There’s a running joke in my family that, unlike most Australians, we’re descended from the [Dutch] crooks who got away with it.

FourFourTwoAustralia, Shaun Hanns - I have a confession to make; I hope the Dutch win the World Cup. Not terribly patriotic, I know, but with the smart money being on Australia not making it past the group stages, everyone needs a reasonably reliable back up plan for the rest of the comp and who better than international football’s greatest underachievers?
This is not the first time I will have followed the Dutch team’s efforts at the World Cup. A combination of a Dutch surname, the lack of any Australian representation and a gaudy bright orange shirt were enough to convince me that the Netherlands were to be my team in my teenage years. Well, that and some stories about ancestors who happened to be 14th century Dutch spice smugglers of course. read on>>

There’s a running joke in my family that, unlike most Australians, we’re descended from the crooks who got away with it.

Apart from tenuous ancestral connections to nefarious criminals, there has always been another reason for following the Dutch: they play an aggressive, attractive style of game. It’d be very easy here to wax lyrical about ‘Cruyff’, ‘Total Football’ and their ‘contribution to the game’ but if you’re reading this blog I’m sure you’ve heard all that stuff so many times that any reiteration could cause you an aneurysm, so in the interest of public health I’ll avoid using those terms again.

Suffice to say that the Dutch have, since the 70s, been seen to play an almost virtuous style of the game and it’s this that makes their shift over the past few years from the more attacking 4-3-3 to the defensive 4-2-3-1 so interesting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like they’ve gone from Total Football to Catenaccio overnight, but it is a subtle shift towards a more pragmatic style of football more in line with the modern game where, at the highest level, stopping the other bastards from scoring is increasingly seen as more important than scoring yourself. It seems that the Oranje have finally worked out what my ancestors knew centuries ago:

Virtue is for suckers.

With van Bommel and de Jong marauding the back of the midfield looking to kick anything that looks remotely like an opposition player, a lot will depend on how Sneijder performs as the central pivot in attack. The other key figure in the Dutch attack will, of course, be Sneijder’s Champion League final opponent in Arjen Robben, who has also had a stand out season after leaving Real Madrid for Munich.

The big question hanging over the squad is whether ‘internationally retired’ veteran striker van Nistelrooy (horseface to you) will be given the nod to go back into the team with Dutch boss van Marwijk indicating a final decision will be made today. Of course it can be considered an absolute rat act by van Nistelrooy to make himself available when all the unglamorous matches, against the likes of Macedonia, are done with, but it’s hard to argue with the fact that he would add something that the Dutch squad is currently lacking; an out and out one-every-two-games goal scorer.

Van Nistelrooy might just add that little bit extra that the Dutch need to make a serious challenge this year and I’d suggest that most independent observers would suggest that he should get selected, but this is the Dutch national team and it remains to be seen if they’ll let sheer bloody-mindedness shoot themselves in the foot once again.

After all, it wouldn’t be the Oranje without a very public and controversial bust-up before/during/after a major tournament.

Group E by Shaun Hanns

This entry was posted on donderdag, mei 13th, 2010 at 3:51 am and is filed under Aussie In The News, Historie, World on the Dutch, Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.