IN the first of a two-part interview, former Wanderers midfielder Richard Sneekes explains how Burnden Park helped fuel a love affair with English football which continues to this day.

The Bolton News:

RICHARD Sneekes was the Dutch master with a rocket of a right-foot who would have folk at Burnden Park shuffling to the edge of their seat every time the goal came within sight.

For a couple of seasons in the mid-90s, the classy midfielder with the flowing locks could not get within a few meters of the penalty box without Wanderers fans imploring him to “shoot!”

Up to the point he was spotted by Bruce Rioch and his trusted chief scout Ian McNeil, Sneekes’ career had been one of unfulfilled potential back home in Holland.

He had been given a debut aged just 16 by the great Johan Cruyff but made only a few first team appearances in Amsterdam before drifting off to spells with Volendam and Fortuna Sittard.

Speaking to The Bolton News, and now working as a schoolteacher in the Midlands, Sneekes admitted he nearly turned down the offer of a trial with the Whites to get some sun on his back in Compostela, Spain.

“I had been playing in Switzerland on loan for a year and I knew I didn’t want to stay with my club in Holland,” he told us.

“I could have gone to Spain but I also had an offer in England with Bolton, who wanted me on trial.

“I said to my agent ‘it’s sunny in Spain, I’ll play there’ but he wasn’t having it. He had set something up with Ian McNeil, who was the head scout, and said I had to go to the most northerly tip of Scotland and spend a week there.

“We played Dunfermline and I had a bad game. (Dixie) McNeil came over to me afterwards and said: ‘We know you can play Richard, but you need to get hold of the ball.’ “The game was just 100-miles-an-hour and I couldn’t get near the thing.

“But then the following game we played against Ross County and we beat them 5-1, I scored two. Then Inverness and I scored again. I walked off the pitch and the lads were like: ‘We’ll see you next week!”

“The club I was at in Holland could not believe the amount of money they were getting for me. The chairman rang me and told me to get on my bike, fast!

“The player I was and where I was at in my life, everyone was saying I’d be back in three weeks. We’re nearly 28 years later now and I am still here. I proved a couple of people wrong, let’s just say that.”

Landing in a mid-90s dressing room and playing second-tier football in England was quite the culture shock for a player who had been brought through the refined ranks of Ajax.

Even though his senior career at De Meer had not taken off as he would have liked, the experience of working with the club and absorbing its coaching ethos stays with him to this day.

“When you walk into a team with Ronald Koeman, Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard and quite a few other great players, it is like a dreamland,” he said.

“In the youth team, Denis Bergkamp is the same age as me and we had Frank and Ronald de Boer in there, Bryan Roy, Richard Witschge, it is such a great club, and it is one club.

“They make sure that the first team train where the youth team train. That was always the vision and they have one system which ran right the way through whenever Cruyff was there. Different managers tried to deviate from it but it is their DNA, it is the way they play.

“If you go to Ajax as a seven-year-old, you could walk into a first team training session and know what you are supposed to do. Physically, you couldn’t match it, but everyone knows what is expected of them in any given position and system.

“Then Cruyff goes to Barcelona and injects that same DNA into that club, and Pep Guardiola, and he has been influential in European football for a good decade now.

“He tweaked things, of course, because when Cruyff was coaching the right and left winger would be expected to have chalk on their boots. The pitch was kept wide. Nowadays it is more interactive but the principles are still the same.”

After convincing Rioch he was worth an outlay of £200,000, Sneekes went on to become a regular in midfield during the 1994/95 campaign.

Although the Premier League era had begun, English football still looked somewhat at odds with the continental influences which were becoming more common at each club.

“It was an eye-opener at times,” Sneekes recalls of his early days at Bolton. “There wasn’t much of a team-talk and you’d have players jumping in the baths and showers and at first I was thinking what the hell is going on?

“But because everyone played the same way back then there wasn’t any tactical surprises, it was about who turned up on the day.

“You just had to make sure our players were up for it – and more often than not, we were.”

Rioch was one of the main reasons Sneekes settled so well.

The Dutchman recalls fondly the parties organised for Christmas, Easter and the like, the support offered to wives and children, and the way he was quickly embraced by a mainly UK based squad at first.

As the foreign influence slowly increased, some aspects of the Wanderers dressing room also started to reflect the different personalities within.

But Sneekes says playing under Rioch also changed his own outlook and his desire to embrace a different way of playing the game than he had been brought up with at Ajax.

“I just loved playing for Bruce,” he said. “If he didn’t like you, he could give you a very hard time, I can’t deny that.

“But he always used to tell us: ‘You guys are like my sons, if I have to tell you off it is for a good reason.’ “He had a great reputation as a manager but also as a player, don’t forget, and he liked the way I did things.

“I was used to turning up at noon for a 3pm kick-off and there would be spreadsheets everywhere explaining who you were up against, where you needed to be, what their set pieces were, blah, blah, blah.

“All of a sudden it was a team-sheet at half one with a couple of names on it of who would pick up from corners.

“Everyone played 4-4-2 but it slowly changed. When Mixu, Gudni, Fabian and myself came in we maybe brought that slightly different mentality. But I loved playing for Bolton, it made me think I’d been over-coached in Holland.”