Johnny Rep must have been a nightmare at bus stops. Never the most patient of players, he would have been a fidgety mess, cursing the quiet road and rechecking the timetable every five seconds. Good things come to those who wait, apparently, but try telling that to Rep circa 1973. If you could get near him, that is: when he wasn’t tapping his foot or audibly sighing, he was sprinting off to harangue the future, pointing accusingly at his watch and telling it to hurry up.

So let it be stated here, on behalf of the Dutch go-getter, that good things also come to those who do not wait – and Rep certainly wasn’t hanging around. The final sprocket in the Total Football machine put together by Ajax in the early 1970s, he played the game as if driven by his own private agenda. On the pitch and off it, he saw what needed to happen before practically anyone else – and then he made it happen.

Rep began the 1973 European Cup final as the only Ajax player who had not featured in at least one of their showpiece triumphs over the two previous seasons. He had been a fringe contributor at the start of the campaign. An undeniably brilliant winger, yes, but a 20-year-old talent who had to bide his time. Especially as the man keeping his place warm was ‘Mr Ajax’ himself, Sjaak Swart, a bona fide club monument. 

Rep took a long, hard look at the best team in Europe – one of the finest sides ever assembled – and basically shook his head. Pretty good, but could do better. And what tweak did this recipe require? More Rep, less Swart. “It was my turn,” he says now of that period. Frustratingly for him, coach Ștefan Kovács refused to bow to Rep’s vision of the inevitable, so the restless prodigy went right ahead and complained to the board of directors.  

It was a risky move, this brash young upstart defying the manager who had recently conquered Europe. But the board was receptive, with Rep having won Ajax the Intercontinental Cup in September, when he was subbed on for Swart during the second leg against Independiente and promptly scored twice. With the backing of the higher-ups, he was fast-tracked into the forward line alongside Johan Cruyff and Piet Keizer, ostensibly as the right prong of a trident but in truth a mobile, dribbling dynamo in a fluid 4-3-3 formation.