These are both joyous and troubling times for us Oranje fans. I’ll drop the pretense of impartiality sportswriters are supposed to arm themselves with here, and concede that I still intertwine some of my happiness with the fate of the national team from my native Netherlands. Old habits die hard, even in the face of professional obligation.
So yes, joyous and troubling.
We’ll start with the joy: the fatal idiosyncrasy of Dutch soccer is that it has always been afflicted with a desire to put style before scoring. Losing prettily is tolerable, especially if the alternative is winning ugly. Pretty, in our definition, is a quick, possession-based game that employs the entire field and generally eschews long balls and direct play. A modern version of Total Football, upon which Spain’s tiki-taka was built. It was that Spanish child of our house style, the “Dutch school” as we say back home, that beat us in the last World Cup final – in no small irony, when we had resorted to ugliness.
That ugliness, by and large, consisted of “results-football” – again, a translated Dutch term. It’s an undesirable label. We played with two bruising holding midfielders in Nigel de Jong and Mark van Bommel and head coach Bert van Marwijk had his side sit in far more than any of his countrymen cared for. Aesthetics were subservient to the outcome, and while it brought Oranje to a third World Cup final, it didn’t deliver a first World Cup title. So ultimately, it proved no more effective than the way we’d been playing all along – the way I, and many, believe we should always be playing.
With a view to the future, it perhaps wasn’t such an awful thing that Oranje flamed out of Euro 2012 in a disastrous dumpster-fire of a campaign, losing all three games in its deathly group with Germany, Portugal and Denmark. Because before long, van Marwijk and his reign of tactical terror were gone and Louis van Gaal, a Dutch school ideologue, was reinstalled.
Van Gaal had been in charge of the qualifying campaign for the 2002 World Cup, but the golden generation he had brought along and conquered the world with at Ajax in the mid-90s, all of them stars by then, wouldn’t put up with his discipline any longer. It all ended in tears, as a mighty team never even made it to the tournament.
This time around, he inherited a team between generations, which brings us to the trouble advertised above. Few remain from the team put together by Marco van Basten from 2004 to 2008, before he handed it off to van Marwijk. Striker Robin van Persie and winger Arjen Robben are still at the top of their profession, but if you judge the players surrounding them honestly, dispatching any pre-World Cup hype, you can’t but conclude that this is perhaps the weakest Oranje team since the mid-1980s. No Dutch team in recent memory has had so few players at Europe’s powerhouse teams and so many still active in the meek Dutch league.
Van Gaal realized full well that he would need to transition to a younger group. This was necessitated both by the aging and decaying core of the team and his own didactic methods. But he may have gotten a tad carried away. The soccer has been good and attractive. But van Gaal included 16 players with 15 or fewer caps on his final 23-man World Cup roster. While the house style has been clear, the team lacks a real identity. Van Gaal has always valued the system over the individual, but his rotation of personnel may have left him with a team short on experience and comfort with one another.
Most lines are unsettled. Van Gaal has gone with a raft of internationally inexperienced goalkeepers in the back, and will likely start Jasper Cillissen in Brazil – who has been the starter at Ajax for half a season and for the Netherlands for seven games. In defense, young Eredivisie players Bruno Martins Indi, Daley Blind, Daryl Janmaat and Stefan de Vrijhave gobbled up most of the minutes.
Expectations for this new generation of midfielders have been high. But Chelsea’s Marco van Ginkel has been out for the past six months with an injury and didn’t make it back in time, and team dynamo Kevin Strootman of AS Roma will miss the World Cup with an ailment of his own. Rafael van der Vaart is injured as well. Jordy Clasie, Leroy Fer and Georginio Wijnaldum haven’t really broken out yet, so the team still relies heavily on Wesley Sneijder to create, but he isn’t close to the player he was in 2010. De Jong has been drafted back in to shield the porous defense.
Van Persie and Robben are counted on to produce at the top of van Gaal’s new 5-3-2 system, which employs wing backs rather than the traditional wingers. But his heralded forwards have historically been fragile and mercurial for their country. And not one of their backups – 33-year-old Dirk Kuyt, Klaas-Jan Huntelaar and Jeremain Lens – are difference-makers at this level.
Now consider that in Spain and Chile (oh, and Australia) the Dutch were handed a very tough group at the World Cup, and you’ll understand the rightful pessimism I share with my countrymen. This World Cup won’t last long for the Dutch. But their soccer will be pretty, dammit.
