By Andrew Das

JOHAN Cruyff, a brash Dutch soccer star who helped develop a style that revolutionised the way the game is played, becoming the Netherlands’ greatest player and later a scolding conscience of the sport, died yesterday in Barcelona, Spain. He was 68.The cause was cancer, Cruyff’s family said in a statement on his website.
Cruyff, a heavy smoker until he had heart problems in the 1990s, revealed in October that he had lung cancer.
But as recently as February 16 he had predicted his recovery, saying he had “the feeling that I am 2-0 up in the first half of a match that has not finished yet.”
Widely acclaimed as one of the best players in history, Cruyff and the famed coach Rinus Michels teamed in the 1970s to perfect a style called Total Football, a shape-shifting system in which players switch positions effortlessly.
Cruyff, a wiry and deceptively quick forward, was the personification of the style, bursting forward to attack or drifting back to defend, but always ready to deliver an incisive pass or to appear in the perfect position when an opportunity to score arose.
During his career and after, Cruyff was a proponent of beauty over efficiency, though his fierce competitive streak proferred both. “Quality without results is pointless,” he was quoted as saying. “Results without quality is boring.”
Cruyff, though, was never boring. Supremely confident in his opinions and quick to share them sometimes with acid-tongued criticism, his career as a player, coach and executive was accompanied by a trail of bitter feuds.
He quibbled about money and sponsorships, and about tactics and control. He departed his boyhood club, Ajax Amsterdam, several times on bad terms, and was fired by Barcelona in 1996 – four years after winning the European Cup – after a falling out with the club board.
Yet the vision and adaptability inherent in the Total Football he helped create changed the way soccer was played, and lifted its adherents, notably Ajax, F.C. Barcelona and the Dutch national team, to great heights.
Ajax won the first of three consecutive European Cups in 1971 with Cruyff and Michels at the controls and the Netherlands reached consecutive World Cup finals in the 1970s, becoming known as the Clockwork Orange for their signature orange jerseys and their sweeping movements.
Cruyff, like Michels before him, preached the style at Barcelona, which Cruyff coached to their first European title in 1992 and where their essence remains the club’s guiding soccer philosophy. Cruyff’s influence on the club’s youth academy and players and coaches like Pep Guardiola set a foundation that has carried Barcelona, and Spain, into their recent era of trophies and championships.

The former England striker Gary Lineker, who played for Cruyff at Barcelona, said, “Football has lost a man who did more to make the beautiful game beautiful than anyone in history.”
Hendrik Johannes Cruyff was born on April 25, 1947, in Amsterdam, and grew up in a working-class neighbourhood that was only a short walk from the Ajax training facility. He joined the club as a 10-year-old and made his first-team debut at 17 in 1964. Michels arrived a year later, and together they turned Ajax into one of the best teams in the world.
With Cruyff directing the Total Football symphony Michels had designed, Ajax won the European Cup, the forerunner of the UEFA Champions League, three straight times from 1971 to 1973. In 1973, Cruyff joined Michels at Barcelona for a transfer fee of about $14.1 million in today’s dollars, a record at the time, and a year after that they led the Netherlands to the World Cup final in Germany.
The Dutch took a 1-0 lead in that game, stringing together 17 passes from the opening kickoff until Cruyff won a penalty, which Johan Neeskens converted, before the Germans touched the ball. But Germany answered with two goals, denying Cruyff and his country a title they have yet to claim.
But that final, like the Barcelona transfer, also gave a glimpse of Cruyff’s mercenary side. The Dutch federation had signed a sponsorship with Adidas for that year’s World Cup, but Cruyff, who had his own deal with rival Puma, refused to wear the team’s official uniform, believing it to be a conflict. To appease their star, Dutch officials relented and allowed Cruyff to play in a custom-made shirt bearing only two stripes on the sleeves instead of Adidas’s famed three.

Honoured as Europe’s best player in 1971, 1973 and 1974, Cruyff won nine Dutch League titles in Holland (eight with Ajax and one with Feyenoord at the end of his career) and another in Spain with Barcelona. He later coached Ajax and Barcelona, with whom he won four Spanish titles and his fourth European club title, but despite several flirtations and feuds with the Dutch federation he never led his national team.
Cruyff retired from international soccer in 1977, missing the Netherlands’ return to the World Cup final in 1978 in Argentina. The reason given at the time was that he opposed the military dictatorship in Argentina. Years later, however, he revealed to a Catalonian radio station that he and his family had been subjected to a kidnapping attempt in Barcelona a few months before the tournament.
He left Barcelona in 1978 but returned to the game a year later when he signed a $1.4 million deal with the Los Angeles Aztecs of the North American Soccer League. At the time, he credited his comeback, at age 32, to his love for the sport and to the chance to bring the game to a new place. In reality, he acknowledged, he had lost money in a series of investments, and so the rich contract with the N.A.S.L. was a welcome payday.

He played for one season with the Aztecs and another with the Washington Diplomats before returning to Europe for a brief tenure with Spain’s Levante and then a return to Ajax. When Ajax did not offer him a new contract in 1983, he signed with rivals Feyenoord – and promptly won the league and Dutch Cup double at age 37 before retiring for good.
The English journalist David Miller labelled him “Pythagoras in boots” for his ability to see open spaces and advantageous angles on a field, and David Winner, in his book on Dutch soccer, “Brilliant Orange,” compared Cruyff’s play to the perfection and organisation of a Vermeer painting.
His game was so sublime that he has a move named after him: the Cruyff turn, a deft sleight-of-foot manoeuvre in which he teased defenders in one direction before using his heel to push the ball behind him and a burst of speed to break away.

But he had little tolerance for a Netherlands that turned away from his ideals. When the Netherlands reached the World Cup final in 2010, Cruyff decried their bruising style as “anti-football.”
“This ugly, vulgar, hard, hermetic, hardly eye-catching, hardly football style, yes it served the Dutch to unsettle Spain,” he told a Spanish newspaper. “If with this they got satisfaction, fine, but they ended up losing.”
Spain, playing with a possession-based style more to Cruyff’s liking, and with a goal scored by player Andrés Iniesta, who had emerged from the Barcelona youth system, Cruyff had nurtured, won the final, 1-0.
Cruyff is survived by his wife of 47 years, Danny Coster; two daughters Chantal and Susila and a son Jordi, who followed his father into professional soccer, playing with Barcelona and Manchester United, and coaching. (www.nytimes)