On van Daele’s glasses, the cup, the Kuip and the party in Bremen

Ask ten Feyenoord supporters about their club’s greatest moment and you will just have started a discussion that has no end. Was winning the European Cup better than winning the Dutch league for the first time? Did Julio Cruz’s goals against Juventus mean more to Feyenoord than Rinus Bennaars’s shot that once brought Vasas Budapest to its knees in Antwerp. And was the sailing of the Groote Beer and the Waterman to Lisbon more impressive than 30.000 Feyenoord fans watching Feyenoord beat Groningen to claim the title in 1995 on two giant TV-screens in the Kuip. Feyenoord’s wealth in memorable moments is so vast that nobody can really answer that question. And that’s all for the best really.

In the night of the 6th and 7th of May 1970, four trains shot through the night. They were coming back from Milan to Rotterdam. Thousands of fans heading home, worn out, but intensely happy. They had been there! For the first time in the history of Dutch football a European Cup had been won. Their club, their Feyenoord had now managed to do, what Ajax wasn’t able to do the previous year, Scottish champions Celtic had been beaten 2-1.

Only after 117 minutes of play, when the opponents were expecting a replay, did Ove Kindvall by lobbing the goalkeeper deliver the deserved final blow. To 25.000 Feyenoord supporters the Milanese San Siro stadium had become part of 7th heaven. Millions at home, tense and biting their nails, had been watching the match in front of the television.
Feyenoord was popular. The admirers of Feyenoord’s game, a combination of high-level technical football, and a reliable insight on the field, cast together by Viennese football professor Ernst Happel, lived in and far beyond the city of Rotterdam. But there was more to Feyenoord than just that. Feyenoord also meant: a sixty year long history of the simple people’s club from a poorer area in Rotterdam Zuid; a people’s club that had climbed all the way to the top of Europe.

The road, taken by former directors, had proved to be a right one. There were many who shook their heads and raised an eyebrow or two at remarkable decisions in the past: chairman L. van Zandvliet who ordered the building of a stadium with a capacity of some 65.000 people, chairman Cor Kieboom who brought in player that weren’t from in or around Rotterdam. Loyal supporters hadn’t in fact taken it the wrong way. The stadium was packed on a regular basis and whoever wore the red and white, would be accepted by the crowd. On the 6th of May the icing had been put on the cake.

This of course was the undisputed highpoint in the club’s history, but on that train that night were also a few people who had been through a thing or two with Feyenoord. In one carriage were six seniors who could still remember the matches v. Arsenal of 1937 and 1938.

Sorce: o.a. Feyenoord Compleet, Waanders Uitgevers / Mr. J. Oudenaarden