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Forgot the Line-up (thanks Goose!)

March 29th, 2007 | By: Jan | 4 Comments »

I noticed I forgot to mention the line up of Oranje against Slovenia.

vdSar,

Heitinga; Mathijsen;Bouma;Emmanuelson

vBronckhorst;Sneijder;Affelay

Robben;Kuyt;Babel

Van Bronckhorst on midfield was already mentioned by Van Hanegem. He saw that because Sneijder played deep (in the offensive central striker role) the other two midfielders needed to control. Van der Vaart is not a good controlling midfielder and last Saturday that didn’t work out. Gio is better at that, due to his leftback experiences. Tactically strong, physically strong. And most of you will know he was a brilliant young midfielder at Feyenoord and a strong playmaker in midfield for the Glasgow Rangers. After he broke his leg, he never was able to reach his old level of play and slowly got transformed into a left back (first at Arsenal, then at Barca).

Afellay played strong. He showed his skills. Great vision, great command over the ball, good passing… That boy is a class act. Same level as Vaart, Persie, Sneijder.

Emanualson is also a strong contender for the left back position. He is fast, explosive and has a good vision too. He is doing very good at Ajax and will be here to stay.

Kuyt worked hard. As ever. But was not really an improvement over Hunter. The striker saga will continue.

Tags: Gio van Bronckhorst, Ibrahim Afellay, The Netherlands

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Comments

By Bruce | March 29th, 2007 at 6:55 pm

Agreed. Affelay is going to be huge. Emanualson was an asset.

Personally I think the big problem with Oranje currently is the wingers up front. Robben and Babel were purely useless, and Kuyt suffered as a result. I also think Kuyt would work better on the wing, because he is way more of a team player and much more supportive.

Posted from Canada

By Samuel Knight (Oudegeest) | March 29th, 2007 at 7:28 pm

Would be nice to have Van Nisterloy do his stuff, in the packed boxes that defences are showing Oranje right now, wouldn’t it?

Be awfully nice to have Van Bommel pumping people up.

Would be nice too to have Makaay work with Van Bommel as they do at Bayern.

Anyway, good to have these young players coming up, but ignoring strong veterans is just a waste.

One thing that I did think made sense is to switch players when you have two games back-to-back. The number of games is really tough at the top levels. National teams, champions league, domestic leagues add up to a lot of games.

One other note: Gio fired away from afar and got lucky. But it was a good strategic choice. When a defence packs the box you arent’ going to get a lot of gorgeous goals. What you have to do it take shots and let that ball bounce around. Set up shots outside, let them foul you, but shoot. And once you start looking dangerous from outside, it really pulls the defenders out.

And BTW – that’s part of the reason I think Van Persie helps Oranje so much. He can fire from a long way away. That forces defenders to step up a meter or two, which opens up room for those speedy wingers to slip in.

Posted from United States

By Jan | March 29th, 2007 at 9:19 pm

Agree with all your points. As Cruyff always says: you can’t score if you never shoot at goal. The law of the big numbers says if you try it 5 times, you may never score. If you try 10 times, you may. If you try 20 times, you will get that lucky deflection.

Posted from Australia

By goose | March 30th, 2007 at 7:36 am

think most interesting thing about the line-up was ofcourse vanBronckhorst… a lot of us (esp. Jan) has pointed to the fact that we lack footballing abbilities (?) at the back…
been reading this comment by Ferenc who put deZeeuw at the back…read in one of Jan’s posts that vanHanegem was thinking of Sneijder at the back….at least we know now that vanbasten spots the problem aswel….
grzt

Posted from Netherlands