For much of his playing career, Frank de Boer – ball at his feet somewhere between his own penalty area and the centre circle – used to look up and survey the pitch in front of him to see Phillip Cocu available, giving him passing options, thinking the next step ahead.
The pair of them shared successes and setbacks over hundreds of matches as teammates for club and country.
As coaches, they are developing some of the same familiarity – but as rivals.
De Boer’s sensation as he prepares his Ajax side for this afternoon’s meeting with Cocu’s PSV Eindhoven resembles the feeling he had for season after season when they were colleagues at Barcelona, and for even longer when they lined up together for the Netherlands national team.
De Boer, once a defender who could calibrate passes to the millimetre from his excellent left foot, now looks up and sees Cocu, who was a versatile midfielder, ahead of him again. But too far ahead for comfort.
PSV head the Dutch Eredivisie by 14 points from Ajax, the defending champions.
De Boer and Cocu are both 44 and have been identified across Europe as coaches with great futures. Since last August, Cocu has been overseeing what it would not be too heavy an overstatement to describe as a revolution.
PSV look all but certain to put an end to a sequence of five successive Ajax league triumphs.
A permanent member of the country's "Big Three" clubs, with Feyenoord and Ajax, PSV have not won the league title since 2008.
The turnaround in the hierarchy says much about Cocu’s gift for management, especially his enthusing and advancing of young players, such as Memphis Depay, 21, the league’s leading goalscorer, and Jetro Willems, 20, who has provided more goal-making passes than anybody in the league.
But Ajax have also declined, with De Boer’s apparent Midas touch fading.
Until this season, De Boer in most ways had been the perfect company man for Ajax. He won a league title in every season he has been in charge, starting in 2011.
He also seemed to have a plan to cope with important departures from the club, Ajax being a selling institution.
They included departures such as Christian Eriksen, who moved to Tottenham Hotspur in 2013, Jan Vertonghen (to Spurs in 2012) and Luis Suarez (to Liverpool in 2011).
Few were surprised by his successes. A former Ajax player, De Boer was a fine captain as a player, for the Netherlands above all, and a natural leader from a young age.
His transition into coaching, as Cocu has said, “began during the playing career”.
The two of them, according to Cocu, “saw the game in a certain way”.
“Helped by the fact we were a central defender and a central midfielder,” he said. “You see most of what’s happening ahead of you that way.”
Their colleagues in club football made a stimulating group, too. At Barcelona in the late 1990s and early years of this century, De Boer and Cocu played alongside Pep Guardiola, now the Bayern Munich coach, and Luis Enrique, now in charge at Barcelona.
“Pep was steps ahead of us” in his coaching career, Cocu told Spanish newspaper Marca.
“I have made myself a coach little by little and I am not in a hurry,” he said.
But, like De Boer, who was strongly linked with Tottenham and Liverpool in the past four years, Cocu, who has three-and-a-half years left on his PSV contract, must sense his stock is rising, and offers from abroad will come.
He knows even a point today will strengthen the assumption the title is PSV’s. There are 10 matches left in the league.
Ajax still have the Europa League to chase, a competition PSV exited on Thursday at the hands of Zenit St Petersburg, but they and De Boer must be nearly reconciled that this May will feel different, and emptier, than the previous five.
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