Wim Jansen, invisible icon

Sjoerd Mossou
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Saturday 20 September 2008

There is a distant resemblance with Jan Wolkers, the Dutch novelist.

Transparent, grey curly hair, pushed up by the collar of his trainer.

Wolkers would have lovingly picked up a passing caterpillar from the ground.

Jansen doesn't.

He's focussed on the ball, on the edge of the temporary training ground in the Krabbendijkestraat.

He sometimes says something, but not very often.

His eyes peer at the game, in the same way he can do it at Varkenoord, when Feyenoord's youth teams are playing.

"Wimpie is not a talker, never has been," Jan Boskamp knows.

The current manager of Belgian FCV Dender should know.

Wim Jansen and he grew up together in Old North in Rotterdam.

Boskamp in the Woelwijkstraat, Jansen in the Bloklandstraat.

"The two of us on the moped to De Kuip. I would steer with Wimpie on the back seat with our bags."

The contact never diluted.

Boskamp and Jansen speak regularly.

Over the phone or side by side in some stand.

The ball is always the subject.

"But I was also surprised that he was going back onto the training ground," Boskamp says.

"I was perplexed, because he hadn't mentioned it at all. Typical for Wim."

All of a sudden he was back on the pitch this summer.

As an assistant to Gertjan Verbeek.

A 'yes' that surprised everybody within the club, not in the least the former player who asked him to do so.

Director Peter Bosz saw him as the ideal man to complete the technical staff, but he considered the chances to be minimal.

"I asked him to think about it," Bosz says.

"Very carefully, because you shouldn't try to force things with Wim. That's when he says no. I left him alone for a while afterwards, until one fine day he said: I'll do it."

And so he will be in the dugout, when Feyenoord play Ajax tomorrow.

Jansen has been on both sides during The Classsic, as coach and as technical director.

Just what he wants and does in his new role at Feyenoord he doesn't want to say.

Jansen doesn't speak to the press, not even after extensive mediation.

His official statement is that he does not want to get in Verbeek's way, but Jansen has never been a man of many words.

You can call it headstrong, uptight, cowardliness or independent, but Jansen simply refuses to open up or to render an account of his actions.

Not even to Feyenoord TV, the club's own TV-channel.

It even makes the man with that very common name a bit mysterious.

But people who know him well praise his football vision.

But Jansen prefers to keep that vision for a select group of people.

"We don't have all that much direct contact," says forward Michael Mols.

"Jansen is a man who stays in the background, I think. He is the soundboard of the boss, I think that's how you should see it. He observes from a distance."

During training sessions it's Verbeeks or his assistants Leon Vlemmings and Alex Pastoor who actively lead the drills.

Jansen watches and timely talks to his colleagues.

"But often he only needs one sentence to make something clear," says goal keeper Henk Timmer.

"He tugs a young player at his shirt and tells him he'd better take position a bit more inside. It shows his great football vision."

"Wim sees through things in football," Bosz says.

"As a coach he had an infallible feeling for certain processes in the team. In my days as a player I have a learned a hell of a lot from him. He can see the details of the game like no one else can. And he tell about it in such a great way. Cause he's not Willem the Silent, as I hear he's called sometimes."

The love for Feyenoord and football sound through in all stories told about him.

Few Feyenoorders are respected to the extend that Jansen is within the club.

He is the pure football man, averse from swank or hanky-panky.

Bosz thinks it is his deep connection with the Rotterdam club that has made him describe to put his tracksuit back on.

"I believe he felt the club needed him," Bosz says.

His friend Jan Boskamp agrees.

"Wim is so mad about Feyenoord. It's his life."

Still, there are some major question marks to his love for Feyenoord.

As a player he signed for Ajax in 1980 without the blink of an eye, much to the dislike and incomprehension of the fans.

In his years as coach of SVV Dordrecht he was reproached with plucking half of Feyenoord's youth players away from the academy and as manager of Celtic he took his former pupil Henrik Larsson with him for a minimal amount.

"Wim always goes his own way. Straight ahead," says Boskamp.

"He knows exactly what he wants and will not have anyone prescribe him what to do. Not even when players are concerned. He is clear about which players suit Feyenoord and which don't. And when there's anything that's not to his liking, he's gone. His departure from Celtic is perhaps the best example. He has won the league, but he felt he couldn't work the way he wanted. And off he was."

Before he came back to the club three years ago as technical advisor, he said 'no' on a few occasions.

"Perhaps because he felt he couldn't be of any help to the club at that moment," Bosz thinks.

"He wants to be of value in his own way."

His status of club legend is relative in the changing rooms and on the training ground, Michael Mols thinks.

"I think I am the only one who has actually seen him play," the 37-year-old forward says.

"But guys like Georginio Wijnaldum (18) don't pay much attention to the fact that he is an icon. They respect the things he says, but hey only know Wim Jansen by name."

His value as a Feyenoord-statue is hard to define.

According to Peter Bosz it didn't even play a role in naming him assistant: "We wanted a complementary staff and Wim had all the qualities we were looking for."

Nevertheless there will be a club icon on the sideline when Feyenoord meet Ajax tomorrow.

"Wim is in the same category as Coen Moulijn and Willem van Hanegem," Boskamp thinks.

"But he will never claim he is. Wim is simply Wim."