For the first time in the picture: the young Johan Cruijff in color

Grainy color images, filmed behind the goal, at the corner flag or on a roof of Stadium De Meer. For strikingly empty stands, because Ajax fought against relegation in 1964. And for their own audience often playing in blue, because the home team had to adjust his outfit as a sign of hospitality to the outfit of the visitors. Ajax players who handed Feyenoorders for a ‘classic’ flowers, because the Rotterdammers were in the Europe cup final.

The 8 millimeter camera of the Amsterdam occasional filmer Louis van Schoonhoven registered the Ajax period 1963-1973 at home and abroad. His focus was on Johan Cruijff: a young, frail attacker, still playing with the back numbers 7, 8, 9 or 10 and only later with his renowned number 14.

Short cut hair, an orange ball, and the contours of the rising star were already visible. Passes with the outside right foot, double gears, passing movements behind the standing leg with which the opponent was misled: the Cruijff hood or Cruyff Turn. And not to mention the typically Cruijffian way of cheering – running back and jumping while his clenched right -fist waves through the air.

After his death in 2011, Van Schoonhovens family members offered the more than three hundred color films at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum. No interest. Ajax was also not interested in the historical material at the time. After an editor of Other Times Sports The videos of the family happened to have found, the ball came to roll. Sound and Vision digitized the material. Director Marcel Goedhart van Other Tijden Sport summarized the whole together to 45 minutes of viewing pleasure, this Monday evening broadcast by the NPO on the death day of Cruijff.

Hard in the duels

In a press release, Goedhart says: « From a knit of hundreds of minutes of image, we selected the most beautiful and most special images. It felt a bit like a new Van Gogh or Vermeer. The young Cruijff in color, sprolding, small, a dancer, but never scared and hard in the duels too. »

The original visual material was without sound, music or comments from then radio reporters Theo Koomen and Dick van Rijn or TV commentator Herman Kuiphof is added. The sparse NOS/NTR fragments from the same games are mounted as a supplementary puzzle piece for or behind the amateur images.

This way we get to see the same promotions from different angles. That was not a superfluous luxury at the famous Ajax fog match in 1966 in the Olympic Stadium against Liverpool. Van Schoonhoven stood behind the English goal, which gives us the 5-1 better picture than the television viewers-and the commentators.

Former teammates Ruud Krol, Jan Mulder, Klaas Nuninga and later director Arie van Eijden come to the floor. Rinus Israel (former DWS and Feyenoord) is also asked to respond. They see themselves for the first time in color and are full of praise for the best of the best football player of all time. Mulder: « Cruijff was new music, a kind of South American. » Krol: « Johan collected, but also handed out. »

Cruijff was new music, a kind of South American

Director Goedhart says that he « almost gone wet » during mounting. On one of the videos, the young Johan Cruijff seemed in the picture again, but an attentive editor noted that it must have been another up-and-coming Ajax talent: Sjoerd Ruiter. The two fast, skittish strikers were often exchanged. The never -broken rider died fairly anonymously in 2017, a year after the world -famous Cruijff. His relatives were offered the images of De Jonge Sjoerd almost sixty years later.

When asked whether amateur filmmaker Van Schoonhoven had ever spoken to his great idol Cruijff in the ten years that he filmed him very near, his brother and sister: « We never heard Louis about that. And he would have told us otherwise. »

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