So Paddy Got Up - an Arsenal anthology (5 page)

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Tim Stillman has been blogging on all matters Arsenal since 2006. Tim has been shunning human relationships to follow Arsenal over land and sea since childhood.

4 – DENNIS - Paolo Bandini

It takes something quite special to give Ian Wright an inferiority complex. “We are not worthy,” hailed Wright, leading his team-mates in a deferential bow, as Dennis Bergkamp attempted an introductory speech at his first Arsenal training session back in July 1995. The tone may have been light-hearted but the sentiment was sincere. Never before had London Colney played host to a talent quite like this one.

Dennis Bergkamp. The Dennis Bergkamp: blond-haired, blue-eyed star of the Dutch national side, joint-top scorer at Euro 92 and artful annihilator of England’s World Cup 1994 qualification hopes. A graduate of the Ajax youth academy who had been mentored by Johan Cruyff and topped the Dutch scoring charts for three years running and twice finished in the top three of the Ballon d’Or voting. A player who had joined Serie A’s Internazionale two years earlier for an eye-watering £12m – just £1m shy of the then world transfer record.

If Arsenal was hardly a footballing backwater – a club just one year removed from Cup Winners’ Cup triumph and two from a domestic cup double – then it is also fair to say that they had never before shopped in this aisle of the transfer market. The £7.5m paid to Inter represented a trebling of the club’s record outlay. Indeed, for the briefest of moments it was a British transfer record – before Liverpool completed their £8.5m purchase of Stan Collymore from Nottingham Forest. Furthermore Arsenal had shattered their wage structure with a package worth £25,000 per week, prompting the chairman Peter Hill-Wood to decry his own club’s spending as “absolutely mad”. He also offered a justification, however. “We have got better value for money than some of the big transfers of late,” he noted. “This player we have bought is truly world-class.”

That, in itself, seemed an alien notion at a time when every Premier League squad remained overwhelmingly British and Irish. Although there were a number of talented and productive foreign players throughout the division, English clubs did not yet boast the resources to compete financially with the continent’s richest sides. Arsenal’s own foreign legion extended to Glenn Helder and John Jensen. The great players who did arrive from abroad often came with a caveat. Eric Cantona moved to England only after becoming so enraged by decisions handed down by the French Football Federation that he briefly toyed with retirement. Jurgen Klinsmann’s one-year stay at Tottenham had concluded with the club’s chairman Alan Sugar railing against “Carlos Kickaball” foreigners exploiting British generosity to make a quick buck.

Bergkamp also came with red flags against his name. His time at Inter had not been a happy one, marked by just 11 goals in 52 Serie A outings, and a difficult relationship with the Italian press. Uncomfortable with the intensity of media spotlight in Italy, Bergkamp was labelled aloof for declining interviews, and cold for not being more verbose when he did give them. Even several years after his move to England, the newspaper La Repubblica protested that dealing with Bergkamp had been “like talking to a cash machine.” In the absence of direct quotes from the player, the speculation had been relentless. “For a while when he was at Inter, Bergkamp had a high Rockabilly quiff – very blond – but then at a certain point he decided to cut it short,” recalls David Winner, author of Brilliant Orange: the neurotic genius of Dutch football. “So then this story shows up in Gazzetta dello Sport saying his hair was falling out because of the stress.”

But if said haircut also contributed to Bergkamp acquiring the nickname Beavis – on account of his perceived likeness to MTV’s chortling cartoon teenager – then it was Moratti who behaved like a Butthead. In persuading the Dutchman to join in the first place from Ajax, the Inter president promised his new signing that the team would be built around him – with an attacking formation designed to make the most of his talents. The experiment lasted barely a month, abandoned after a poor start to the season and long forgotten by the time of his departure – two managerial changes later.

The very words with which Moratti damned Bergkamp after completing his sale betrayed how Inter had misunderstood the Dutchman’s genius. “Arsenal will be lucky if Bergkamp scores 10 goals this year,” crowed the Inter owner. From a statistical perspective he wasn’t that far wide of the mark, Bergkamp concluded the 1995-96 campaign with a modest 11 from 33 league games. The difference at Arsenal was that his contribution was measured by far more than just how many times he hit the net.

Where Inter had too often used Bergkamp as a lone striker, at Arsenal Ian Wright was only too happy to shoulder the goal-scoring burden – leaving the Dutchman free to take up deeper positions, to focus his energies at times on creating opportunities instead of finishing them. He provided eight league assists in his first season, a figure that would rise steadily over the following three campaigns. Even Bergkamp would be surprised by the enjoyment he derived from his new role. “It [Putting a player through on goal] gave me so much pleasure, like solving a puzzle,” he told Winner in a recent interview for football magazine The Blizzard. “Scoring goals is, of course, up there. It is known. It is like nothing else. But for me, in the end, giving the assist got closer and closer to that feeling.”

Which is not to say that goals were unimportant, and especially at the outset there was a pressure to justify such a high price tag. “Dennis Bergkamp is a £7.5million striker playing like someone who cost 75p,” scoffed Mark Lawrenson in the Mirror in late September, after the Dutchman failed to score in any of his first six league games for the club. “Hartle-Fool” read a headline in the same paper when Bergkamp failed to get off the mark in a League Cup game against third division Hartlepool United. And yet, when Bergkamp’s first goals for Arsenal finally arrived – a few days later in a 4-2 win over Southampton at Highbury – they seemed sufficient to dispel such doubts at a stroke. If the opener, a cushioned volley back across goal from Helder’s looping, slow-motion, cross, demonstrated impeccable technique, then the second was of such quality that Bergkamp immediately declared it to be “in my top three of all time.” Receiving a pass from Tony Adams inside the Southampton half, Bergkamp glided forward 20 yards, cut sharply to the right to shed his marker then arrowed a shot straight into the top corner while yellow-striped defenders buzzed around him like angry, impotent bees. It was the culmination of a performance of the highest order, one that began in the very first minute, when Bergkamp picked out Lee Dixon with a breath-taking cross-field pass that almost led to a Paul Merson opener. The drought over, reporters turned their attention elsewhere. Unlike their Italian counterparts, English tabloid reporters were interested in the private lives only of those players who liked to live fast. Bergkamp, more than one newspaper noted approvingly, was a quiet soul who enjoyed tending to his garden. Little wonder – one of his lowest moments for in Milan had arrived when reporters resorted to interviewing his gardener, who had cheerily portrayed Bergkamp as a hopeless case who spent every waking minute in front of a telly.

Yet the Bergkamp who showed up in north London was anything but a social misfit. By his own admission, the Dutchman was surprised by the English drinking culture and did not himself partake, but he respected his teammates’ right to make their own decisions. “The funny thing is you never noticed it in training because they were so strong and they always gave 100 per cent,” he would later note. His teammates, meanwhile, would quickly discover that behind the Iceman façade lay a mischievous sense of humour. “He had this big, toothy grin. He was the kind of person who just loved football, and he expressed himself best in a football club,” recalls Martin Keown. “He enjoyed a practical joke. If your gear was hanging up from the ceiling you’d pretty well know it was Dennis who put it there.”

For Bergkamp, it had been a life-long dream to play in England – an ambition formed during so many childhood pilgrimages to watch matches there with his father. Wim Bergkamp was unashamedly fixated with the British game, so much so that he had sought to name his son after Denis Law, only for a fussy civil servant to insist on the insertion of a second ‘n’. Dennis himself idolised Glenn Hoddle, though he has often stressed that this did not make him a supporter of Tottenham. Arsenal at the time might not have seemed the most obvious fit for a player motivated to escape the defensive clutches of Serie A, committed as they were, in the latter days of George Graham’s reign, to what Winner eloquently terms a “grubby English catenaccio”.

Graham himself had been sacked, of course, for accepting illegal payments from the agent Rune Hauge, but this was still a team built to defend first and foremost, and there was no guarantee of a transformation in approach under his successor Bruce Rioch. But for all that Bergkamp spoke in his early interviews of excitement at the attacking nature of Premier League football and the joy of playing alongside a goalscorer like Wright; he also admired the old-fashioned toughness of Arsenal’s back line. In his third pre-season fixture for Arsenal, against his former club Inter, a torrent of abuse from his former team-mate Nicola Berti was cut short when Tony Adams stepped up to the Inter midfielder. “Our English defenders put the spirit in the team, which the Europeans lacked,” Bergkamp would reflect in an interview with the magazine FourFourTwo many years later. “They would say, ‘Get stuck in!’ and all sorts of other phrases. I loved it, especially: ‘How much do you want it?’ I thought about it. It stuck with me. Do you really want it more than the opponent? How much are you prepared to give? How much time do you want to put in to become better?”

Certainly Bergkamp was not afraid of putting in the hours. On the Monday after a match he could regularly be found lining up free kicks on an empty training field long after the main session had ended. And for as long as his team-mates did hang around, he was helping them develop too – communicating his own ideas as well as techniques he had picked up at Ajax, where the academy required its students to train in every outfield position over the course of their development. “For me as a defender it was a chance to pit your wits every day against a genius,” says Keown. “But he made it easy to play with him as well. He pulled me over in training one day and said ‘we’re going to do opposite movements.’ So if he stepped forwards he wanted the ball behind the opponent, and vice-versa. Wrighty, for instance, might run 10 yards in the direction opposite to where he would want it, and then step out. But with Dennis it would be literally just the drop of a shoulder, little signals that made it very easy to find him.”

From 12th place finishers the season before, Arsenal finished Bergkamp’s first campaign in fifth – the Dutchman scoring the winning goal against Bolton to secure a UEFA Cup berth after his fellow summer signing, David Platt, brought the team back from a goal down. At the time it felt like a significant achievement in its own right, but the real revolution was just around the corner. Late in the ensuing summer, Rioch would be sacked and replaced by Arsène Wenger. Bergkamp had been fond of Rioch, describing his departure as “a big blow to me,” yet he soon identified in Wenger a kindred spirit. The forward who once mused “I suppose I’m not that interested in scoring ugly goals,” finally had a manager who recognised the value of the aesthetic, as well as the end product. They also had shared ideas about the requirements of being a professional. While Wenger’s tough dietary regimen came as a shock to the system for some, in Bergkamp’s case he was preaching to the converted. The Dutchman had previously always declined the food served London Colney but now was first in line. If Wenger’s arrival marked the start of what would be termed a French revolution for Arsenal then it would be another year before they would be ready to overthrow the ruling elite. After a third-place finish in 1996-97 Arsenal began the following campaign with a 12-game unbeaten run with Bergkamp on blistering form. His hat-trick in a 3-3 draw against Leicester at Filbert Street, famously, would claim first, second and third place in Match of the Day’s Goal of the Month competition. While the first two strikes had been impressive – an inch-perfect effort from the corner of the area that arced over a horde of players and into the top corner, then a delicate finish to complete a sweeping counter-attack –  the third was of a different order. Racing into the area to meet a chipped pass from David Platt, Bergkamp cushioned the ball with first his right, and then, without letting it touch the ground, his left, wrong-footing his marker Matt Elliot in the process as he shifted the ball back across his body before side-footing it across the keeper into the net. It remains Bergkamp’s personal favourite from his time at Arsenal – ahead even of the goal he would score against Newcastle in 2002, caressing the ball around Nikos Dabizas before spinning around the defender in the opposite direction to slot the ball home. The latter would go on to be voted by fans as Arsenal’s greatest goal of all time, but for Bergkamp the strike against Leicester was more “pure”. Dabizas, he reasoned, could have stopped him had he taken a step back at the crucial moment. Elliot never had a chance.

But if Bergkamp was showing his brilliant best at this stage then he was also showing his petulant worst. By the 11th game of the season he had already collected his fifth booking and with it an automatic ban. During his absence, Arsenal lost their first game of the campaign – a 3-0 rout at Derby, sparking a sequence of four defeats in six league matches. Having learnt the game playing out on tarmacked streets, it was perhaps no surprise that Bergkamp had never really worked out how to tackle. Nor, indeed, quite come to terms with the idea of others tackling him. Over the course of 1997-98 he would pick up nine yellow cards and one red, earned after introducing his elbow to Steve Lomas’s face during an FA Cup replay in March. It was the second of four dismissals he would collect in his Arsenal career. The vicious streak was not just restricted to matches. “He certainly knew how to look after himself,” says Nigel Winterburn. “I remember playing an eight v eight game, and I was playing at the back with Steve Bould. Steve had kicked Dennis a couple of times and you could see Dennis getting wild. I came in behind to mark him on the next occasion and ended up with the fattest lip you’d ever seen.”