Gio not desperate; Guzman out; Verbeek loses sleep

Gio’s face looks desperate. His eyes lost that shine. Has the crisis arrived? The sharemarket is down again, hedge funds are struggling, fuel… oops…wrong blog…

Gio’s face looks desperate. His eyes lost that shine. Has the crisis arrived? He looked like a player who doesn’t know what to do anymore. “This is sooo frustrating,” the Feyenoord skipper said late after the Nancy match. “Before the season start I thought we were much further. No one expected this. And surely not me.” Once before did he experience such a period. In his first year at Barca, the club slipped into depression. “We were no. 14 in the standings. The pressure became bad, everyone was in a huge dip, looking for answers. And then, in November we won away against Sevilla and we never looked back since.”

The midfielder doesn’t believe in panic. “It’s football. One victory can turn it all around. We’ve seen it many times. I’m not saying we’re not in trouble, but we need to do it on the pitch. All this talking is useless. With Barcelona, we played the best second season half ever. That’s my life raft, so to speak, that memory will keep me going.” Gio saw how his friend and trainer Frank Rijkaard handled the situation. “The more heated the situation got, the cooler Frank was. He was cool and collected, internally and externally. Verbeek is like that. It’s so important not to be desperate, to cling to your vision and keep on working, keep on having confidence in your strategy. But you do need results.”

Internally, there’s a lot of confidence in Verbeek, one of Holland’s hardest working coaches. Everybody respects his approach and vision. He’s got a lot of credit with the fans, sponsors and management. But…every one is startled with this season’s start.

Van Bronckhorst: “We are the only ones who can turn this around. We can’t look at the fans, the sponsors or the people in the office. We need to close down matches now. The expectations are high and rightly so! We’re a big club. Losing seven out of eleven is a disgrace for us. I feel it like that. So Sunday, the pressure is on. And that’s a good thing.”

Feyenoord played very decent periods in the matches against NEC and Willem2 but still lost. Against the pedestrian Nancy, the first half was quite ok for Feyenoord too. “And that’s so frustrating. We lose games due to little moments… Little mistakes… During the break versus Nancy we felt pretty good. We could do something there, we felt. And then 45 minutes later, we have nothing.”

Gio’s heart told him to leave Barcelona for his first club: “I came back to help the club. To do something back for my great career. Obviously, this is not what I wanted, but I won’t linger to much on that. That doesn’t help. I see a great future still, although we’re in a storm now. It’s our task and duty, as players, to turn this around.”

Gertjan Verbeek didn’t sleep after the 3-0 in Nancy. Literally. “That wasn’t this match so much, you know. I always have trouble sleeping after a game, and this time around we came home at 4 am. I decided to watch some football that I taped and before I knew it, it was 9 am. I decided to go to work.”

Verbeek stoically looked forward to the Heerenveen match. “I don’t have to win. I don’t like to use those words. My thing is, I want to win… And the funny and positive thing with this Feyenoord is, we didn’t lose against Nancy because we choked, or because we hid… We lost because after the 1-0, we were to eager to score the equalizer. We are the victim of our good intentions. I see that, despite the loss, as a positive aspect of this group. We weren’t paralyzed, we actually took too much initiative.”

The injury woes in Rotterdam are not over yet. This time, Jonathan De Guzman is out till 2009. The 21 year old playmaker still suffers a thigh injury that he took home from the Olympics. “He started with his groin and because he kept feeling pain, he started to use his body differently. The result is now that his thigh muscles are protesting. So, I told him to get 100% fit before I want to use him again. I don’t want to risk his health and Feyenoord’s future. I need him to take as much time he needs to get well. The medical staff will program a special trainings plan for him and we might see him back around Christmas time. It’s a blow, for him and for us, but I’m confident we have adequate players to take over his role for now.”