I couldn’t sleep at all last night, so instead of tossing and turning in anticipation of the 2010 World Cup Final today in South Africa between the Brilliant Orange Netherlands and Bloody Red Spanish, I picked up one of my favorite reads, “Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football.” I first read this book back in 2003 as a recommendation from my friend, Miss Emma Hayes, and this book definitely delivered! So I thought, in honor of today’s World Cup Final, I’d share a few quotes from the book, and help my friends and fellow football fans get a feeling for the Dutch football way. (Keep in mind this was published ten years ago.)

Buy the book: Amazon.com

Introduction

If this is about Dutch football, at some stage you’ll probably wonder why it contains pages and pages about art and architects, cows and canals, anarchists, church painters, rabbis and airports, but barely a word, for example, about PSV and Feyenoord. A very fair point. And the reason, I suppose, is that this isn’t so much a book about Dutch football as a book about the idea of Dutch football, which is something slightly different. More than than, it’s about my idea of Dutch football, which is something else again.

Dutch Space is Different

Space is the unique defining element of Dutch football. Other nations and football cultures may have produced greater goalscorers, more dazzling individual ball-artists and more dependable and efficient tournament-winning teams. But no one has ever imagined or structured their play as abstractly, or architecturally, in such a measured fashion as the Dutch.

Total Football was based on the new theory of flexible space. Just as Cornelius Lely in the nineteenth century conceived and executed the idea of creating new polders and altering the physical dimensions of Holland by dike-building and exploiting the new technology of steam, so Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyss exploited the dimensions of the football field. Total Football was, among other things, a conceptual revolution based on the idea that the size of any football field was flexible and voul be altered by a team playing on it. In possession, Ajax – and later the Dutch national team – aimed to make the pitch as large as possible, spreading play to the wings and seeing every run and movement as a way to increase and exploit the available space. When they lost the ball, the same thinking and techniques were used to destroy the space of their opponents. They pressed deep into the other side’s half, duntin for he ball, defended a line ten yards inside their own half, and used the offside trap aggressively to squeeze space further.

Who’s in Charge?

The famous Dutch sense of democracy and equality is based less on ideology than on the country’s habitual reliance on contractual rights and agreements. The most controversial Dutch coach, Louis van Gaal, often refers to such things after matches when discussing his players’ performances: ‘We lost control over the game because some of us did not keep the agreement.’

The Eleventh Commandment

‘Winning is not the most important thing. The most important thing is to play a good game.’ It is almost impossible to imagine an English Permiership manager ever saying such a thing. (Or, needless to say, the equivalent in Germany, Italy or Spain.) Nonetheless, these are the words of one of the Netherlands’ most admired, intelligent and best-loved coaches, Foppe de Haan. De Hann, who has spend fifteen years buiding the tiny Frisian club Heerenveen to a place among the elite of Dutch football, and then keeping them there, is no oddity. The vast majority of Dutch coaches, players, journalists and fans feel exactly the same way. Johan Cruyff struck a cord when he said during the 1998 World Cup that although his beautiful totaalvoetbal team had lost the 1974 final to the Germans, they had achieved a victory of a kind by playing football the world still talks about. The Dutch look down upon the cynical defensive tactics of Italy, Spain, Argentina or Belgium. The English are considered stupid. And the ‘ugly’ (i.e. defensive, physically powerful and hard-running) German style is beneath contempt. To win at all costs and by any means necessary is shameful and indecent. To play in a beautiful, attacking way has become the Eleventh Commandment for the Dutch.

The Back Cover

The Netherlands has one of the world’s most distinctive and sophisticated football cultures. From the birth of Total Football in the sixties, through two decades of World Cup near misses to the exiles who remade clubs like AC Milan, Barcelona, Arsenal and Chelsea in their own image, the Dutch have often been dazzlingly original and influential. The elements of their style (exquisite skills, adventurous attacking tactics, a unique blend of individual creativity and teamwork, weird patterns of self-destruction) reflect and embody the country’s culture and history.

Recommended read: You Have to Read this Book!
Buy the book: Amazon.com

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