Mr Cool loses it

FIRST Ruud Gullit lost the manager's job at Chelsea, then he did the same at Newcastle United. That was bad enough for a man whose opinion of himself has never been less than glowing.

But now something even worse has happened to the chap we came to think of as Mr Sexy Football after he arrived from Italy a few short years ago: Gullit has lost his image, his aura, his eclat; in short, he's lost his profile as the personification of modern football cool.

The final humiliation has arisen from events far from the field of play which, as a player, Gullit so often graced. He's been caught by the "red tops" with the wrong girl in his bedroom and his shorts around his knees.

Thanks initially to the dedicated snooping of Daily Star reporters, we've learned that while in Newcastle Gullit was to use the weary euphemisms - "playing away" and "scoring" with 28-year-old Lisa Jensen, a winsome waitress at an Italian restaurant. Back in Holland, Estelle Cruyff - Gullit's partner, bearer of his child and niece of the legendary Johan Cruyff - was not at all amused, and was even reported to have "dumped" him.

She will be laughing even less if she has seen yesterday's Sunday papers, which squeezed every last drop of scandal from the saga.

Among others, Ms Jansen made the shattering disclosure that she had also "done it" with the wretched Gazza, and that the boudoir style of "Fat Boy" put poor Ruud's moves to shame.

In the eyes of the public it's been a grizzly fall from grace - from soccer sophisticate to letdown lover in the space of just two seasons - but our gradual realisation that Cool Ruud is capable of being as incompetent and crass as any homegrown grafter has also underlined how completely he beguiled us in the first place. Now that the Premier League in general and Chelsea in particular is awash with fancy footie artistes from every continent, all of whom appear to know their Armanis from their elbows, it is easy to forget that Gullit paved the way for their arrival.

Yes, there were overseas players already, but none with the track record, let alone the awesome charisma, of the Dutchman with the dreads.

Signed as a player by Glenn Hod-le - that other icon turned to dust - he was the one who began to put the champagne back into Stamford Bridge after two decades of lager ordinaire. It was, though, as a television presence that he did most to sell himself and England's fizzy new football frenzy to the widest possible audience. His media persona - attractive, eccentric, engaging - brought home how little our indigenous heroes had moved on from the spirit of the Seventies when style was a kipper tie and a set of sideburns you could have used to windsurf with, and every post-match utterance was prefixed with "Well, Brian." What a wonder Gullit was with his award- winning wardrobe and winning way with broken English. As a manager his post-match interviews made his rivals look like a Ron Knee convention. As a pundit he made Alan Hansen seem square and suburban - a man with a side parting. Dear, oh dear.

Besotted, even those of us who knew Gullit's chequered history basked in the golden glow he cast.

We should have known that underneath the precious metals there lay a fragile bauble. His glittering playing career had been littered with rows with managers who, so it appears, simply didn't appreciate that Ruud always knew best. And what of his own record as a manager? A top line ex-pro with a fat chequebook at his disposal often brings a measure of quick success, but it takes more than wealth and reputation to build a team that lasts: things like having the right temperament, knowing how to handle others, and how to roll your sleeves up when things aren't going your way. The whole Gullit edifice began to crumble when these failings as a manager began to be exposed. He was so feted as a media magician that his maudlin press conference following the Chelsea sacking at was subjected to textual analysis in the style of Roland Barthes. But when he started blaming Fate, Alan Shearer, anything but himself for Newcastle's grim start to this season. it was plain the game was up. (Yesterday his apparently unrescuable team, now under new management, won 8-0, Shearer scoring five.) And now we know what he was on about when he left the club complaining about intrusions into his private life. There was this girl, see, and someone started talking and now his missus has found out.Suddenly it all seems so Old Football, so tawdry, so banal.

Does it matter that Ruud Gullit has ceased to symbolise what many people welcomed as a new sophistication in our football? Only up to a point. His style and sex appeal suggested seductive new ways in which the game might be conducted both as sport and as mass media entertainment: in those respects he cannot be replaced. But his nadir also reminds us of modern big time football's less attractive characteristics: its vanity, its vacuity and its inability to face up to its faults.

Copyright 1999
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