Postgame Reaction: @ Greece 🇬🇷

A tale of two halves. Yikes.

Editor’s note: the official Dutch national team YouTube seems to be a little slow on posting the highlights; it took about a day for the ones against Serbia, which have since been embedded at the bottom of my reaction to that game. Once the highlights do get posted, I’ll include them at the bottom of this article.

Editor’s note 2: highlights added!

You know the phrase, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”?

Forget it. This wasn’t the clear mark of improvement I thought it would be. It was pretty much the opposite.

Much like against Germany, this was a tale of two halves: first half bad, second half good. Except, unlike the game against Germany, this first half was atrocious. Misplaced passes. Rookie mistakes. Players looking like they were literally born yesterday! Dutch analyst (and former Oranje star) Rafael van der Vaart said this after the first half:

“They’re wandering around in a haze. If you walked around Amsterdam like that, people would call the police to report confused people wandering the streets.”

So, I guess Xavi learned some lessons: he even admitted after the game that the first half was “my mistake.” Which isn’t something that should be skipped over: it’s a breath of fresh air to have an Oranje coach actually say, “yeah, I messed up.” Will he give Guus Til that much attacking responsibility from the get-go ever again? I’d hope not. I support giving chances to players to show themselves, as he did with Til and Quinten Timber to start the game, but do that in the home game against Serbia on Sunday (2:45pm ET on Fox Soccer Plus). Don’t do that against a Greek team, in Greece, that just proved their mettle by beating Germany in Germany. With respect to Til and Timber, there was a clear jump in quality when Ryan Gravenberch and Tijjani Reijnders were brought on the field in their place. I can only imagine how the game would’ve gone had those two been given a spot in the starting lineup.

Maybe it was the atmosphere—this was a sellout crowd in Thessaloniki—or maybe the players indulged in too much pre-game baklava. But the first half of this game reminded me of the hopelessness I felt against Morocco at the World Cup. This was something Xavi also took the blame for: he said that he may have confused the players too much with his positional instructions. I will say, I was feeling significantly less downtrodden after watching Xavi speak to the cameras. He seemed calm, cool, and collected, as if he fully understood where things went wrong and how to fix them. It is quite the positive note that he has been able to turn things around at halftime; he also admitted with very Dutch-like clarity that he should not have started with two holding midfielders, and that once he switched to a diamond midfield in the second half, things improved.¹ If you’re unsure of what that means, see the footnote.

So, with Xavi’s first trifecta of games under his belt, we’re still feeling confident here at the Orangerie about how things will look under the Spaniard. I do wonder, though: if you’re going to tinker with the midfield, arguably the most important part of the field, why not give other attackers or defenders a chance? I think it’s a shame that we haven’t seen Jeremie Frimpong do his best impression of a roadrunner on the right wing. Jorrel Hato—whom I had wanted Xavi to start with at left-back against Germany—has also seen zero minutes. They easily could’ve started in place of Crysencio Summerville and Micky van de Ven. I really would hate to see them also not get involved against Serbia. The other players who haven’t seen any minutes are either goalkeepers (Mark Flekken, Robin Roefs) or established members of the national team (Teun Koopmeiners, Nathan Aké). But, regardless of my qualms about Hato and Frimpong, it was very nice to see Feyenoord’s star Gjivai Zechiël get his debut for the national team. He just might be the only one for whom this was a memorable evening.

One last concern: the injuries. After the game against Germany, Xavi said, “you practice as you play, you play as you practice,” which analyst Van der Vaart praised due to his association of the phrase with Louis van Gaal. In Van Gaal’s days, however, players weren’t nearly as overworked as they are now. Maybe an increased intensity during practice is what’s leading to the many injuries? First it was Brian Brobbey injured against Germany, and then Lutsharel Geertruida injured during practice, and then Cody Gakpo injured against Serbia, and then Jan Paul van Hecke also injured against Serbia… Add that to Donyell Malen and Justin Kluivert pulling out of the team before the break started, and Frenkie de Jong being completely unavailable… and any injuries during the international break are like groceries for the average American family: we can’t afford them!

Speaking of injuries, the Dutch might have walked away with a fat L in this game had Greece star Christos Tzolis not gotten injured himself within the first quarter of the game. Before that stroke of bad luck for the Arsenal player, he had already managed to put the ball into the net on a goal that was (correctly) called off due to an offside Vangelis Pavlidis interfering with the play.

I know I haven’t mentioned the fact that the Dutch had two of their own goals cancelled for offside… one of them very questionably (I can’t find a video, but will link to the highlights whenever the Oranje YouTube team decides to post them)… but the story of Xavi’s three games so far has been that there should’ve been more goals than there were. Enough teasing! Stick it in the net and make it count!

I’m now nervously anticipating this (second) game against Serbia, which after a topsy-turvy few games will decide the lasting taste in Dutch mouths until the next international break in November. Jürgen Klopp’s Germany were just able to comfortably win at home themselves against the Serbs, in a game in which they kept the Balkan country to just one shot on goal for a whopping 0.0 Expected Goals. If they suddenly look dangerous against the Dutch in Eindhoven… as Scooby-Doo would say: “ruh roh.” But if Xavi can mastermind a dominant performance, we can imagine ol’ Scoob doing his classic snicker: “Rheeheeheehee.”

1. Two holding midfielders, illustrated here, provide better defensive cover against a team like Greece, who love to throw everything forward immediately after winning the ball. It’s understandable why Xavi would make this choice, considering we knew going in that Greece are a good counter-attacking team, but it inadvertently allowed the two Greek strikers (the two in a 4-4-2 formation) to easily defend the holding midfielders (Veerman and Quinten Timber) and make it difficult for them to find space, or find a pass to the attacking midfielder, in this case Guus Til. Switching to a diamond midfield, illustrated here, caused confusion between the two Greek strikers as to who would cover the lone defensive midfielder, and allowed the Dutch to have numerical advantages in the middle of the field—which better counteracted the way the Greeks were staying compact and forcing the Dutch to use the wide areas of the field, essentially saying: you can beat me, but only by getting the ball to your wingers and then crossing it in to a striker in the middle. Unfortunately, Mexx Meerdink is not that kind of striker.