The success of the Dutch crew’s European Championship requires a cultural change: from sport to actuality

• Thierry Boon

  following the Dutch nationwide crew

The playing around is over. The preparation is over. The wait is over. The Dutch nationwide crew will begin the European Championship this afternoon at 3pm. With a bunch that’s hungry and claims to have realized classes from the previous.

“You want crucial notes,” which is such a lesson, mentioned captain Virgil van Dijk on Saturday, with a dozen digital camera crews in entrance of him, at a global press convention on the Volkspark Stadium in Hamburg.

The European Championship is about to begin for the Dutch crew and you may see that in every thing round it. Within the packed press room, a UEFA worker greeted everybody politely and mentioned that translation was accessible in Polish, English, Dutch and German.

English and German TV needed to know what the nationwide coach Ronald Koeman and Van Dijk take into consideration Xavi Simons. And a French journalist needed to know if Koeman sees the Dutch crew as his favourite for the ultimate victory, identical to a rustic like France.

Koeman regarded steady, as he’s all through the preparation. In management, you may say. The 1988 European champion is on a mission and he and his employees have been engaged on it for months.

His second time period was marked by accidents. He may by no means play with what he thought-about to be the very best eleven. Not even now, after the lack of Frenkie de Jong, Teun Koopmeiners and earlier than that Marten de Roon.

However up to now, Koeman has been capable of enhance his crew in Zeist and Wolfsburg. It isn’t solely about creation and tactical points, but in addition about how gamers work together with one another.

That has been a vexing problem for a while now. On the Nations League finals in his dwelling nation final summer time, Koeman was pissed off by his choice after defeats to Croatia and Italy.

“It is a whole lot of enjoyable, however you additionally should be arduous on one another. I feel the gamers appropriate one another too little,” he mentioned on the time. We’ve been consciously engaged on this up to now months.

This Dutch crew needs to show a pleasant group right into a profitable crew. “That is undoubtedly alive,” mentioned Denzel Dumfries from the coaching camp in Wolfsburg. “Many of the choice has been collectively for a couple of years and has been to the final championships. You’re feeling the starvation to win one thing.”

“We informed one another that we’re a great group and that we wish to work together with one another, however that we’ve to be crucial and need to inform one another the reality,” defined Dumfries. That is arduous typically…”

Within the moderately magical Wolfsburg, the group has grown nearer to one another once more over the previous week. But it surely’s additionally okay to be robust with mates typically to enhance efficiency, they are saying.

“We’ve to have discussions with constructive criticism and proceed to lift the bar. That is a lesson from earlier competitions,” mentioned Dumfries, who noticed the Dutch crew taking steps on this route. “There’s now an actual tradition of telling the reality. To assist one another, to make one another higher.”

In line with Dumfries, the veterans Van Dijk (68 worldwide video games), Daley Blind (107) and Memphis Depay (91) are within the lead. “However the younger gamers additionally have to really feel secure to provide suggestions to the older ones. We really feel that that is going very effectively in the mean time.”

“Denzel is completely proper about that,” Van Dijk mentioned. “And we, as skilled guys, are open to that as effectively. We’ve informed one another that it does not matter what number of worldwide video games you could have or how lengthy you could have been with the Dutch crew. Everybody ought to be capable of undertake that. career.”

It is vitally necessary for a crew to appropriate gamers when crucial, Van Dijk, who’s now 32 years outdated, is aware of. “As a result of all of us have the identical aim. And that’s to win the European Championship.”