100 years of Abe: Frisian myth pops up in never-before-seen color images

When asked if he is the best Dutch football player of all time, not many people will say ‘yes’ wholeheartedly. But there is no doubt that Abe Lenstra is one of the greatest myths in national football history.

In the week in which the Frisian legend would have turned 100 – he died in 1985 – unique visual material has surfaced with him in the lead role. It concerns a match between Heerenveen and Haarlem from 1948, a meeting in the context of the so-called championship competition.

The images were made by Oeds Andries Brouwer, an amateur filmmaker living in Dokkum at the time who recorded the duel with an 8mm camera. What makes it extra special is that the pictures are in color.

“We are really very happy with this. They are the oldest color images of Dutch top football that we know so far”, says Syds Wiersma, coordinator of the Frisian Film Archive. He does not hide his enthusiasm. According to him, the images are unique and of historical significance.

Unusable patches

“It started with a request from Omrop Fryslân, who wanted to make a documentary about Abe for his 100th birthday on November 27th. They wondered if there were still undiscovered images of Lenstra that were hidden in our archive.”

Wiersma dived into the archive with that assignment. He first came across a few scraps of images of Heerenveen-Feyenoord from 1943 and Heerenveen-SVV from 1949. A good start, but the recordings turned out to be too fragmentary to really use it.