Conflict is a normal part of football in Holland and news of unhappiness over the manager’s rigid style of play may not signify lasting issues in the dressing roomWhen Bobby Robson took over at PSV Eindhoven in 1990,he was shocked by the culture he found there. “An English professional,” he said, and “accepts the manager’s decision,but after every match here the substitutes arrive and visit me.” Debate has been part of Dutch football from at least the days of Rinus Michels and his “conflict principle by which players were encouraged to critique one another’s performances, seemingly on the logic that every pearl begins with a dinky grit of irritation.
Perhaps it is even the case that debate is part of Dutch life. “whether in Holland someone says something, and ” Marco van Basten said,“there is always someone else who stands up and says: Yes, but’ That starts in school and that is our way of living. whether you explain someone to do something in Germany then they will say ‘OK’ and do it but that is not how we work and how we grew up. It’s a different way of being.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com