Golazzo: Marco Van Basten, AC Milan vs. IFK Goteborg, 1992
Published on: November 25, 2024
It is a shame Marco Van Basten played when he did.
For the recent introduction of the term “The Last Dance” in the sporting lexicon would have perfectly encapsulated the balletic grace of “The Swan of Utrecht.”
The Dutchman, who turned 60 last month, possessed all of that. And then some.
It is also a shame Van Basten played when he did, for his superb talent was kicked out of him, his ankles beaten to a pulp in an era when players’ welfare was an afterthought.
“He sometimes faced defenders who he said did not even know the score because they were so busy trying to stop him or kick him out of the game,” his father Joost once recalled.
Van Basten was two months short of his 31st birthday when he left football, having spent more time under the surgeon’s knife than on the pitch in the previous two seasons.
The three-time Ballon d’Or winner had effectively retired two years earlier, his last match coming as AC Milan lost the 1993 Champions League final against Olympique Marseille.
There was a brutal, almost poignant kind of circularity to Van Basten’s final season with Milan, which encompassed a five-month injury layoff and a scarcely believable return of 20 goals in 22 appearances in all competitions.
Goals and a terrible fragility, the yin and yang of his career juxtaposed one final time.
Six months before his final appearance with the Rossoneri, Van Basten treated the San Siro to his last great virtuoso performance.
It was his last dance, only nobody knew it.
Conversely, the Champions League had barely made its debut by the time Milan welcomed IFK Goteborg at the Giuseppe Meazza on November 25.
For all intents and purposes, the inaugural version of the Champions League was a different competition from the commercial behemoth we know today.
The competition proper included 32 teams compared to the current 36, but the tournament featured just 74 matches as opposed to the 189 that will be played in 2024-25.
Significantly, the Champions League still lived up to its name, for only champions from each of the UEFA-affiliated nations were allowed to participate.
Having dispatched Olimpija Ljubljana and Slovan Bratislava 7-0 and 5-0 on aggregate, respectively, in the first two qualifying rounds, Milan found themselves in a group with IFK Goteborg, Porto and a PSV Eindhoven side featuring Romario.
On the other side of the draw, Walter Smith’s Rangers were pitted against Olympique Marseille, CSKA Moscow and Club Brugge.
This was a different era. Was it better? Perhaps. Was it more exotic? You bet.
Watching footage of Milan taking on IFK Goteborg 32 years on is a viscerally thrilling experience from a visual standpoint.
Stuck on a white sleeve patch, the Champions League logo is beautifully raw.
Its presence on a Milan kit devoid of any shirt sponsor and still featuring the Adidas trefoil is the perfect visual bridge between the historic European Cup and its new iteration.
Van Basten arguably fulfilled the same role himself.
The man whose brace helped Milan sink Steaua Bucharest in the 1989 European Cup final and who helped the Rossoneri defend the trophy the following season now became the first player in the Champions League to score four goals in the same game.
Van Basten’s quadruple against IFK in the opening match of the group stage covered almost his entire majestic repertoire.
The opener is an ode to movement without the ball, a lesson that Arrigo Sacchi had repeatedly drummed into the Dutchman, much to the latter’s chagrin.
“I had to make him understand that, when our attack was over, he shouldn’t just take a rest up a siding – he needed to stay in an active position, ready to receive a pass or to hunt down the ball,” Sacchi, who signed Van Basten in 1987, wrote of the Dutchman in his book The Immortals.
“When the lesson entered his brain and he was fully convinced of his own worth, Marco became a phenomenon at pressing, too.”
Sacchi was replaced by Fabio Capello by 1992, but some of his principles still applied.
Against IFK, Stefano Eranio cuts in from the right and plays a pass directly to Van Basten’s feet at the edge of the box.
With a defender directly behind him, the Dutchman moves as if to collect the pass, allowing the ball to roll past him towards Jean-Pierre Papin before pirouetting past his marker and away from him.
By the time he receives Papin’s pass, Van Basten still has the strength to hold off a defender and direct his finish past IFK goalkeeper Thomas Ravelli.
To do so while off balance perfectly illustrates what made him so special.
A schoolboy gymnast at his peak, Van Basten’s brain and body worked faster than anyone else’s on the pitch.
Van Basten’s goals came in all shapes and sizes, from towering headers to delicate chips and long-range piledrivers.
More importantly for a striker, they came often.
He netted 128 goals in 133 Eredivisie appearances with Ajax, winning three league titles, three Dutch Cups and the European Cup Winners’ Cup, scoring in the final.
Serie A in the 1980s was the litmus test for any striker, but Van Basten remained just as prolific after moving to Milan in 1987, scoring 125 goals in 201 appearances in all competitions.
The trophies, too, kept coming.
Under Sacchi, Van Basten won the Scudetto in 1988, consecutive European Cups in 1989 and 1990, and a European Super Cup, two Intercontinental Cups and the Italian Super Cup.
Sacchi’s Milan revolutionised football, but its architect was completely burnt out by 1991, his all-consuming approach eventually forcing him to step aside and be replaced by Capello.
If Sacchi had pursued his own football utopia, Capello’s colours were firmly tied to the mast of pragmatism.
“Despite what some have written, it’s not true that I said: ‘Without me, you’ll not win anything any more’,” Sacchi wrote in The Immortals.
“I said something quite different. ‘You can still win trophies, but not in the same way. Not with our style.’”
His forecast proved prescient as Milan romped to the Scudetto in Capello’s first campaign in charge without losing a single game.
The Dutch triumvirate of Van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rjikard remained as central to Capello’s plans as they had been under Sacchi.
By the time Goteborg arrived at the San Siro, the Rossoneri were amid a domestic 58-game unbeaten run and were the team to beat in Europe, a belief only strengthened by their thumping of IFK.
Having scored the opener, Van Basten single-handedly dismantled the visitors in the second half.
He doubled the lead with a slightly fortunate penalty, which just squeezed under Ravelli, but there was nothing fortunate about his third goal nine minutes later.
Eranio works his way into the box before checking back and lifting the ball towards the penalty spot as he swivels off his right foot.
The cross lacks any real pace and is slightly behind Van Basten, who has been left in acres of space by the IFK defenders.
In one fluid movement, the Dutchman sets himself and finds the far corner of Ravelli’s net with a bicycle kick that sends the ball bouncing into the turf before planting itself past the keeper.
Like a batsman waiting to play the perfect cover drive, time seems to briefly stand still as Van Basten lifts himself up in the air before connecting with the ball.
Anyone who has watched football in a stadium knows the roar that almost precedes the ball hitting the back of the net, as thousands of eyes and brains know exactly what is about to unfold in the next second as the striker directs the ball past the keeper.
The reaction to Van Basten’s goal, however, is markedly different.
The roar is significantly delayed as if the fans needed some more time to process what had just unfolded before their eyes.
Only when the ball slams into the turf can you hear a crescendo of noise, which turns into a proper roar only after the ball has long nestled into the net.
The Dutchman’s final goal two minutes later is almost as aesthetically pleasing.
Riijkard makes one of his trademark runs from midfield and lays off the ball to Van Basten, whose return pass is a majestic flick with the outside of his right boot, which loops over a defender and back into his teammate’s path.
As a defender bundles over Rijkard, the ball squirts past another IFK player and back towards Van Basten, who seizes the moment and rounds Ravelli before rolling the ball into an empty net with his left foot.
It was the Dutchman’s 19th goal in the European Cup/Champions League in 27 appearances, and it was also his last.
Within a month, Van Basten was sidelined with an ankle injury and returned just in time to feature against Olympique Marseille in the Champions League final in Munich.
In the same stadium, Van Basten had led the Netherlands to European glory five years earlier, setting up Gullit for the opener against the Soviet Union and then scoring that volley.
“I was at the maximum of my career,” he told The Guardian four years ago of his Euro 1988 triumph.
“And things that followed were nice and beautiful. But, all of a sudden, in 1993, I played my last game in the same stadium.
“Everything went down. There was a lot of pain and problems.”
Beaten by Marseille in the final, Milan retained the Serie A title and won the Scudetto again the following season, when they also thrashed Barcelona 4-0 to win the Champions League.
It was arguably Capello’s apotheosis, but Van Basten was effectively retired by then.
The Swan of Utrecht had danced his last dance.
