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In a golden age for domestic Dutch football, Feyenoord and Ajax often found the going tougher at home than they did in European competition. Ernst Bouwes looks back on the 1970-71 Eredivisie season

The long-term significance

This season the Dutch league was arguably the best in Europe if not the world, being host to the 1970 European Cup winners Feyenoord and the team who were about to succeed them, Ajax. PSV reached the semi-final of the Cup-Winners Cup and FC Twente the quarter-final of the Fairs Cup. Between 1969 and 1978 these four teams would play in eight European finals and win six.

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FC Twente's new creative midfielder wants to be known just for his football. Jonathan Wilson reports on a reluctant trailblazer

“I have packed,” Nashat Akram said with a smile, “my diplomatic passport.” The joke was apt, and was delivered as a friendly way of ending the conversation, but there was also a tiredness in the Iraq midfielder’s voice as he made it. Nashat understands why the question keeps being asked, and recognises the need to provide some sort of answer, but he is clearly also sick of constantly being asked whether he is an ambassador for Iraqi football.

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Dear WSC
I thoroughly enjoyed your blow-by-blow review of Euro 2008, noting with some reassurance that I’m not the only one driven to distraction by the so-called expert input of BBC and ITV pundits. However your assessment of the Holland-Italy game surprised me somewhat. The furious and defiant ignorance of the laws of the game displayed by Clive Tyldesley and David Pleat with respect to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s goal were surely worthy of comment, indeed arguably the most damning condemnation of their failure in their roles in providing insight and ­explanation. Instead, you bafflingly seem to support their case and argue, in effect, that an official ought to base an offside call on whether he believes a player is faking an injury or not. Actually he’d already made that call by not stopping the game to permit treatment to the Italian defender in question, who had in effect left the field without permission and thus had to be playing the Dutch striker onside. One shudders to imagine the Machiavellian tricks that some domestic managers would concoct were it possible to play an opponent offside by tumbling off the pitch in a writhing heap. Next you’ll be condemning cliched and inappropriate English attitudes to the German team alongside an anglicised spelling of “dummkopf”…
Matt Rowson, Watford

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Johan Cruyff’s title-winning final season, putting one over Ajax. By Ernst Bouwes

The long-term significance
This was Johan Cruyff’s final season as a player. Ajax, whom he rejoined in 1981 after eight years in Spain and the United States, declined to extend his contract for another year because they doubted his crowd-pulling abilities at the age of 36. So, out of spite, Cruyff went to bitterest rivals Feyenoord. Incredibly he was to take them to their only title between 1974 and 1993, but their fans never really knew what to make of the move – Cruyff grabbed all the headlines and it seemed more his title than Feyenoord’s. Most of their away games were sold out, but home attendances went up by only a couple of thousand per match.

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Hooliganism and obscene chanting have reached such a level in Holland that a recent Den Haag game against PSV waas abandoned, as Ernst Bouwes reports

I first met a Den Haag sup­porter in the flesh in 1983. They had been relegated from the top level and were playing my club, EVV Eindhoven. This rather small away fan came over to me and claimed that the hand in his pocket was holding a knife. No one would be hurt if I handed over my blue-and-white scarf. I declined. A stand-off followed, until my team came to the rescue. His side’s first goal made my assailant run to his mates to join in the celebrations. In the remaining hour there were another seven goals – celebrating an 8-0 win didn’t give Den Haag fans much time for hostilities.

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