Bert van Marwijk solves the Seedorf puzzle

Attacking defense. That’s the term. That’s how team manager Bert van Marwijk wants to see Oranje play football. Tight organisation, forward pressure, taking possession and full on attack. Sounds simple.

According to the team manager, you can create space for your offensive game. Again, it sounds good. He was very surprised, he said in an interview, that the media were negative about Oranje’s game against Norway, while insiders were very positive.

Ronald de Boer had told bro’ Frank that it looked really good. I can’t get the image out of my head that radio DJ and imitation expert Edwin Evers called Frank to prank him around with his Ronald-imitation.

But no, it was real. There’s a difference between the experts and the media. So, the question now is: when is an insider also an expert? When you play left back at Cambuur, are you than an expert?

Is any media representative an outcast? Is there a committee somewhere? And will Mario Been, Willem van Hanegem and Jan van Halst be sacked from their expert status, because they also analyse matches on tv?

I think it’s a grey area, really. I think, that when you agree with Van Marwijk, you’re suddenly an expert.

Funnily enough, the media actually like Bert. He somehow earned a protected status. How different was it with AZ some time ago, when Hugo Borst wrote his column after PSV-AZ: “AZ has no spirit, no soul, no identity and no system. This is the end. There’s a coach there (Louis van Gaal) whom you feel sorry for. This is never going to work anymore.”

When I watched AZ-PSV yesterday, I just had to think about Borst’s prophesies…

And so, after Borst’s column, AZ started to swing. The curse of the columnist. Van Marwijk will never be attacked by the media. Why? I don’t know. Even last year, when Feyenoord resembled a drunken and over the hill boxer, the media never judged him.

Van Marwijk calls himself an offensive coach. But last year, I’d call Feyenoord’s game “defending defensively”. But Bert would never agree with me. The thing with Van Marwijk is, he always keeps his cool.

“A team manager needs to be indifferent to other people’s opinions,” he said in the same interview. But at Feyenoord, he was known to fly into the curtains whenever Pierre van Hooijdonk said something critical about him.

But, Bert gives the impression to have everything under control. About the “Issue Seedorf” he said: “Clarence is a too big a player to select for the bench.”

Genius! That is what I call an attacking defense…

By Wilfred Genee in www.ad.nl