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The Cruyff Turn 45 years on: a juxtaposition of genius and simplicity

It seems somewhat harsh to relegate any human being down to one moment: one particular time on one particular stage. Ultimately though, it's easier to remember someone with one shining image. Diego Maradona fist-pumping the heavens. Andrea Pirlo nonchalantly chipping a penalty. Zinedine Zidane's mad headbutt in the heat of a World Cup Final. Or Johan Cruyff bamboozling a defender in a single sleight of shin.

The Cruyff Turn is 45 years old this year. You've seen it a million times. Cruyff shapes up to pass the ball from just outside the box with his right foot. He instead tucks the ball behind his standing leg and switches direction by 180 degrees. He carries on with his dribble and gets the ball into the box.

The decibel level erupts. This is the first time that the Westfalenstadion crowd, or anyone watching from the comfort of their front room, had ever seen such a thing. Your dad is impressed. Your little brother can't believe it. The style, the audacity, the simplicity was breathtaking. For a split second, Johan Cruyff, with his chic slightly-longer-than-a-Beatle haircut and catwalk model frame is a magician, revealing to the audience that the card you chose from the deck was tucked away up his long, orange sleeve the whole time.

Perhaps though, the strangest thing about the Cruyff turn is that maybe, just maybe, it was nothing special. It's almost sacrilege to suggest out loud.

But Johan Cruyff temporarily leaving his marker in a heap was the only noteworthy event in a 0-0 group game: it's not as if it led to a goal or even a big moment in a decisive match. For years, you may have assumed that the defender was an Italian by the royal blue of his shirt. It wasn't. It was Swede Jan Olsson, in his country's change strip. Of course, this doesn't matter per se, but the unconscious assumption that Johan dumbfounded an Italian – a nation we have always associated with defensive rocks – certainly gives the moment more gravitas than hoodwinking a 32-year-old capped just 17 times in his entire career.

Yes, it was the first time that anyone had seen the Cruyff Turn, but let's play Alan Hansen on this moment. Should Olsson being doing better there? Arguably. He commits his body and suffers the consequences. It's hard to imagine a modern defender being quite so naïve and gangly. These were the days before players were labelled “frauds” by internet trolls, though.

Then there's the aesthetics of the shot. The 1974 edition was only the second ever FIFA World Cup broadcast in colour, and whoever shot the moment Cruyff turned, caught it at the optimum angle. It was perfectly framed, the camera focusing vertically to where Cruyff changes path. Zinedine Zidane was never so fortunate to get a perfect stage and camera angle when he pirouetted on the ball and made “the Marseille Turn” his own: not in the way that the stars aligned when he volleyed the iconic winner against Bayer Levekusen in the Champions League final. Pele was behind the rainbow flick, but in an age in which it didn't look as good on screen. Every time Mesut Ozil scores, it takes a slow-motion replay to reveal if he's applied his now-trademark cushioning of the ball against the ground.

It seems odd that the moment that followed Cruyff for the rest of his life was nowhere near the most amazing thing he did in his career.

This was a man that won three consecutive European Cups with Ajax, managed Barcelona to their first and whose name is splashed across almost everything he touched. The Cruyff Turn was a 24th minute whim in a group game. It's similar to how an artist as enduring and vocally talented as Michael Jackson became associated so strongly with the moonwalk. Did we really reduce such a visionary to a technically simple move?

That's exactly why the Cruyff Turn has stood such a considerable test of time, though.

You've probably seen the Cruyff Turn performed against better defenders; no doubt by considerably less talented footballers than Johan Cruyff. Marc Pugh was known for it at AFC Bournemouth, for example. It's something that most children learn when playing football in the street.

The Cruyff Turn is the most ordinary of all the extraordinary things you can do with a football. It doesn't require a deft touch or an eye for an angle. It just needs timing. The turn is an evasive football move: it gets the performer out of congestion and into space. It doesn't boast like a stepover does and it's not Ronaldinho-level in its wizardry. It's not like a rabona: you don't see it coming until the last second. One second you're about to pass: the next you're not. It's that basic.

Whilst most tricks in football rely on what you can do with your feet, the Cruyff turn is more about what you do with your body. The satisfaction of the Cruyff Turn is that it subverts your expectations. Cruyff offers you something with one hand before taking it away with the other in a smoother manner than Jay-Jay Okotcha or Cristiano Ronaldo has ever managed with their trademark turns and chops.

In this respect, perhaps only Cruyff could have invented the Cruyff Turn: or at least brought it to the masses. It seems like an urban myth waiting to be uncovered that a modest Eredivisie winger practised the move first, only for a more famous Dutchman to pilfer it, like a blues melody for a rock and roll song.

Johan Cruyff was a rockstar and a complex man at that. A legend whose name still reverberates around the Ajax academy, yet he left them in a fit of rage towards the end of his playing days for rivals Feyenoord. Cruyff was fiercely individual, idealistic and driven by the philosophy of freedom of expression, yet governed himself by the idea that the sum of a team was greater than his own ability. Cruyff was frequently labelled as hellishly arrogant, yet omitted his own name once when asked to comprise an eleven of the greatest footballers ever. He could have easily walked into the theoretical side, too.

The Dutchman assumed the classic squad number 14 by mistake and apparently stuck by it as an act of rebellion against the Netherlands' Football Association. He refused a move to Real Madrid on the basis of their association with Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and in defiance against Adidas – Cruyff had a deal with rivals Puma – would only wear a special orange jersey for the Netherlands that ripped one of the brand's legendary three stripes from the shoulders.

A rebel, often with an idyllic cause, the idea of him turning 180 degrees just to avoid doing the ordinary is idiosyncratically Cruyff. That he should do it so beguilingly, is fitting. Perhaps the greatest innovator in the history of the sport, it doesn't really matter whether it was Cruyff that invented his turn: he was the one that brought it to the spotlight.

Just as Total Football was based on mad, mad movement off the ball, the Cruyff Turn exploited space. It's apt that players all over the pitch, from ball-playing centre-backs to strikers in a tight spot, use the turn as a “Get out of jail free” card: in Total Football, Cruyff could've pulled out that trick anywhere on the pitch. Yes, the Cruyff Turn is simple, but it's quintessentially Cruyff. Not the greatest thing he ever did, but a single move that summed up the fire in him, the showman in him, the team player able to give the on-rushing men in the box a cross, even in a sticky situation.

And yes, Johan Cruyff's defining moment is one that we all learned before the age of ten. Not a Maradona-slalom of a run into the England penalty area or an Henry zig-zag through the beating heart of Real Madrid's imperious back four. But Cruyff made us fall in love with football in a different way to such physically gifted men. A boy from humble beginnings in Amsterdam, he showed the world a rich brand of the sport, not just through his ability, but his vision.

The Cruyff Turn makes children of all of us: sometimes world class defenders and seasoned analysts alike can't see it coming. Only Cruyff, the man with the greatest vision in football, could. And at its core, the Cruyff Turn is as complex as its master. Simple, unpredictable, rebellious, showing off and yet not showing off for the sake of it. In 45 long years, we've still not seen a trick like it.

#johan cruyff #netherlands

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