Doha. It is said that he would have been a great player if only he had the physique.
Louis van Gaal became a great coach instead.
He doesn’t care if his body is telling him to give up.
Today I feel like a Qatari.
Landing in Doha, in the middle of the FIFA World Cup, is an odd experience on many levels. Most of them you know, they’ve been fed for years. They’re the others I’ve been looking up to, feeling heroic from within the tournament, on the sidelines of the reports and the headlines. In the heat, between the minarets and the ghutra, between the veil and the architectural sensations. The World Cup in Qatar is a lot like the Olympics, with a large scale on a limited surface, a constant sense of new construction and purity.
And think, there are people here too. There they are, the migrant workers, the proud residents, the football fans, the full sense of normalcy. Not only is it possible to feel emotions other than disgust ahead of WC 2022, it is a responsibility one must root for at all distances.
Khalifa Stadium is not a new building, just a completely renovated old national stadium, and the first sportingly important play-off match for the entire tournament:
Worlds collide.
On one side came the future superpower USA, without football trophies but with a new generation, a World Cup on home soil at first sight and an inherited mentality that I think we will win. United States of Titans. On the other hand? The most impressive football bank in the world. The Netherlands, on the sidelines and with very few world-class players, but with a team that has learned to get bored and think about winning.
Gregg Bajen-Berhalter in a T-shirt and sneakers, against Louis van Gaal in a suit.
death? Not a chance
For ten minutes it was the USA match, including the advantage standing against only a thousand (few Orange fans historically). Daley Blind was asleep, Christian Pulisic got a free center and the USA pulled away on plays from the ends. Then the Netherlands exploded into one series of total football. Twenty quick passes inside the team, Cody Jakpo took the ball out, Dumfries took the ball in the second round and Memphis Depay pushed it 1-0.
I thought a lot about Van Gaal, not so much about Berhalter, and there is a reason for that.
It has been two years since one of European football’s greatest thinkers received his diagnosis: aggressive prostate cancer. Having lost his first wife to cancer before winning the Champions League with the Ajax teenager in 1995, he had no intention of letting the disease steal his last big dream from him.
The players on the national team were not told anything, nor did they know that they had a coach who had gone for radiotherapy in the evening, or that he was wearing a catheter to collect urine he could no longer control. When they qualified for the WC, he was in a wheelchair, the players were told it was due to a bike accident.
When his life partner Truus worried about his husband these years, Louis van Gaal only put on the businessman’s smile:
– You don’t get rid of me so easily, you know.
death? Not a chance. Not now that he has decided to win the World Cup.
It’s not a particularly aesthetically pleasing national team that he’s built, and it may not even have been a very good team – but he’s built it right. Frenkie de Jong is responsible for half of their creative play, Kodi Gakpo is a raw force, Van Dijk is a world class defender and Memphis Depay has been carefully matched to be fit for this. And now he is, he was accurate in most of what he did in the first half.
The match is very airy
It was Depay’s game from the start, it was De Jong’s game, but more than anything else it was an arrogant and formidable old thief born a few feet away from Ajax’s home turf.
Louis van Gaal has interpreted football for 2022, he sees the World Cup where it seems impossible to play through a dense midfield and where 72% of all risks (I understand the number, the world would end if we had more quantitative data for football) in the same way , from the edges. The Portuguese has a strong back three, they have Denzel Dumfries who threatens from the edge, and now they have Depay who can cut down the middle. He (and eternal companion, goalkeeping ideologue Frans Hoek) seem to have chosen the right keeper in Andres Noppert, a provincial player who considered turning to the police after he stabbed Warner Hahn and was the only one on the team who chose not to. The family flies to Qatar, because the family budget simply did not allow it.
What are the weaknesses of the United States? Van Gaal might have figured that out, too. They often become more ambitious and watch the ball on defense and lose form and opponents. 1-0 came after they forgot the second round from the box. So did the others.
Just before the break, Dumfries cleared a throw-in and rolled the ball into exactly the same spot as at 1-0, and behold: old Daley Blind came and lunged at the second.
The USA had a hard time recovering, going into a low orange trap and having a hard time getting around that fifth back row. The only time it looked promising was when speedy full-back Sergino Dest (born in the Netherlands, raised at Ajax) started on the right wing, but that was only when Van Gaal replaced his midfield players Martin de Roon and Davey Claassen. Too much and kept an increasingly tired Memphis on the court as they hammered a ticket into the game.
They could not recover it.
Haji Wright heeled in to make it 2-1 in a way that might have been intentional if his name was Bergkamp, and for three minutes the game was very airy – before man of the match by a large margin (Dumfries) fired a long shot. blind cross. 3–1 to Dumfries Ground.
Germany played attacking games but went home after the group stage, Belgium played like the worst of the Netherlands, and behold, a clever and brilliant Orange, functionally playing their way to the quarter-finals, and celebrating goals in one group game. yellow dot. The world is upside down, but they still enjoy it very well.
And in the middle of it, Louis van Gaal sits, at ease.
Eight years ago, he was the captain of the Orange Confederation which was a penalty shootout away from the World Cup final. They faced Argentina then, they may face them again now, and Van Gaal has put a lot of time into penalty training.
They will not be preferred. But you will not get rid of it so easily.
