With a mop of reddish curls on a prematurely balding crown, Ruud Geels, who died this Saturday at the age of 75, was considered one of the Netherlands’ best ever headliners, far after Bep Bakhuys and far ahead of Luuk de Jong. The combination of timing, jumping power and heading power is rarely seen in the Eredivisie anymore.
Geels scored his best goal in 1975 in the Olympic Stadium at Ajax-Feyenoord (6-0). Literally the highlight of his career. Willem van Hanegem stood transfixed – a rarity – as can be seen in a frequently shown ANP photo. Geels scored five times in that ‘Classic’. A sixth goal was wrongly disallowed, at least according to Geels.
Born in Haarlemmer Geels, initially a semi-professional and working as a house painter in addition to sports, he was a shy sportsman who did not feel at home in the macho football world. “I experienced the glitter and fame as a burden,” the twenty-time international, now fitted with a hairpiece, said decades later at Barend & Van Dorp. “If I had stayed on the ladder, I might have been much happier.”
Lonely at Orange
In the shadow of the Amsterdam basic players/swaggerers Johan Cruijff, Johan Neeskens, Jan Jongbloed, Ruud Krol and Wim Suurbier, he played a reserve role at the 1974 World Cup in West Germany. He felt lonely at the training camp in Hiltrup. “Luckily there was fishing water nearby and I could isolate myself,” he said in 1994. NRC.
He called those four weeks with the Dutch national team “the worst period in my life.” “I went down the stairs with shaking knees when we had to have breakfast,” said Geels, who reportedly had to watch during dinner as Suurbier let his genitals dangle in his soup. That was a laugh – but not for Geels.
He was more in his element on the field and especially in the enemy penalty area. A fast, agile striker with a nose for goal. He was a professional for eighteen years and scored a total of 318 times in 474 matches at home and abroad. With 265 Eredivisie goals, he is second on the all-time top scorers list, behind the late PSV player Willy van der Kuijlen, who scored 311. Ruud Geels, together with Ronald Koeman, was the only one who played for the national top three: Feyenoord, Ajax and PSV.
Also read
The 2021 obituary of ‘skite Willy’ van der Kuylen
Gallows
He talked about his heading power Football International: “At Telstar we had one of those old-fashioned English gallows, which I practiced for days and, above all, I learned good timing. You must always be one count ahead of your opponent.”
In the 1960s, Geels first became a semi-professional at Telstar via the Haarlem amateur clubs DSS and Onze Gezellen and shortly afterwards, as a young boy, he became a full professional at Feyenoord. In VI he said: “In the beginning I said sir to Moulijn, but he then said to me: ‘You have to tell Coen, Ruud’. I always traveled by train from Haarlem to Amsterdam and from there I drove to Rotterdam with Rinus Israël.”
Geels was accurate in De Kuip, but found his superior in fellow center forward Ove Kindvall. From his home in Haarlem – he was not allowed to go to Milan because he had already signed with Go Ahead – he saw how the Swedish center forward Feyenoord punted to the historic, first Dutch European Cup 1 victory.
‘Chip and Dale’
After two years in the Deventer shelter, he was then successful for two seasons at the Belgian top club Club Brugge. From 1974 onwards he had to make Cruijff, who had previously left for Barcelona, forget at Ajax, playing in one team with his tormentors Krol and especially Suurbier, also known as ‘Chip and Dale’ because of their so-called football humor.
Ajax had now dropped to the European mid-table, but it was not due to Geels’ accuracy. He became the Eredivisie’s top scorer four times in a row, with 30, 29, 34 and 30 goals in succession. Most of them with the head, of course.
In VI Geels later said about his top years at Ajax: “I lived like a hermit, never went anywhere, and from Wednesday onwards I was completely focused on the next match. It was a stressful existence. I thought: if you sleep a lot, the stress disappears. I took yoga classes to better regulate my breathing and make my heart rhythm problems disappear. Sometimes I didn’t dare to play because of nerves, but once on the field they disappeared.”
He simulated injuries
Geels moved to the Belgian top club Anderlecht in 1978 and returned to the Eredivisie a year later with Sparta. And again he became the national top scorer, with 22 goals. Under trainer Joop Brand, he often simulated injuries during endurance runs, then tested the Sparta goalkeepers and then scored head goals at the weekend.
After a season at PSV and two years at NAC, 35-year-old Ruud Geels voluntarily retired from professional football. He then returned to his real love – the profession of house painter – as quickly as possible.