The 1974 Bild swimming pool incident…

Oranje had qualified for the WC1974 finals. Cruyff and Neeskens beat Brazil and West Germany – not playing a very impressive tournament so far – was to be the next nudge on the …eh…football shoe.
German tabloid Bild wanted to milk the situation.
They had a plan. They knew where the Dutch players resided. They had some loose Deutsch Marks to chuck around. And they had the phone numbers of some juicy escort girls.
“I love it when a good plan comes together…”
The money was used to bribe the security guards. The escort girls were….eh…escorted into the pool area where the Dutch players were chilling out. The girls undressed and jumped giggling into the pool, amongst the players. And the Bild photographers were happily snapping away in a bush somewhere.
The photo’s were prominently on the front page: “Oranje has big orgy with naked women in Hotel pool”. Or something like that.
They obviously didn’t write that it was a big set-up, nor that the players almost immediately left the pool and made for their rooms to escape this scandal. With Neeskens, Krol and Rep in their midst, it was quite a feat. Gullit and Kluivert were never put to this test. Koeman wished he was… But, I’m am drifting…
The images were quickly used in the Dutch media as well and a huge debacle was born. Team supervisor Rinus Michels thought it was amusing. Players (Van Hanegem, Krol, Jongbloed) laughed it all away, but the damage was done.
Danny Cruyff was on the phone immediately to her hubbie JC to check what happened. Johan Cruyff was named as one of the players canoodling with a couple of Bambi’s (while in fact he wasn’t even in the pool that day!) and Danny was in tears. The players were gone for weeks already and tension rose. JC was on the phone for quite some time and made a promise to his wife, never to leave her that long. At night, Johan couldn’t sleep and paced the room, smoking one cigarette after the other.
The connection between Jopie and Danny is well-known and Johan was shocked by the way the German tabloid tried to influence the game.
Out for revenge, when the ref blew the whistle to start the game, Johan had only one goal: humiliate the Germans. He picked up the ball on his own half and dribbled past three or four opponents until Vogts stopped him illegally in the German box. Penalty! No German had had a touch yet and even before Sepp Mayer touched it, the score line was 0-1, thanks to Johan Neeskens’ penalty.
In the minutes after the goal, Oranje switched to gallery play. They didn’t set out to win the cup, they set out to crush and ridicule the Germans. Not a shabby team by the way, with Muller, Beckenbauer, Grabowski, Hoeness and Overath. And one Sepp Mayer. He wasn’t going to be humiliated. The big goalie stopped everything coming his way, and we all know how this game ended.
JC had a strong first minute, but was pedestrian in the remaining 89. Van Hanegem, Rep, Rensenbrink…they were close to scoring, but it was Paul Breitner and Gerd Muller finding the net.
We lost. Bild won.
(Note: I’ve been searching for the Bild photo’s but they are nowhere to be found… Although the actual photographer should have a couple in their private collection….)
For years, people thought JC didn’t go to the WC1978 because of his promise to Danny…we’ll find out later what the real reason was… Check out Memories on WC1978 (to be published soon
)
Goose, arrogant they may have been, but to this day they still were the best team to never win a WC in my book.
@Finnster, that and 75 cents will get you a pack of chips. Its about the win in the end.
Posted from
United States
Where do you buy your chips? :p
Posted from
Canada
@finn; agreed, but after reading a great dutch book on WC74 called ‘wij waren de besten ‘(= we were the best) i cant help but think it was our own fault we didnt win .. the players attitude was terrible…. but yeah; we should have won
Posted from
Netherlands
in ‘74 we really were the best, it’s a shame, but we’ve had big chances to win a EC/WC like two or three times besides the one time we actually won.
off-topic
V.Persie matchwinner for Arsenal, scored the equaliser and the winner in a 2-1 match against Chelsea. Let’s hope he’ll finally be as good as he can be for more than half a season.
Posted from
Netherlands
off topic; any of you live in NewYork? if you do you should watch your Oranje games in this bar:
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=eA99aSYPKlQ&feature=related
looks great!
Posted from
Netherlands
“De Telegraaf” almost put the affair on its headlines from that July 7th. On the last minute, they refused to do.
And, whether The Legend of the Pool influenced the team’s morale or not, I’m with goose: all of them were pretty good that WC, but… OUCH! What an arrogance! And with arrogance you’ll never win a WC.
(I heard that they demanded from the fans a tax for giving autographs, is it true?)
Mainly against the Germans. The winners from First World War treated them as rubbish, made the Treaty of Versailles, some Germans got angry and we know the end… the French team from 1982 scored 3-1 on the ET at the Semifinal on Spain and thought they were already in the Final and then…
@Goose: That bar looks like the business. I have never been there, and I thought I knew all the soccer bars in Manhattan… See how much I know… I will check it out. It is called the Tonic Bar and is on 7th Avenue between 48th & 49th street.
Thanks for the heads up mate.
in (July 2007), the world soccer has chosen the 1974 dutch team the 3rd best football team ever, the ranking was:
1- Brazil (1970)
2- Hungary (1953) (with Puskas)
3- Holland (1974)
4- AC Milan (89-90)
5- Real Madrid (56-60)
Posted from
Canada
I told you so, Goose is the YouTube King! The GooseTube….
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the headline in german was : “Cruijff, Sekt und nackte madchen”
i dont think its true that Cruijff wanted to humiliate the germans cause of the Bild story ; the 74 team was an extremely arrogant bunch of guys, they thought that they were superior to anybody and they were wrong in the end!
Posted from
Netherlands