season, but they did capture their first league title in 10 years. And then Cruyff retired from playing football forever.
In retrospect, St Mirren v Feyenoord was probably one of the most glamorous club games ever to have taken place on Scottish soil, given the presence of a contemporary and future footballing icon. Although I didn’t appreciate it to any significant degree at the time, being a far from worldly-wise 11-year-old, the match was a moment of historical significance, in a football sense at any rate.
Forever number 14 ❤️@AFCAjax pay tribute to Johann Cruyff on what would have been his 77th birthday 👏#vooraltijdnr14pic.twitter.com/k60sOchvaI
— Behind Sport (@BehindSport) April 25, 2024
I can’t say I’ve witnessed any other historical moments that go beyond the purely parochial, so I’ve been dining out on this one for 39 years. Well, I haven’t actually, but I’m always open to offers.
As a depressing postscript, Gullit later revealed in his autobiography how the single most sickening example of prejudice and hatred he ever experienced during a game of football came in a UEFA Cup tie while playing for Feyenoord at St Mirren when he was spat on and singled out for abuse because of his colour.
As a naïve kid, I only remember him being booed regularly, but I assumed this was because he was so good and because he scored against the home team. You live and learn.