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Geplaatst: Vr 23 jul 2010 12:56
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World Cup 2010: Holland's new football reflects a nation's changes
Try to imagine Italians suddenly losing interest in food, Saudi Arabia becoming famous for its relaxed topless beaches, or Lady Gaga metamorphosing into a shy, unmusical nun. Even then you're not close to comprehending the scale of transformation the World Cup is wreaking on the Netherlands.
For decades, the reputation of the country as a bastion of free thinking, creativity and fun was buttressed by its uniquely attractive football culture. The totaalvoetballers carved out a niche by playing daring, creative, attacking football – and usually lost their most important matches in tragic circumstances. Their tendency to self-destruction in major tournaments made the Dutch many people's favourite second team. Holland was the Lord Byron or Marilyn Monroe of international football.
Now, despite reaching the World Cup final for the first time since 1978, oranje have lost much of their charm. The team relies on hard work, group loyalty, defence and counter-attack. The unique Dutch are now, like everyone else, playing for results. The sympathetic nation of Beautiful Losing is winning ugly.
Just as Brazil has traded for decades on the image of Pele, the best-known modern Dutch people are not architects, artists, business people or politicians; they are fabulous but fragile footballers such as Johan Cruyff, Marco van Basten and Dennis Bergkamp.
Dutch football as we have known it was born in Amsterdam in the late 1960s as the city was being transformed by social and cultural revolution. Playful Provos and anarchists were subverting the old, grey, sober Netherlands and turning the city into a centre of world hippiedom. Meanwhile, iconoclastic Ajax coach Rinus Michels and teenage genius Cruyff were laying down the blueprint for a revolution in football.
Within a few years, Amsterdam went from backwater to world significance. In the early 1970s Ajax won the European Cup three years in a row with their dazzling cerebral style, and the official foreign policy of the radical government of Joop den Uyl was Nederland gidsland, literally Netherlands Guiding Country. In both cases, the idea was that the ever-moral Dutch would show the rest of the world how things were done. But Nederland gidsland bit the dust in the wake of the economic crisis that overwhelmed Holland following the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil boycott.
The football was never quite the same after the 1974 World Cup final against the West Germans in Munich, when Holland took the lead in the second minute, yet lost. The day is remembered in Holland with the sort of shudder still evoked in America by recollection of the assassination of President Kennedy. The Dutch convinced themselves they were moral winners because they played the more beautiful football. Now this view is being fundamentally challenged.
The difference between old and new was vividly illustrated in the moments leading to Holland's first goal in their semi-final against Uruguay. The goal recalled the old days: Holland's captain, Giovanni van Bronckhorst, thumped in from long range just as Arie Haan did against Italy 32 years ago. Yet this beauty was made possible by a brutal foul a few moments earlier on a Uruguayan defender who was lucky not to have his leg broken. The man who perpetrated the foul was Mark van Bommel, son-in-law of Dutch coach Bert van Marwijk.
Tellingly, it is Van Bommel rather than Van Bronckhorst who has become the new folk hero in Holland among the young orange-clad crowds partying and watching the games on big screens.
Older fans, for whom the football of Cruyff defined an era much as did the Beatles, wonder if the Netherlands is losing its soul. Auke Kok, columnist for the NRC Handelsblad newspaper, went so far as to suggest a link between the pragmatism of Van Marwijk and the politics of Geert Wilders, the populist anti-Islam politician whose PVV party became the third-largest political bloc in last month's elections.
Football has always been powerfully entwined with culture and politics in the Netherlands. It was no accident that the sudden rise of Wilders's predecessor, Pim Fortuyn, came in late 2001, just after Holland were shockingly beaten by Ireland in Dublin and therefore failed to qualify for the 2002 World Cup.
Fortuyn represented a darker side to Dutch liberalism. His eponymous party, the Pim Fortuyn List, exploited growing anxiety over immigration and identified a new enemy for the Dutch open society: Islam. When Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002 – by a Dutchman who claimed he was acting to protect Muslims from being "scapegoated" – it was clear that Dutch society and politics was developing a sharper edge. The famous coffee shops, where cannabis could be smoked freely, have come under scrutiny as politicians attempt to balance an easygoing approach with the demands of a vocal anti-drugs lobby. Amid concern at the level of criminal activity in Amsterdam's red-light district, half of the city's "prostitution windows" were closed in 2007.
According to Paul Scheffer, one of the country's most perceptive cultural and political commentators, what we are seeing from the men in orange in South Africa reflects a more cautious and fearful nation. "We are more insecure, conservative. You could also call it realism. We have become aware of our vulnerability, so have a more sober idea of what we can do, what we can be. The more free-floating, high-minded idea of what we represent in the world has got lost a bit in the last 10 years. Of course you lose something that was nice, but you lose also something that was irritating – I never liked all that moralism.
"You have something now that is less interesting because it's less distinctive. We focus on the result and don't worry if it's nice to watch. We've become more average, and the paradox is that perhaps being average will win us the World Cup. People I talk to have very mixed feelings. There's enthusiasm and also disbelief. How did we manage to beat Brazil? The way Brazil lost was the way Holland used to lose: they imagined they were already in the semi-final and relaxed."
The success of the Dutch team, which is notably less gifted than its predecessors, is connected to its sense of its own limitations. "The brutal bargain of modern football is that is just impossible to win while playing really attractively. It seems you cannot be innocent and win. And that is terrible because winning represents power. There's no way you can become president of the United States and be moral. I don't think you can win the World Cup in an innocent way.
"And that's the sadness. Realism engulfs the creativity to some extent, and with it the joy. As fans in the past 40 years watching the Dutch team, we always liked to win but it was more important to play beautiful football. Now we see the goal of Van Bronckhorst is only possible because of the foul of Van Bommel. Winning comes at a price.''
David Winner is the author of Brilliant Orange: the Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football (Bloomsbury)
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