Ah, 1974… the team. The master on the bench called Marinus Hendricus Jacobus Michels. All the magicians on field (not surprisingly, many of them followed the coaching career – Haan, Krol, De Kromme, Rijsbergen, Neeskens). And, of course, THE MAN among the men. JC. I do believe that, just as Brazil will spend the eternity trying to return to the pattern we reached in 1970, Oranje teams will try to reach the momentum which was reached at ‘74 forever. I don’t know if it’s possible.

The truth is that no one here even imagined how Holland was good. People here like to mock on Mario Zagallo – our coach then – because it was said he had considered Oranje as a team which “passed the ball too much”, without decision. It was also said that he, by hearing about Cruyff, said “Cruyff? WTF is this guy? I know Crush, the cold drink”. And it is said he had made a good joke: “We will make a delicious juice from this Oranje”.

All BS. I repeat: we knew Oranje was doing good at West Germany, but we thought we could deal easily with it. But we just knew that Rinus’ team was not only being good but making history when we were facing them. And, in the 1st half, we played good and could even have scored (Jairzinho and Paulo Cesar almost did it). But time passed, the anger came, and the rest all of you know. Neeskens and Cruyff scored, we lost our nerves, Luis Pereira was fairly sent off (horrible tackle!), Marinho made Nees unconscious for a while with his elbow…

We fairly lost. Our team was not good. There was a lot of dressing-room arguments between the roster (after the 3rd place definition – we lost to Poland -, Leao, our goalie, punched Marinho in the face because of the gap the latter let to Lato run and score), the team was playing too much defensively, and our best player then, Ademir da Guia, played just 45 minutes on that WC!!! Against Poland, when we had no more chances!!! And let’s not forget that many Brazilian stars from ‘70 had already retired internationally (Pele, Tostao, Gerson).

Two funny stories I heard from ‘74 Oranje: Gerrie Mühren was also intended to figure among the 22 men, but his son was sick and he decided to spend his summer at home, taking care of him. Even the family told Gerrie “oh, man, you can go, we take care of the child”, but he refused to let.

And Jongbloed even brought his fisherman’s kit to Germany, thinking clearly he wouldn’t play a minute! He’s not even on ‘74 sticker album (Dutch goalies there are Schrijvers and Heinz Stuy)! But Van Beveren clashed with JC and Michels thought Jongbloed “libero-goalkeeper” style suited more to the team, so…

And the hotel affair with the girls before the Final, huh?

As for Robin… I didn’t think he played that bad. He was constantly alert. Constantly looking for space but the build up was so slow. They should play more direct than you can break a team like Kiev down. Robin’s free kicks were good (Sylvestre?????) so were his corners. He had to good runs along the box, putting the ball in low. Bendtner was too late with one and the other one was blocked into a corner kick.

Then he “felt” where a cross by Vega (?) would land and he tee-ed up for a shot, blocked by the goalie (by his chest?). I didn’t think Robin played poor at all!! I felt Ednilson and some others (Gallas ) played poor.

Yeah I watched the Arsenal game pretty pathetic van Persie and he admitted it too. Well Drenthe played quite OK for Real from the start. I still think he should relax a little on the ball, seems to want to go at 300kmh from the moment he has the ball.

Finn, Holzenbein admitted recently that it was a dive…