Two years ago the Netherlands reached the final of the Fifa World Cup, while now they’ve crashed out of the 2012 European Championships without a point.
There’s plenty of finger-pointing going on currently in the Oranje camp, with Bert van Marwijk’s side performing dismally in Poland and Ukraine.
The opening 1-0 loss to Denmark came as a shock to most, while the 2-1 losses to Germany and Portugal provided the evidence to suggest there was plenty wrong with this Dutch side despite their feats of two years ago.
Van Marwijk argued: “It’s basically the same team (which reached the World Cup final) except for a few positions.
“We did try to make the team faster and younger and also to make it better in terms of strength in depth. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to do what we did two years ago.”
It’s true, there hasn’t been a great turnover of players. The notable absentee is World Cup skipper Giovanni Van Bronckhorst along with Dirk Kuyt. Therefore it’s arguable the approach was wrong.
Some critics are claiming the Dutch side, full of attacking talent, had no balance, with the defenders not of the same quality as the attackers.
In particular against Portugal, van Marwijk used Rafael van der Vaart, Wesley Sneijder, Robin van Persie, Arjen Robben and Klaas-Jan Huntelaar in the same side. Of course, they were chasing a two-goal win, but it left their defence wide open against a rampant Portuguese side. It played into Cristiano Ronaldo’s hands as he attacked defenders on a one-on-one basis.
Van Marwijk said things would have been different had they taken their chances in the opening game against the Danish.
“That opening defeat by Denmark was where the uncertainty started. We saw again that when we concede a goal that uncertainty stays there,” he argued.
“If we’d scored a second we’d have been more sure of ourselves. “Had we won that first game when we had so many chances we might have had a different team.”
Perhaps, perhaps not. The fallout from the Dutch defeat to Denmark was bad. Talk of inflated egos and anger among the playing squad is never the right response after a loss in your opening group game. It’s never ideal to meet Germany either, in that situation.
However, this Dutch side had all sorts of problems and while van Marwijk will point to a variety of factors, he needs to seriously analyse his approach.
The Netherlands side which reached the 2010 World Cup final attracted some criticism for their negative play. Dutch football isn’t known as negative and van Marwijk arguably tried to respond to that with his method at the 2012 Euros. With the players at his disposal, it didn’t work.
Unfortunately for him, the Dutch team currently doesn’t have the defensive quality to deal with being exposed. Nigel de Jong and Mark van Bommel had sheltered the back four in South Africa, but there wasn’t the same effect at the Euros.
How to find the right balance, without upsetting the egos is the big question for van Marwijk. Perhaps that’ll require him to assert his authority and let his big names now, they need to fit into his plans, rather than the other way round. If he cannot, perhaps it’s someone else’s job. And, of course, finding a few quality defenders would be useful too.