NOS Voetbal•vandaag, 20:03
“I still come from the time of Faas Wilkes,” he sounded almost apologetic when Kees Rijvers was appointed honorary member of FC Twente in October 2019. At the last moment. After all, he was already 93 years old. “Then you can be happy that you are still here at all.”
Kees Rijvers, renowned as a player and successful as a trainer
A dry but realistic observation from the Brabander, who was a very successful trainer in Enschede from 1966 to 1972. On Monday it was reported that Rijvers, who was also a gifted football player, had passed away at the age of 97. Since the death of Germ Hofma in 2018, he was the oldest living former international.
An important part of his life took place in France, where he signed a contract with Saint-Étienne in 1950 and thus became one of the first Dutch professional football players.
As a trainer, Rijvers achieved great success, especially with PSV. In the early 1980s he was in charge of the Dutch national team and allowed Frank Rijkaard, Ruud Gullit, Ronald Koeman and Marco van Basten to make their debuts, among others.
Malnourished
Before the shoemaker’s son – the youngest of five children – started to emerge as a coach, Rijvers made waves as a player. Born (in 1926) and raised in Princenhage, still a village at the time but a district of Breda since 1942, he took his first steps on the football field at Groen Wit.
At the age of fourteen, he moved to NAC, where he went through a difficult period when his mother died in 1944 and the young Kees was left to fend for himself by his father. Ultimately, NAC captain Lou van der Linden took care of the teenager who was in danger of becoming malnourished.
Name: Cornelus (Kees) Bernardus Rijvers
Born: May 27, 1926, Princenhage
Profession: football player/coach
Position as player: left interior/midfielder
Clubs as a player:
NAC Breda (1944-1950 and 1962-1963)
Saint-Étienne (France, 1950-1953, 1955-1957 and 1960-1962)
Stade Français (France, 1953–1955)
Feyenoord (1957-1960)
International matches: 33 (10 goals)
Honors list as a player:
National champion: 1 x (in 1957 with Saint-Étienne)
Cup winner: 1 x (in 1962 with Saint-Étienne)
Clubs as trainers: FC Twente (1966-1972), PSV (1972-1980, 1994), Beringen FC (1980-1981), Dutch national team (1981-1984)
Honors list as trainer:
National champion: 3 times (in 1975, 1976 and 1978 with PSV)
Cup winner: 2 x (in 1974 and 1976 with PSV)
UEFA Cup: 1 x (in 1978 met PSV)
International matches as national coach: 21 (10 won, 3 drawn, 8 lost)
Things soon went to a crescendo again for de Rijvers, who made his debut in the first team at the end of the 1943/1944 season. In that era, which was still without professional football, the club played in the First Division South.
Two years later, the industrious left winger, renowned for his fierceness and never-ending pursuit of the ball, was allowed to make an appearance in the Dutch national team. Against Luxembourg (6-2 win), the show was stolen by another debutant – 22-year-old Faas Wilkes scored four goals – but 19-year-old Rijvers also neatly scored.
Golden Indoor Trio
Another 32 appearances and nine goals in the national jersey would follow. He was on the field ten times together with football legends Wilkes and Abe Lenstra. The three of them formed the famous ‘Golden Inner Trio’.
Only once did the Dutch team suffer a defeat with the offensive trio in their ranks. It was immediately a very painful one: 4-3 in extra time against Great Britain in the first round of the Olympic Games in London in 1948.
ANPFaas Wilkes, Abe Lenstra, Kees Rijvers with the Dutch national team in 1957
The fact that it remained at 33 international matches had everything to do with the transfer that Rijvers made to the French league in 1950. The Brabander started working as a full professional at Saint-Étienne. “My dream finally came true: I earned my money with football,” he said in the biography Prof from 2016 by his granddaughter Antje Veld.
But with that the door to the Dutch national team closed with a loud bang. There was no place in the Dutch team for “that scum”, as the football association called the players who had crossed the border for the money. Only amateurs were eligible.
Flood
The change in this view started after the legendary Flood match on March 12, 1953. In Paris, a team of Dutch professionals playing football abroad, including Rijvers, played against France to raise money for the victims of floods in the southwest of the Netherlands. from a few weeks before.
The KNVB saw the Dutch team win 2-1 against the strong host country and understood that professionalization was necessary to take football in their own country to a higher level. The first professional competition started in November 1954.
Pro ShotsKees Rijvers with his granddaughter and biographer Antje Veld in 2016
Rijvers earned his francs at that time at Stade Français in Paris, with which he was relegated from the top flight in 1954. A year later he returned to Saint-Étienne.
There ‘La Maniaque’, as they called him in France because he often trained extra and did not drink a drop of alcohol, experienced his best period as a footballer. He won the national title with Saint-Étienne in 1957 and was named player of the year in France by the football magazine France Football.
Simka
The time was ripe for a return to the Dutch fields. Rijvers was brought in as a ‘big gentleman’ at Feyenoord. His contract was corresponding and that caused a lot of jealousy, he said in his biography. “I noticed that when I arrived at the first training in my Simca family car, while the others were on their bikes. I immediately got rid of that car.”
ANPKees Rijvers scores for Feyenoord against DWS in the Olympic Stadium
In 1957, after seven years of absence, he returned to the Dutch national team. Coincidentally, Luxembourg was the opponent again in that twentieth international match (5-2 win). And now he scored a goal.
Rijvers crowned a third period at Saint-Étienne with winning the French Cup in 1962, after which the Breda native ended his active career at the club where it all started: NAC.
Teenagers
Although a qualified electrician, the ex-footballer immediately embarked on a career as a trainer. In mid-1966 he started at FC Twente as head manager. Rijvers carried out a drastic rejuvenation in Enschede under the motto ‘young players are eager, ambitious and fit’. In his first year, he had the teenagers Jan Jeuring and Theo Pahlplatz and the 20-year-old Epi Drost make their debuts.
This approach had an impact: the club grew from a mid-table team to a stable sub-topper that even won its first national title in 1969 when Twente topped the rankings after match round 23. However, things went wrong in the last weeks of the competition, including a 2-0 defeat at Ajax.
Rijvers in France: ‘I only miss the Netherlands for playing billiards’
As one of the reasons for dropping out of the championship battle, Rijvers mentioned the blunder of 22-year-old Eddy Achterberg during the away match with the rival from Amsterdam at a 0-0 score. “He missed for an empty goal.” Rijvers would not charge the striker very heavily: Achterberg later married one of the coach’s six daughters.
UEFA Cup
He still won the national title at PSV, which attracted him in 1972. Three times even. PSV also had its say at European level. Saint-Étienne, of all places, blocked the way for the Eindhoven team to reach the final of the European Cup 1 in 1976, but two years later they won the UEFA Cup. In the double final, France’s Bastia, with Johnny Rep, had to make do.
After some disappointing results, Rijvers left PSV in early 1980. Not much later, he succeeded Jan Zwartkruis as national coach of the Dutch national team that was trying to qualify for the 1982 World Cup. One of his first acts was to sound out the almost 34-year-old Johan Cruijff for a return to the Dutch team.
In fact, the star, who had already retired as an international player in 1977, was included in the selection for the qualifying match against France in March 1981. Although Cruijff, who played for Levante, was even given a say in the line-up, he still withdrew just days before the match. Due to business interests, he did not want to play in an Adidas shirt, as before.
Nine European champions
Cruijff, with whom he later found fault again, was not the only veteran that Rijvers, often hidden under a cap, called upon in his early days, but he soon changed course and opted for fresh blood. No fewer than nine players made their debut under his reign and brought the European title to the Netherlands in 1988.
National ArchivesRuud Gullit, Kees Rijvers and Marco van Basten at Schiphol after the 3-2 win in Ireland
Despite a spectacular victory in Ireland, where 21-year-old Ruud Gullit and 18-year-old Marco van Basten helped overturn a 2-0 deficit, and a 2-1 home win over competitor Spain, the Netherlands also missed out on the 1984 European Championship after the 1982 World Cup . Spain passed the Dutch on goal difference thanks to a controversial 12-1 home win over Malta.
Rijvers had already seen that storm coming and was sitting with the neighbors during that match. Too much, said the KNVB press officer, but that turned out to be a myth. “I can’t even play cards,” Rijvers said years later.
The national coach was angry, because there was a hint of bribery surrounding that ‘Spanish stunt’, but the Dutch Football Association took no action whatsoever to uncover any possible malpractice. “That bothered me enormously. I had already received signals in advance.”
Lifetime Award
Although Rijvers recognized the potential of his talented group of players, he prematurely threw in the towel after the 2-1 home defeat against Hungary at the end of 1984. He was fed up with criticism that he would be ‘too adventurous’ as a national coach.
ANPKees Rijvers receives the Rinus Michels Award, a lifetime achievement award, from the namesake
In 2004, Rijvers, who was technical director of FC Twente for three years and briefly did the honors at PSV in 1994, was the first to receive the lifetime achievement award for his entire coaching career from former colleague Rinus Michels. He came over from Île d’Oléron, an island in the south-west of France, where he lived with his wife from the early 1990s until 2013.
The football fan who was annoyed by the careful shuffling that he was presented with too often – “Pointless playing with possession of the ball; I often turn off the TV after ten minutes” – looked back on his career with satisfaction. With the exception of one detail: “I have always found it a great pity that I was never a NAC trainer.”
2024-03-04 19:03:09
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