Oranje: a new start!

How do you describe that feeling, when everything you touch turns into gold? Wesley Sneijder couldn’t say, but his big smile did…

“It’s a great feeling, I never want to lose it,” the Madrid midfielder said.

“Normally, I wouldn’t go for goal like that, but when you feel strong you try that stuff out, you take a risk. I saw the goalie a bit too far for his goal and thought, what the heck…”. The way he hit the ball though, is carefully crafted on the trainingsfield.

Sneijder seems to specialize in the characteristic “floating” shot (zwabberschot), kicked with high speed. We knew the curve balls already (Beckham, Platini, Van Hanegem, Zico) or the top-foot kick (Roberto Carlos, Pierre van Hooijdonk, Robin van Persie) but the “zwabberschoten” have an indistinct behaviour and tend to drop to the ground suddenly. Ivankov couldn’t gauge the trajectory and missed. Keeper’s mistake, everyone concluded but Sneijder knows better. “Well, you always need the help of the goalie. But yeah, the intention was to trick him. I can’t say how I do it. It’s a matter of kicking the ball at exactly the right spot and with the right contact point on your shoe. It takes some practice, I just practiced a lot over the last months, and here we are.”

His goal was completely in sync with the flow Sneijder feels in the last weeks. Since his dream transfer to Bernabeu, the ball does exactly what Wesley’s mind and eyes want. In record time, the Spanish press and fans embraced the little Utregter. When van Basten replaced him in thr 73rd minute, big cheers were his reward.

The opening goal allowed Oranje to settle in the match, after an incosistent start. “It’s always easier after scoring. If you don’t score, you get worried, you try to force things, you bump into yellow cards, the fans are starting to get restless…. It’s all that. I don’t think we should be happy with the limited number of chances we created, but all in all our field play was not so bad.”

Ruud van Nistelrooy agrees. The striker scored his first goal since the WC in Germany 2006. “That was a nice bonus, but I had a good feeling already before the goal. We were focused and patient. It looked much better than it did against the Swiss. I was happy with my own performance, even though I only got one chance to shoot.”

Which immediately meant the 2-0. And he shot on intuition. Never saw the goal. “You know what? That’s because I play in this position for a while already. You don’t have to look, you sense where the goal is,” the Madrid top scorer smiled.

Winning against Bulgaria came just in time, Van Nistelrooy agreed. “Yeah, the image of the group was deteriorating a bit. And that feeling was very much alive in the group. That’s another reason why we needed to win. We wanted people to go home with a proud and satisfied feeling. And I think they did.”

Captain van der Sar saw the negativity around Oranje increase too. “The first two years it was all hosanna. The third year was 100% negativity. Much to black-and-white for my taste, but the last months we weren’t able to shed the criticism and scepsis. I hope this victory is some sort of new start. It’s important to have the nation backing us, we’re getting in the final stages towards the EC.”