No More Superlatives

As good as it gets: Bergkamp waves goodbye to the Gunners fans for the final time.





This summer, one of the best players of the past two decades hung up his boots for the last time. As a playmaker, he displayed unparalled grace, poise, and vision, coolly holding onto the ball until the defense opened up and allowed him to make a lethal pass to set up a teammate for the easiest of goals. When deployed as a second striker, his composure under pressure, astounding touch on the ball, and awe-inspiring audacity (few, if any, players in the world made better use of the chip) made him a clinical finisher. There was a subtlety to his game, a simplicity that made the most difficult plays look easy, almost unfairly so. Even as he entered the twilight of his career, his game remained as fresh and insightful as if he had only just been called up from the youth team; never having had much use for power and strength, he relied on his technique and finesse to continue dissecting defenses with amazing precision. For anyone who has ever played pick-up basketball, he had become the old, slow, fading star that ran half as much as everyone else, barely moving half the time, but still always being the deadliest, most feared opponent you could imagine, capable of deciding a game without so much as breaking a sweat. Simply put, his game was timeless.

Zinedine Zidane will go down in history as one of the five best players ever, but there was one other player that compiled a comparable body of work in the past decade: Dennis Bergkamp, star of Holland and Ajax and Arsenal, is the only player that can even be mentioned in the same breath as the great Frenchman. The only blight on the Dutchman's career is that, as fearless as he was on the pitch, he was afraid of flying, a fear so strong that he missed the 2002 World Cup in Japan and Korea as well as almost all of Arsenal's Champions League away games (held across the Channel on the continent). It was this fear that may have prevented the Non-Flying Dutchman from achieving the glory on the international stage that could have catapulted him even higher on the pantheon of all-time greats; he was part of the Dutch generation that, after displaying so much promise, never fulfilled its potential by winning international trophies; at Arsenal, his teams had a habit of crashing out of the Champions League - they were even unable to beat Galatasaray to win the UEFA Cup. All the same, Bergkamp's career needs no apologies or asterisks - he was one of the most beautiful players to watch, a true artist in action, a superstar with no shortage of highlights.

It is a testament to Dennis the Menace's skill and longevity that his career managed to span two of the most glorious periods of Arsenal's history. In the late 90s, Bergkamp was the fulcrum of a team that included Ian Wright, Nwanko Kanu, Emmanuel Petit, and his best friend and fellow Dutchman Marc Overmars. In the next millenium, Bergkamp partnered with Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, Robert Pires and Freddie Ljungberg to again pack Arsenal's trophy case to the brim. To this day this latter Arsenal squad remains one of the most jaw-dropping teams ever: the verve of their attacking prowess, roared on by the packed rafters of Highbury, was too much for teams to overcome. No matter how many of his oil rubles he spends, Abramovich's Chelski will never match the beauty of these attacking Arsenal sides, relentlessly pushing men forward into attack, playing with movement and speed reminiscent of Barcelona's Dream Team of the 90s, pouring forth in wave after wave as if they were down by three goals in a Cup final. In 2004, they cruised through an entire Premiership campaign without losing a single match. Around this time, Bergkamp scored a goal that will long last in the memory of every footie fan: against Newcastle United, Bergkamp received a cross from the left on the edge of the penalty area and with a defender, Nikos Dabizas, on his back, he dinked the ball with the inside of his left foot to the right of Dabizas, then spun to the left, cutting around Dabizas' back side, collected the ball and calmly placed it in the corner of the net as if the goalie didn't even exist. It was sublime. If a soccer player is only as good as his first touch, then Bergkamp's control against Argentina in a '98 World Cup quarterfinal surely places him among the all-time greats: he collected a long ball played from the back, took it down smoothly, cut back behind Argentina's Ayala, and blasted in the game-winning goal with only seconds left. And he was not just a finisher: his assist in a Champions League match against Juventus is as shocking a pass as you could ever hope to see. Set to the soothing sounds of Queen, you can catch a glimpse of Bergkamp in all his glory in this video.

Ultimately, as a BBC commentator once remarked, with Bergkamp you simply run out of superlatives. He was one of a kind, a reminder of everything that soccer can be, a true ambassador of the beautiful game. Last week, at Arsenal's new Emirates Stadium, two of his former clubs - Arsenal and Ajax, an epic collection of all-time greats including fellow Dutchmen Johan Cruyff, Frank Rijkaard, and Marco Van Basten, and a dozen of his former teammates, gathered for Bergkamp's farewell match. To say that he will be missed is an understatement, but at this point, I've run out of superlatives.