VAN BASTEN’S BELTER
Euro rewind to 1988:
Press box etiquette says us media types should never celebrate when a team scores. But sometimes a goal is so good, you just cannot help yourself. That was the case on June 25, 1988 when Marco van Basten let fly against the Soviet Union.
There did not look much on when Arnold Muhren lofted a hopeful cross over to the far side of the box. Van Basten, who would finish as the tournament’s top scorer, had a seemingly impossible angle to shoot as the ball dropped out of the sky.
But shoot he did, connecting sweetly to produce one of the alltime great volleys to smash a thunderous strike over stunned goalkeeper Rinat Dasayev.
It was not just the 62,770 fans in the Olympic Stadium in Munich who were on their feet when it went in either.There were usually passive, ‘I’ve seen it all’ media types in the press box leaping out of their seats in amazement. Coming after Ruud Gullit’s headed opener,Van Basten’s volley killed the game off.
And it had legendary Dutch coach Rinus Michels off the bench clutching his face in disbelief.
AC Milan ace Van Basten had not even started the tournament, playing second fiddle to John Bosman, Holland’s top scorer in qualifying. But after losing in their opener, a 1-0 defeat ironically to the Soviet Union side they would beat in the final, Holland brought in Van Basten and never looked back.
They played the final with the kind of swagger and verve they had shown from that moment on.
Everyone remembers that Dutch team for the jazzy orange shirts, still a collector’s item today, and the stellar play of Milan trio Gullit,Van Basten and Frank Rijkaard. But it is Van Basten’s goal that will live longest in the memory, and regularly comes up in compilations of the best ever scored.
“You need a lot of luck with a shot like that,” he said later, with typical modesty.
It helped make Gullit the first Holland captain to lift a major international trophy. And it was a fitting end to the competition for a glittering side full of stars, with Ronald and Erwin Koeman, Jan Wouters, Hans van Breukelen and Muhren joining Holland’s Big Three in the team of the tournament.
They had done it the hard way, by beating host nation West Germany, their conquerors in the 1974 World Cup final, in a grudge match of a semi-final that Michels later called “the real final”.
He had an impossible angle to shoot as the ball dropped