Stomach problems

Johan Cruyff wasn’t impressed by the Champions League final. For him there was no glory in Chelsea’s heroic defending and improbable success.

“Only Chelsea fans will be happy with this, for the rest, nobody can be happy with the outcome of the Champions League final,” he said. “What especially bothers me is that a football team can forget everything and still win.”

For Cruyff, now a director at Ajax, winning is not enough; there must be style in the victory. “I’d choose to take the steps we take at Ajax, towards the football that we all want to see,” he said. “And then if there’s no Champions League win? Better not to have the trophy in this way.”

Cruyff is an extremist but his comments encapsulated a particularly Dutch outlook on the game. They may have reached the final of the World Cup two years ago but it was an achievement about which many felt uneasy. “I had no feeling with it at all,” Guus Hiddink said. “I watched, but I realised I wasn’t watching eagerly. ”

It wasn’t that the Dutch were especially physical; it’s more that that physicality was indicative of a move to cynicism. The fluency and free-flowing football of old was replaced by a broken team: six defenders, three forwards and Dirk Kuyt running about in between. The magazine Hard Gras led its post-World Cup issue with a picture of Nigel De Jong’s chest-high kick on Xabi Alonso (above) in the final and the ironic caption, “Hollandse School”. It called for coach Bert van Marwijk to resign. At first, the magazine was dismissed as a bunch of Amsterdam intellectuals, but it soon became apparent the sentiment chimed across the country.

The Netherlands’ first game after the World Cup was a qualifier away to San Marino. The Sportfive agency struggled to sell the rights to any Dutch tv station and did so – presumably at a discount – a little over a day before the game. Only 1.6 million people watched the game – a shockingly low figure. Four days later, the Netherlands played Finland, the first home qualifier after the World Cup final: only 30,000 turned up. The disillusionment was clear.

In a strange way, Jason McAteer’s winner for Ireland against the Netherlands on September 1, 2001, a goal that meant the Netherlands would not qualify for the World Cup, had an effect in football similar to the 9/11 attacks 10 days later and the assassination of Pym Fortune the following year did in wider society: it shook liberal Dutch assumptions and inspired a wave of pragmatism.

That Van Marwijk was concerned by the backlash against the way the Netherlands had played was clear when he banned De Jong after he had broken Hatem Ben Arfa’s leg in a Premier League game between Man City and Newcastle in October 2010. De Jong was replaced by Rafael van der Vaart who, as Kuper pointed out, is “a slow man without great physical gifts, all skill and brain” – the modern poster-boy for the Dutch tradition. The first game after De Jong’s ban brought a 1-0 win in Moldova, the second a superb 4-1 home win over Sweden.

De Jong returned for the away game in Hungary last March but at the expense of Mark van Bommel rather than Van der Vaart. It gave the Dutch greater cohesion through midfield and didn’t seem to affect them unduly defensively as they kept five clean sheets in the seven qualifiers after De Jong was dropped.

Perhaps under tournament pressure Van Marwijk will relent, but he gives the impression of having learned the great Dutch lesson: 15 teams will go to the Euros trying to win, but the Netherlands, if their most romantic fans are right, will be looking simply to play the best football they can.