Some managers etch their names into history because they change the game. These are the
visionaries, the men whose legacy is written in more
than silver and gold. It is because of them that we
think about football in the way we do. They are the
mavericks and the dreamers, the ones who see the sport in a different way, who force us to forget all we
know about how 11 players should function on a
pitch.

Others are recognized as legends because they
perfect the game as it exists. These are the masters,
the motivators, the men who can do what everyone
else does but better. They are remorseless, relentless
winners, soaring above their peers, their necks
adorned with medals and a heap of trophies at their feet.

Jose Mourinho, perhaps, would provide the most
apposite example of the latter. Helenio Herrera,
mastermind behind il grande Inter, would be
another; even Sir Alex Ferguson. Marcelo Bielsa, the
hipsters' darling, would be in the vanguard of the
former; maybe Arsene Wenger and Tele Santana, too.

Yet there are but a handful of men who have
managed to do both. It is in this category, this elite
band, that we must place Rinus Michels.

Michels' CV is nothing to be sniffed at. He lifted four
league titles with Ajax and led them to the first of the
three European Cups with which they started the
1970s, as well as saw them beaten in the final in
1969. He won La Liga with Barcelona, too, and the
Copa del Rey a few years later. With Holland, he lifted the 1988 European Championships and also took
them to the 1974 World Cup final, where they were
beaten by their own sense of superiority as much as
by West Germany.

But weighing precious metal and counting precious
medals is not a fitting way to assess Michels'
contribution to the game. It does not quite explain
why he was declared Coach of the Century in 1999. It
does not come close to measuring his impact on
football.

COUNTDOWN

•No. 20: Fabio Capello

• No. 19: Udo Lattek

• No. 18: Pep Guardiola

• No. 17: Jock Stein

• No. 16: Bela Guttmann

• No. 15: Marcello Lippi

• No. 14: Ernst Happel

• No. 13: Ottmar Hitzfeld

• No. 12: Giovanni Trapattoni

• No. 11: Vicente del Bosque

• No. 10: Bill Shankly

• No. 9: Jose Mourinho

• No. 8: Valeri Lobanovsky

• No. 7: Sir Matt Busby

• No. 6: Arrigo Sacchi

• No. 5: Helenio Herrera

• No. 4: Bob Paisley

• No. 3: Brian Clough

• No. 2: Rinus Michels

• No. 1: Sir Alex Ferguson

do you agree with the list?

His name, of course, is synonymous with Total
Football, that peculiarly Dutch vision of how the game
should be played. When he died, in 2005, Marco van
Basten described him as "the father of Dutch
football." That, too, is an inadequate epitaph. Michels,
in many ways, is the father of all modern football.

Total Football is often characterised as the on-pitch
manifestation of the hippie revolution that swept
through Holland and the rest of Europe in the 1960s.
Johan Cruyff, Johan Neeskens, Johnny Rep and the
rest captivated the world with their free-flowing style,
their manes of hair, their statement sideburns; this was free love in shin pads, Woodstock in studs. The
popular vision of Total Football is that it did away
with the tyranny of positions and with the shackles of
static tactical formations, allowing players to
interchange places at will so that everyone was an
attacker and nobody a defender.

That is an inversion of the truth, even if the
consequences were largely the same. Michels was a
disciplinarian, a workaholic, who drove his players
into the ground. Piet Keizer, the Ajax winger,
remembered his training sessions as "the hardest I
ever had; sometimes we did four a day." It was Michels who introduced the Dutch to the Italian
concept of sequestering the team in a hotel before a
game so that the players could be entirely focused on
the task in front of them. Rinus Michels, a qualified
gymnastics teacher, was not a hippie.

He was also not as cavalier as his reputation
suggests. Yes, Total Football granted full backs like
Ruud Krol the licence to raid forward, but it
demanded that another player, an attacking player,
possess the capability to slot in to cover his
teammate's position. When Bill Shankly remarked that he had never seen a home team play so defensively
-- this after watching his Liverpool side demolished
5-1 by Ajax in Amsterdam -- he was only partly
being sardonic. He had recognised that Michels' Ajax,
as would be true of his Barcelona and his Holland,
protected their own goal first. Johan Cruyff, Michels' greatest protégé, played as a withdrawn forward,
dropping deep into his own half to gain possession
and dictate play. This system was not all attack and
no defence, all light but no dark. It was a symbiosis of
the two.

It was to this end that Michels worked his players so
hard. His system was not new: Nandor Hidegkuti had
shown how much damage a withdrawn forward
could do for the great Hungary side of the 1950s,
while Brazil had long enjoyed a tradition of attacking
full backs. Michels was not even the first man to introduce the principles to Holland -- that honour falls
to his mentor, Jack Reynolds, coach of Ajax in the
1950s -- but he was the first to recognise that it could
work to its full potential only if the players were
physically flawless. Michels realised you need to work
for your freedom.

That is the on-pitch stuff. It was that theory,
combined with the two greatest generations of
footballers in Dutch history, which brought him all
those league titles, the move to Barcelona, the place
in the World Cup final and, once Cruyff, Neeskens and
Rep had been replaced by van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard, his crowning glory, the 1988
European Championships.

But there is more. It was Michels who first established
the principle of schooling young players in the Ajax
way, to make sure that each successive generation
played in the same way; this way, his legacy was
protected. It was that idea, imbued in Cruyff, which
led to the foundation of La Masia at Barcelona; it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that many of the
youth development principles now so common
across Europe were seeded by Michels.

And it was Michels who, as van Basten hinted,
ultimately defined the Netherlands' footballing
identity. Those brilliant men in orange are still
expected to play in his way, with his style, with his
panache. Perhaps only Brazil have a more defined
role in world football's firmament.

"He put the Netherlands on the map in such a way
that everybody still benefits from it," said Cruyff after
Michels' death. "With him, results came first, but
quality of soccer was No. 1. I will miss Rinus Michels."