Before his team eliminated Brazil from the 2010 World Cup Bert van Marwijk promised us that total football was dead — and his team lived up to their head coach’s words. Holland were as far from the gilded generation of Cruyff, Neeskens, Krol and Rensenbrink as Dunga’s Brazil were from the team of Pelé, Gérson, Tostão and Clodoaldo.
Both teams played football in which pragmatism was the watchword, the heart of each side to be found in the pair of defensive midfielders shielding the back four. If Mark van Bommel and Nigel de Jong did a better job than Gilberto Silva and Felipe Melo (who made Brazil’s opening goal but then, imbecilically, got himself sent off), that was probably what swung the match.
The memory of Cruyff’s famous goal against Brazil in 1974, volleyed at full stretch on the run from Krol’s cross, had accompanied some idealists into Port Elizabeth’s Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, but it soon faded in the light of cold reality, particularly after half-time, when Holland took the sort of grip on the match that they will hope to exert in the final.
Van Marwijk is a realist who has undoubtedly assembled the best team available to him. Unlike the Brazilians, who will now confront Dunga with the charge of having neglected the young Santos forwards, Neymar and Ganso, no Dutch fan appears to be mourning the absence of a teenaged genius wantonly left behind. Wesley Sneijder, Robin van Persie and Arjen Robben represent the cream, although the skilful and adventurous young forward, Eljero Elia, brought on as a substitute in a few matches, hints at the heritage of Ruud Gullit and Clarence Seedorf.
“A couple of years ago at the European Championship we played two or three good matches, but we also gave opportunities away,” Van Marwijk said, looking back to the previous regime of Marco van Basten, who resigned after elimination in the quarterfinals of Euro 2008. “So when I took this job I stated clearly to the Dutch federation that I wanted to teach the team to defend better — and that starts with the attackers.”
This is a very different conception — perhaps even an inversion — of total football, which, in its pristine form, saw all the defenders at liberty to become attackers when the opportunity presented itself. Although the current head coach may not win the sort of acclaim accorded then and by posterity to Rinus Michels, who refined the original concept and managed the Dutch team to the 1974 final against West Germany, his results are certainly speaking eloquently on behalf of the effectiveness of his philosophy.
But the orange shirts of the Holland players and their supporters are generally associated with a more joyful and creative approach to the game than we have seen from them in South Africa.
“We still want to achieve the same thing,” Van Marwijk said. “In our last matches before the World Cup we scored 13 goals in three games. But we haven’t scored as many in the tournament, and if you win matches without scoring many goals then the perception of you is different. We don’t want to depend too much on chance. We want to rely on good organisation that doesn’t concede too much to our opponents.”
His captain, the enormously experienced 35-year-old Giovanni van Bronckhorst, did not need to italicise the contrast with past tournaments when he spoke of the closeness of the squad. “The atmosphere in the squad is very good,” he said. “We’re a tight group. We’ve been playing for four or six years together and we know one another’s strengths. We fight for one another. It’s good to be part of a team you can trust.”
Van Marwijk prepared his players for the Brazil match by telling them to ignore temptation and remain faithful to the steady approach that had taken them to an unbroken string of victories in competitive matches: eight in the qualifying competition and four (now five) in the tournament itself.
“It’s very important to play our own game and that we don’t go along with Brazil’s way, as some have done,” he said. “We are keen to put a lot of pressure on them. We want to be relaxed, but also tense, which is the way it should be.” — Guardian News & Media 2010