There will no air of in-familiarity for Dutch coach Dick Advocaat when he takes his band of not so merry men to Hampden on Saturday for the first-leg of the Euro 2004 play-off against Scotland. The current coach of The Netherlands, and former PSV coach, of course, spent two and a half years at the helm at Ibrox, where he took Rangers to Hampden on no less than four occasions – winning three of them.
He heads back there this weekend in a working capacity for the first time since he left Ibrox with a similar problem in his dressing room to the one he had when he was in charge at Ibrox – a disharmonious squad.
The rumours towards the end of his reign at Rangers were not flattering towards the Little General. As the empire he had built in his first two years, at great cost, came crashing down around his ears in spectacular fashion, all Advocaat could do was watch and wonder where it had all gone wrong He needn’t have looked further than his own man-management skills if some of the stories and rumours that circulated where true. One such yarn told of a night out that Advocaat had organised to heal the supposed cracks of division going disastrously wrong and, if anything, creating more problems.
The story goes that at around midnight, after a booze filled evening,
Advocaat had called a halt to proceedings, hailed it an unmitigated success and instructed that the players to head home. After discovering that he had left his mobile phone behind, after the leaving the suite, one of the Scottish players (rumoured to be Billy Dodds) went back to retrieve it. It is alleged that when he did return, some half-hour after all the players had been told to head home, he found Advocaat and his Dutch colony of backroom staff and players still there drinking and partying. Whether this horrific story is true or not is irrelevant, the point is that there was obvious disharmony within the Ibrox dressing room walls and the finger of blame for it was pointing in Advocaat’s direction.
This time around, however, Advocaat is relatively blameless as the Dutch squad is more than capable of destroying itself from within.
It is rumoured that there is a lot of bickering between the Ajax old guard and players from PSV and Feyenoord, creating huge divisions in the squad. Ruud Van Nistelrooy is more than a tad puzzled at being the one who has been axed from the fabled unworkable Van Nistelrooy/Kluivert partnership, creating more divisions. And if that wasn’t enough unrest for you then Edgar Davids is being…well, Edgar Davids!
It all adds up to a potential nightmare for Advocaat, whose decision to drop Van Nistelrooy could come back to haunt him. This decision was made despite a recent incident when Kluivert turned up for breakfast the night after a game drunk – and then proceeded to order a beer! Van Nistlerooy’s feelings of a raw deal have some foundation.
But why are we so surprised? This is the Dutch after all and they have been making a rear-end of it for as long as we anyone is willing to remember. All three of their major clubs have lifted the European Cup; they have produced some the most gifted players to take to a field (Cruyff, Gullit, Van Basten, Bergkamp, to name but a few), and their Total Football system is recognised the world over. Yet, despite all this, the Dutch have only 1988’s European Championship to look back on in terms of achievement.
Ever since they arrived as a footballing force in the 70s, the Dutch have always carried some hefty baggage that has prevented them from reaching their true potential. In 1974, when the whole world expected them to see off West Germany in the final in Munich, they froze. On the day of the final the German tabloid Bild Zeiturg ran a story claiming that four un-named Dutch players had taken part in a naked ‘pool party’ at the Wald Hotel after their previous game against Brazil. The paper claimed to have pictures, but none were ever produced, and the feeling was that the story was run to un-nerve the Dutch. It certainly worked if that was the plan, and had implications far further reaching than the 1974 final itself.
On the eve of the game the story had reached the wife of Johan Cruyff, Danny. It is alleged that she phoned Cruyff to make sure that he had not been involved in the late night frolics by the pool and kept him up until the very early hours on the day of the game. Not only had Cruyff’s concentration for the biggest game of his life been broken, but he had promised his furious wife that he would not travel to Argentina for 1978 finals. Holland blew the final against Germany and a habit if a lifetime was born.
Minus Cruyff the Dutch were not expected to repeat the final appearance of four years earlier in Argentina ’78. However, despite defeat in that now legendary game against Scotland, Holland reached the final for the second time in succession – again to the hosts.
If the incidents that preceded the ’74 final were farcical, the goings on this time around were simply ludicrous. First of all the tape that the Dutch squad listened to on the coach on route to every game mysteriously disappeared. The bus journey itself was bizarre as the driver took a longer route that took them through a small village. On seeing its inhabitants, the population of the village surrounded the coach and battered the windows relentlessly whilst screaming “Argentina, Argentina!” The bus was stuck there for twenty minutes.
Even when arriving at the stadium things were done in a way to un-nerve the Dutch. The referee, Sergio Gonella, had been hand-picked by the Argentines after protesting about FIFA’s original choice, Abraham Klein, who had officiated when Argentina had lost to Italy earlier in the competition. And Argentina protested almost childishly about a protective cast that Rene Van de Kerkhof was wearing just before the kick-off, gamesmanship that worked for Argentina as they ran out 3-1 winners.
Internal bickering at the KNVB meant that Holland did not qualify for the World Cup in ’82 or ’86 and it was a full decade on from Argentina before they were seen again at a major tournament, although this time they got it right in Germany and won the European Championships.
It was back to form though in 1994 when Ruud Gullit and Dick Advocaat, in his first term as national coach, had a much publicised fall out and the dreadlocked star withdrew from the squad. Holland bowed out at the quarter-finals.
In England for Euro ’96 the internal bickering was at new high in terms of volume and a new low in terms of cause.
The image of a modern and multi-cultural Holland was shattered in 1996 when the national squad was split in two by a race row. Edgar Davids had complained, live on air, that then coach, Guus Hiddink, did not listen to the black players in the squad, that they were not served Surinamese food in squad get-togethers and politely suggested that Hiddink should “remove his head from the white players’ backsides!”
Davids was subsequently booted out of the squad and the division between black and white players was widened. Patrick Kluivert, Winston Bogarde and Michael Reiziger were all reported to have said that they wanted to play for an all black national team – they were quick to put up the mandatory ‘misquoted’ defence though, but the divisions remained unhealed.
In fact they were so unhealed that several months after Euro 96, in a World Cup qualifier against Turkey, the winning of a penalty was to provoke a public showing of the discontent in the squad. When Clarence Seedorf – the black players’ spokesman – grabbed the ball, it was an attempt to show the white players that the black players were just as important. Unimpressed by this, the de Boer twins turned their backs in demonstration as Seedorf ran up to strike the spot-kick. Seedorf’s effort flew several yards over the bar.
The bulk of the squad from then is still there today and it is obvious that, in terms of egos, you don’t have to look too hard to find one when these players get together. Holland’s ability to self-destruct is a boost for the Scots going into this game and they have more of chance than maybe they are credited for.
Dick Advocaat looked out to an orange bedecked Hampden in 2000 as Rangers secured the double after a 4-0 win over Aberdeen. But the win was merely papering over the cracks of division that were forming in the dressing room, and Rangers and Advocaat were heading for one big fall. Even if Advocaat gets the result he is looking for on Saturday, with the bickering group of players he has at his disposal, you can’t help but feel that the same fate awaits him.