When David Winner was six, his family hired a Dutch nanny by the name of Hanny (yes, Hanny the Nanny) and so smitten by her was the young boy he suspected "there was something special and great about the Dutch". Those suspicions were confirmed, he says, a few years later when he saw Ajax play on television in the 1972 European Cup final.
The Amsterdam club, starring the Dutch master himself, Johan Cruyff, played a brand of football with which most lovers of the game were unfamiliar and Winner wasn't alone in being thrilled and besotted by what he saw. The experience heralded a lifelong obsession with all things Dutch, culminating in Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, published to coincide with Euro 2000, co-hosted by the Netherlands and Belgium.
His study, he insists, is not so much about Dutch football, rather the "idea of Dutch football", the revolution which paralleled the wider change in Dutch society in the 1960s.
Before then the game was amateurish and insular, its parochialism reflected in the banning of Faas Wilkes from the Dutch national team for four years because he dared to leave domestic football for Inter Milan. Those were the days, too, that Amsterdam was "one of the most frumpy and tedious capitals in Europe", as dull and unambitious as its major team. But then the 1960s arrived and the new breed took over, both the city and the club.
It was a time for creativity, experimentation and individuality. Amsterdam was, says Winner, anarchic and chaotic. The establishment and tradition were challenged and questioned like never before, whether in politics, architecture, art . . . or football.
Ajax's contribution to this revolution of ideas was "Totaalvoetbal", the term used to describe their and, later, the Dutch national team's, style of play. "Total Football" featured a dazzling array of patterns created by 10 outfield players all gifted enough to interchange positions - attackers could defend, defenders could attack. Retention of the ball was everything, so much so that television commentators, rather than saying "the team playing from left to right is . . .", would say "the team with the ball is Ajax".
Winner quotes one of the members of that team, Barry Hulshoff, complaining that the Ajax system is subject to "over-intellectualisation". One can only imagine, then, that he would throw his eyes heavenward on reading of Winner's belief that the "spatial vision" of Dutch football is rooted in the lack of space in the Netherlands, a circumstance that obliges its citizens, whether they be architects, artists, town planners or footballers, to think creatively about space. Thus, the author argues, they have "excelled at creating space that wasn't there before" and, thus, Ajax broke down packed defences by finding routes other teams didn't know existed. And there was you thinking: it's only a game.
When Winner claims that Cruyff saw the pitch the way Dutch "artist of space" Pieter Jansz Saenredam saw the churches he painted, or mentions in the same breath Wim van Hanegem's curled crosses and architect Lars Spuybroek's curved arched buildings, or compares the intricacies and adaptability of Ajax's game with the design of Schiphol Airport, it's tempting to scream "enough", side with Hulshoff and hope that you never sit beside Winner at a game.
At times these links are so tenuous you suspect a gentle breeze would dismantle them. Nonetheless, Winner's book is captivating in parts and contains insights to the Dutch psyche that go some way towards explaining the birth of "Totaalvoetbal". And, for good measure, we learn of the 1960s Amsterdam resident who tried to achieve a higher state of consciousness by drilling a hole in his forehead to create a third eye. His funeral was well attended.
