Dennis Bergkamp
Dennis Bergkamp
Dennis Nicolaas Maria Bergkamp; born 10 May 1969) is a Dutch former professional footballer, who is the assistant manager to Frank de Boer at Ajax. Originally a wide midfielder, Bergkamp was moved to main striker and then to second striker, where he remained throughout his playing career. Bergkamp has been described by Jan Mulder as having "the finest technique" of any Dutch international and a "dream for a striker" by teammate Thierry Henry...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionSoccer Player
Date of Birth10 May 1969
CityAmsterdam, Netherlands
I just wanted to get back to playing attacking football after my time in Italy. It was a little difficult at first but the atmosphere and the fans were just fantastic.
A lot of people say you always come back to what you are good at. Football has been 25 years of my life, so maybe I'll come back to it in some sort of way.
I don't want to lose myself in football and that's what a coach has to do to be successful.
In Holland and Spain and France, where so many of us come from, people aren't interested in the sex lives of their players. We don't hear these stories - even in Italy where the media is right on top of football.
Playing football was like being trapped in a rhythm, and my whole career was like that. You have very little time to switch off.
I love playing football, being out on the pitch with a ball, and I will be a little sad when that ends.
If you look at the whole package, with everything Henry has, I don't think you can find that anywhere else. You give him the ball in the right place and his acceleration will take him past any defender in the world.
Arsene Wenger's idea is not only to play good football. It's to play good football to win. In my day, we knew that with our style we could hurt teams and win trophies too. But we did it our way, with the positional game, passing, movement.
When you start supporting a football club, you don't support it because of the trophies, or a player, or history, you support it because you found yourself somewhere there; found a place where you belong.
It's fantastic for Arsenal, and for English football as well. You've got an English club with a lot of young English talent committing themselves to a club.
In the past few weeks, you can see that the spirit and the football are coming back.
We created some chances in the first half and the sending-off made it difficult for us to get going. They equalized but we kept fighting and there was a good spirit. Maybe in the end we would have been happy with a point.
At the time I played with him (Ian), I didn't think I would ever play with another quite like him. I really didn't think that his record would ever be broken,
We haven't talked about money yet. People can say the money doesn't really matter but it does show you how much a club respects you.