2013 - 2014 Football Thread - Page 411

On December 02 2013 20:53 Pandemona wrote:
Oh no lol we not that good yet
Soon we will be if we continue this level of development though, i mean 1 year ago we were dubbed anti football and what not, now we play great football and are very attractive to watch.

On December 02 2013 22:31 Liquid`Drone wrote:


Haha yeah, I was just to say that that's an incredibly dutch way of thinking. And yeah, the best player of the german 90-92 team which made me a fanboy was Matthäus, my personal favorite was Bremhe. before that the most reknowned german player is beckenbauer, and the best german player of the past decade is easily Lahm. (out of many great ones!)

It's usually true that the players who are most talented as kids end up being offensive midfielders and strikers though, but it's also true that many of the kids who become the "smartest trainers" as teenagers are defenders. (to compensate for lack of natural talent, if nothing else.) But I guess twisted and his dutch buddies can keep up this attitude, all while lamenting the fact that their crappy defense is what keeps them from winning championships - offensively the netherlands has been good enough for a couple WC victories by now.. I do remember though, when I was playing with victor and his buddies in utrecht, I noticed this cultural difference when victor said "He's not that good at football, but he's pretty good at defending".

Anyway, I don't entirely disagree, but this "fact" that all the best players are strikers/attacking players is much more true in the netherlands than in the rest of europe, I think, and it has a lot to do with your attitude of well, not granting defenders proper credit for their work. The reason why the best kids want to attack is that scoring goals is more celebrated than not conceding them, not that goals are intrinsically more valuable - give credit to your defenders and good kids are gonna want to defend.

On December 03 2013 02:05 Ferrose wrote:


Seems like a German way of thinking now, too. The national team wants to pass the ball into the net, and they've produced many technically gifted midfielders, but not many good defenders.



Yeah, no one remembers keepers as heroes unless everyone else was poor (like Oliver Kahn in World Cup 2002).

On December 03 2013 02:22 Twisted wrote:


Which is not really a good thing btw.

If a team that solely relies on getting their success from loanees that are gone next season, the league will just drop in value even more because they'll take valuable Champions League spots for example which bring in a shitload of money for Dutch clubs. Ajax has a budget of around €70m and when they can get 20m+ from the CL it's a huge boost financially.

They're not selling out their stadium seats by a long shot, even against top teams, so them getting a lot of reserves from Chelsea is not helping the club themselves because no-one likes them because of it. And it definitely isn't helping the league. If Vitesse for example reaches Champions League with players that are on loan this season, they'll just fail miserably in the next season when they have to build up an entire new team.

Oh and regarding the previous discussion, I guess it has to be a Dutch thing then yeah. This is basically standard knowledge for Dutch football fans haha. Defenders are bad at playing with the ball at their feet so that's why they're defenders :p. I think it's also the total football style where every footballer should be able to fulfill every role on the pitch (apart from goalkeeping obviously). We demand that our defenders are actually good on the ball as well instead of just being big and fast.

And yeah our defenders being bad is kind of an overrated thought imo. We generally don't concede that many goals. We're just overly critical of our defenders. It's usually just the depth of our team and the fact that we haven't been lucky in deciding moments that we haven't won as much as we 'should'.
I mean.. 1974 we were the best team but lost for I dunno what reason exactly. 1978 our best players bailed on the world cup and we hit the post in the final which would result in a win if we got a goal. 1998 we were great as well. We missed 2 penalties during regular time against Brasil in the semi-final afaik and then lost the penalty shoot-out. 2010 we didn't win literally by a toe-length.
With a little more luck we could've won 3 world cups at least and no-one would mention we can never win anything.

Fwiw there's a very good generation of defenders popping up right now.