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Marco
van Basten
Marco van Basten was
the greatest goalscorer of his generation. It wasn't
just that he scored lots of goals, nor that many of
them were outstanding.
No, what made him the most feared striker in world
soccer was a rare ability to perform when it was most
needed. Pressure seemed nothing to him. It brought out
his best.
It was van Basten who scored one of the best goals
seen in international competition. And the fact that
it won the only football honour ever achieved by
Holland is the true measure of his ability.
To understand the significance of that goal in the
European Championship Final of 1988, you have to go
back to the Dutch side of the 1970s - the masters of
"Total Football". That team, led by Johan
Cruyff, captivated everyone who saw them. It was
football as artistry. They were the best in the world
- and they won nothing. Just two losing World Cup
Finals to show for their supreme talent.
After Cruyff, Holland fell apart, even failing to
qualify for the World Cup in 1982 and 1986. So when
the 23-year-old van Basten and the new generation of
Dutch players, including Ruud Gullit and Frank
Rijkaard, competed in the European Championships, it
was against a background of thwarted ambitions and
desperate disappointments.
Van Basten was only third-choice striker in the squad,
but he scored five goals in the tournament and
returned home as his country's greatest hero.
First he hit a hat-trick to see off England, then he
grabbed a last-gasp winner two minutes from time to
overcome hosts West Germany in the semi-finals.
As the Dutch prepared to meet the Soviet Union in the
final in Munich's Olympic Stadium, the expectation
that a nation's dream was about to be fulfilled was
immense. To play under that burden is an enormous
strain. But no one, clearly, told van Basten.
Holland were leading 1-0 through Gullit when, from a
seemingly impossible angle, van Basten struck a long,
looping volley into the Soviet net. It was a classic
strike, and it ensured that first and only Dutch
international triumph.
It may well have been an omen that van Basten was born
on Halloween in 1964. For the boy from Utrecht grew up
to struck terror into the heart of international
defences. Not for nothing did he become known as
"Marco Goalo".
The van Basten story, like that of so many of his
country's great stars, began at Ajax who had spotted
him playing with Elinkwijk. When he joined Ajax, as an
18-year-old, this famous club were struggling to
regain the glory days of the Seventies when Cruyff set
the standard with three successive European Cup wins.
He made his international debut in the 1983 World
Youth Cup, but his instinctive brilliance was
undermined by a vulnerability to injury that was to
plague him and ultimately ruin his career.
By 1986 he was the top marksman in Europe, winning the
European Golden Boot award. With van Basten leading
their attack, Ajax lifted two Dutch Championships, two
Dutch Cups and the European Cup Winners' Cup.
That Cup Winners' Cup victory, against Dynamo Dresden,
was van Basten's last game for Ajax. He had scored 128
league goals in just 143 games at an unprecedented
strike rate.
Those goals, however, came at a heavy price. In that
triumphant Cup Winners' Cup year, he injured an ankle
which required surgery. But the operation was put off
because Ajax decided they could not spare him for
those vital European games.
The following season he joined AC Milan who were
re-emerging from bankruptcy. Milan, who had won the
European Cup in 1963 and 1969, had been rescued from
liquidation in 1986 by the media magnate and future
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Milan had been founder members of the Italian
Championship in 1898, but now they were living in the
shadow of deadly rivals Internazionale with whom they
shared the San Siro stadium.
Berlusconi invested ?0 million in the club, and some
of that money was spent on van Basten, Gullit and
Rijkaard. He also brought in leading coach Arrigo
Sacchi, who was later in charge of the Italian
national team during Euro 96.
Results came quickly. Milan won Serie A for the first
time in nine years. They did it, however, without much
help from van Basten. The ankle injury flared up again
and he played only 11 games.
It was feared, at first, that he might miss the
European Championships, but not only was he the
tournament's leading scorer, he was voted World
Footballer of the Year, just ahead of Gullit and
Rijkaard - an unprecedented sweep of the honours by
players from the same club and country.
He was already European Footballer of the Year, an
award he was to win three times - (1988, 1989 and
1992) - to equal the record of Cruyff and France's
Michel Platini.
European Cup glory beckoned for van Basten in 1989,
Milan destroying Romanian Champions Steaua Bucharest
4-0 in the final in Barcelona. Van Basten got two of
the goals, as did Gullit.
They were to retain their trophy 12 months later with
a 1-0 defeat of Benfica in the final, this time in
Vienna.
Disappointments lay in wait, however. Holland had a
poor World Cup in Italia 90. They failed to win any of
their games, drawing all their matches in the group
stage before losing 2-1 to Germany in the second
round.
Then van Basten had a public falling out with Milan
coach Sacchi and was banned by UEFA for four games
after violently elbowing an opponent in a European Cup
game.
His form suffered that 1990-91 season and he scored
only 11 goals in 33 games. The following year,
however, he was back on the goal standard with 25 in
31 games.
The European Championships followed in Sweden and
Holland reached the semi-finals where they were beaten
by Denmark. In a rare lapse, van Basten missed a
penalty in that match, but it did not prevent him
being named World Footballer of the Year for a second
time.
That autumn, at Milan, van Basten played some of the
best football of his life. He scored 13 goals in 15
games against the tightest defences in club football.
It was a remarkable run, but van Basten then had to
endure two more operations on his damaged ankle. The
condition of his injury was becoming chronic.
His last competitive game was Milan's 1-0 defeat by
Olympique Marseilles in the 1993 European Cup Final -
a match which left a bitter taste. Marseilles, owned
by Bernard Tapie, were later discovered to have paid
three Valenciennes players to take it easy in a French
League game shortly before the European Final. They
were stripped of their French title and their European
Cup win.
Van Basten spent two years trying to overcome his
injuries but in the end he had to face the inevitable,
announcing his retirement in August 1995. He had
scored 90 goals in 147 games for Milan, twice being
the leading marksman in Serie A, and had set a
European Cup record of 18 goals in 23 matches for the
club.
He won the last of his 58 international caps in
October 1992 in a World Cup qualifier against Poland.
He had scored 24 times for Holland.
He had played for 10 glorious seasons, but the
punishment he received from defenders had brought a
gifted career to a premature end.
Van Basten had had it all. He was graceful, yet
powerful, two-footed with tremendous close control,
and was quick on the turn and supreme in the air.
"Marco always played football like a ballerina,
but his ankle eventually couldn't take the
strain," said Rene Marti, one of the doctors who
treated him.
Unsurprisingly, van Basten has led calls to clean up
the game, advancing the view that football should
adopt the basketball rule of personal fouls which,
after a player has committed five, means he is
substituted, even if none of those fouls was bad
enough to earn a caution.
"I really believe that only red and yellow cards
are not enough anymore," he said. "Defenders
have become so subtle nowadays, that a lot of fouls
are disguised."
However, he does not see himself as merely the victim
of cynical hard men. "The most frustrating thing
for me," he said, "is not the way I hurt my
ankle, but the way I have been treated by some
doctors. The person who damaged my ankle most was not
a player but a surgeon.
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