Van Basten not the answer to help fix dwindling Dutch
WHEN last Iceland were making things a bit embarrassing for Holland, Marco van Basten was part of the answer. Not now, it appears. You see, this is not the first time the Netherlands have been scalded by these Icelandic geezers.
Nor the first time that near World Cup glory has been quickly followed by European Championship qualification humiliation.
In 1978, Holland infamously reached their second consecutive unsuccessful World Cup Final — losing to Argentina.
Yet by September 1982, the Oranje stumbled to a 1-1 draw in Iceland — a result which helped them fail to even reach the impending European Championships in France.
Argentina knocked Holland out of last summer’s World Cup semi-final and, just like 1982, Iceland have followed up with a painful blow.
Back in 1982, three international games after the humiliating and costly 1-1 draw in Reykjavik, an 18-year-old phenomenon in the making, Ajax’s van Basten, found himself fast-tracked into a Dutch national-team debut.
He didn’t score in that return fixture against Iceland, but Holland did inflict a 3-0 revenge beating.
From that moment, van Basten began notching the international goals which would culminate in Holland winning Euro ’88.
And, because football has its own internal sense of humour, its own sense of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — Holland’s 2-0 defeat in Reykjavik last October duly led to Guus Hiddink’s departure and the arrival of Danny Blind, who brought van Basten in as one of his two assistants.
Unlike his playing days, this wasn’t a debut — van Basten had previous sole managerial charge of the Netherlands for four years.
Nor has his arrival been a remedy this time.
The 1-0 defeat to yet another Gylfi Sigurdsson goal means that should the Blind-van Basten-Ruud van Nistelrooy combo lose in Turkey later today, then the third-placed team from the last World Cup would fall outside the qualification positions for the biggest, most bloated football tournament in international history.
Dutch football, so often a benchmark for intelligence and quality, in decline, in need of renovation — in need of vision and talent.
But van Basten’s personal story is an interesting sideline.
Put simply, he has found himself to be insufficiently good to stick at, to succeed at, a high-pressure frontline coaching job.
It’s well known, now, that he had the common sense and the honesty to step away from his role as AZ Alkmaar head coach in September 2014, staying on as assistant.
However accepting this summer’s invitation from his former Ajax and Holland team-mate, Blind, to be part of the new broom sweeping away the failings of the Hiddink era, was also a tacit acceptance that, despite the reduced working hours, he’d have to share whatever strain and stress was going around.
It’s a brutal way to discover whether van Basten is armourplated from the abuse simply because he’s now not top banana.
Earlier this year, he explained to France Football: ‘At Alkmaar, I just wasn’t happy in the head-coach job. ‘I wasn’t enjoying the day-to-day coaching. Stress was getting to me, I was having problems sleeping… I was under too much pressure.
‘As a player, I was used to having an influence on our game but I found that I just wasn’t a good enough coach to have a similar impact.’
What a corroding realisation to have to live with.
On the other hand, what sound intelligence and self-protection to admit it — both personally and then publicly.
‘It bothered me from day one and began to eat away at me, undermine my confidence,’ he now accepts. ‘I was miserable and felt incompetent. ‘When you play football, you see the game, you have an understanding of what’s happening and what to do next.
‘That came very easily to me as a player but later, as a coach, I found it a very difficult thing to convey that to my team.
‘There is a big difference between being a good player and being a good coach. If you are a serious person, you tend to take all the responsibility, which can leave you feeling guilty and strung out.
‘Life is too good to waste being stressed. I worked hard for 10 years, to become a good coach and, in the end, I wasn’t particularly satisfied with the result.
‘I just have to live with the fact that I won so much as a player and so little as a coach.’
What van Basten felt best about avoiding, was making the key decisions.
Fundamentally: who played and who didn’t, which tactics to apply and how to deal with the media — all of which cost him so much distress.
Being the first point of contact, in victory or defeat, for the board, the sponsors, the Dutch media, fans... that drained him of the energy and will to continue.
A victim of the Serie A assassins himself, back in 2010 he was horrified when Bert van Marwijk’s Netherlands tried to boot Spain out of the World Cup Final.
In fact, van Basten is a dedicated fan of the current Spanish school of talent. Reduced space, more athletic players, video analysis and pressing strategies mean, in his view, less space than ever in modern football.
‘People tend to underestimate how hard football is,’ he said. ‘Players must be good technically, but at the highest levels — like in the Champions League — available space is cut down to the absolute minimum.
‘Players have to work out how to use that space as effectively as possible.’
Starting in Turkey tonight, clearly.
I worked hard for 10 years to become a good coach and, in the end, I was not particularly satisfied with the final result