Brilliant Orange, By David Winner
World Cup 74, Euro 92, World Cup 98, Euro 2000… the Netherlands’ know a thing or two about stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Penalty shootout losses in 1992, 1996, 1998 and 2000. Makes the whole ‘why do we not win any competition?’ debate that will be taking place across the UK come next summer look pathetic in comparison, don’t you think?
In 1998, after all, we had David Batty or Paul Ince miss their spot kicks! Not Ronald de Boer and Philip Cocu: two players whose rapier-like ability to cut through defences had already been established at club level and in that very World Cup, only for it all to end in a perverse demonstration of totaalvoetbal being about something other than merely ball skills.
However you care to look at it (bad luck, complacency, arrogance, inability to keep mouth shut rather than mouth off at your team mates, ‘No I am MORE special than you’, conspiracy, The Germans!?!?!?) Dutch football has had some fairly rough experiences. As rough, if not rougher, than England.
Yet, they have also given us teams and players who at club and international level have all forced a globe of viewers to pick its collective jaws off of the floor. What is it about the Dutch mentality or Dutch culture, or even Dutch football itself that means Euro 1988 is the only major competition won?
Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football was first published in 2000 (post the Euro 2000 trauma), and is one of the best football books that you probably won’t have read. A very zeitgeist book in many ways – it goes beyond looking at football as a social phenomenon and more as a demonstration of already existing social patterns – but not a problematic one because of this.
In Brilliant Orange, David Winner looks at the story of Dutch football – touching on pre 1970s Ajax – through to the late 1960s/early 1970s emergence of Rinus Michels and a certain Johann Cruyff, and the whole psychodrama of Dutch football since that infamous 7 July 1974 in Munich. In between, rather than some eulogistic postage-stamp biographies of footballers whose ‘genius’ was limited to a couple of goals, we have examinations and conversations with key football figures, management consultants, architects, art historians, figures prominent in the 1960s Provo anarchist movements and more.
What emerges is not so much a hard luck tale with momentary redemption (1988), but something far more engaging and far more revealing.
The Dutch desperation to be seen to play good football comes out far more tellingly than any self-appointed pundit’s diagnosis of Bergkamp’s lack of a killer instinct. The intricacies of using space effectively or the at times bipolar inheritance of Calvinism and individual liberty: Dutch football is expressed more as an inevitable result of the Netherlands’ landscape, history, culture and sporting past.
And no punches are pulled: the Dutch swagger, complacency, ability for each individual to see himself as more important than the team, and arrogance are laid bare. Including that very uneasy period in the late 1990s when divisions upon racial lines seemed destined to split Dutch football irrevocably.
Diagnoses of the England football team tend to rely on some form of class cliché, or call to mind images of the Battle of Britain and Agincourt to support why the English consistently fall short (ignoring the facts that we won the Battles of Britain and Agincourt, so maybe the Charge of the Light Brigade would be a better analogy?) in major tournaments. Brilliant Orange works, largely because it is under no illusions; the Dutch are the architects of their own downfall, often enough, on the football field… but they do it so well!
As the world begins warming up for next year’s South African football fiesta, and with the Netherlands already qualified, Brilliant Orange is one of those books that demands another read in advance. And it lasts merely 250 pages (which you could say, having read it, is a VERY Dutch use of space!). Admittedly, it could now do with an update (one of my key memories of Euro 2004 was the sight of Van Der Sar looking and pointing determinedly at Robben, willing the soon to be Chelsea player to convert his spot kick and finally get the monkey of the penalty shootout off of the collective Dutch backs) – but then again they have still flattered to deceive since 2000 haven’t they?
