Double Dutch

Mike Safe
The Australian
Saturday, May 10 2008

The Netherlands has once again supplied our top soccer coach. But as the World Cup campaign heats up, it's clear Pim Verbeek is his own man, writes Mike Safe.

Pim Verbeek would like you to know that he is not Saint Guus. All Australians, even those who take only a passing interest in soccer, remember Guus Hiddink, the chunky Dutchman who piloted the Socceroos to the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany, only our second visit to the sport’s biggest stage. Now Verbeek, a skinny Dutchman, is trying to get us to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

“I’m a totally different character,” says Verbeek across the conference table at Football Federation Australia (FFA) headquarters in Sydney. He’s been here for an hour discussing the game and the highly controlled way the Dutch think it should be played – which, of course, is how he thinks the Socceroos should play. Inevitably, the conversation turns to Hiddink, the man who came before him and who now guides the Russian national team for a lot more roubles than FFA can afford.

Verbeek, who is said to be on $2 million a year anyway, is glowing in his praise of Hiddink, but explains he has no choice but to adopt a different strategy. Hiddink, he points out, came in late and was only in charge of the Socceroos for a year – from mid-2005 until the World Cup finals – and much of that year was spent in Holland coaching his then club team, PSV Eindhoven, to the Dutch title. Verbeek, on the other hand, is here full time with the task of taking the Socceroos all the way down the two-and-a-half year qualifying road to the World Cup finals – if everything goes to plan, of course.

Hiddink’s shorter stint allowed more of an overview that kept him a step removed from the players, who by the time he came in were totally absorbed in making the finals. “So Guus just focused on what he had to do to win,” says Verbeek. “He knew, of course, he was only with the group for a short time and so he didn’t care about the FFA, about players’ feelings. All he cared about was getting the result.”

On his longer and much more winding road to the finals, Verbeek faces plenty of roadblocks. There will be battles to keep his largely Europe-based stars focused and healthy and, importantly, their clubs on side so they are released for Socceroos duty. Then there’s the logistical nightmare of bringing the squad together from around the world for qualifying games, the tough away-from-home matches in everything from 40ºC heat to near-freezing conditions, wrangles with the burgeoning local A-League over supplying him with players, often on short notice, and, of course, putting up with the expectations of know-all fans, commentators and, indeed, his employer, FFA.

All this, he says, means his style will be more up close and personal – he’ll be part psychologist, part diplomat, while remaining a full-time pragmatist who does what’s needed to achieve a result.

If ever there were a gun for hire, it’s the professional football coach. And sometimes they get shot down. Says Verbeek: “As a player and coach, I’ve learnt over a long time that the only way to survive in a tough world is to be honest. So I give my opinion. You can’t lie to players – you lose their respect if you do that. So I tell them what they have to do to improve, why they’re playing or not playing.

“They have to understand I’m the one who takes the final decision – whether they like it or not. They have to understand I’m here for the team, not the individual player, and, OK, that can bring problems, some clashes also. In the end, I have to look at myself and I know I did everything I could to get the result.”

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WHAT IS IT WITH THE Dutch and football? A bit like their questing explorers and merchants of old, their footballers have colonised the world. For a country of only 16.5 million people, they fight above their weight in the world game. In a way, they are a perfect fit for brash, sports-mad Australia, which also likes to think it wins more than it loses against bigger opponents, soccer now being a prime example.

Indeed, the coach lined up to take the job after Hiddink was Dick Advocaat, yet another well-travelled Dutchman. Instead, he took the cash – said to be $4 million a year – and ran out on the Socceroos to stay coaching in the Russian league. So a hasty search for a replacement came down to a choice between Verbeek, who had just quit as coach of the South Korean national side, and the better known Frenchman Philippe Troussier.

Verbeek got the nod, largely because of his knowledge of Asian football (through which Australia must now qualify for the World Cup) and his encyclopedic understanding of the Dutch method – which focuses on keeping possession and creative, free-flowing play, as originally imposed on the Socceroos by Hiddink.

Verbeek’s comment on all this is that the Dutch have always adapted to whatever the circumstance, be it football, politics or geography. Threatened by the ever-encroaching North Sea on one side and a variety of bigger, often bad-tempered neighbours on the other, the country and its people have had to be resilient.

“We come from a small country and we’ve always travelled,” he explains. “We have a confidence that lets us adapt to new cultures. If it works, fantastic, if it doesn’t we go somewhere else. Many of our players and coaches are like that. We are an organised country because we have millions of people in such a small area. Sometimes maybe we think the country is too organised, but on the other hand there is a lot of freedom and everything is possible. We accept others as long as they don’t bother us. We don’t care if you have long hair, short hair or if you’re black, yellow or whatever. You live your life; we live our life ... and that makes it easier for us to go to different countries.

“Our children are encouraged to be that way, too. We give them the chance to argue their point, as long as they have a good argument. That’s typical of the Dutch – we don’t just say this is the way it is. We always try to have a discussion. I think Australia is much like that … maybe that’s why I like it here.”

Tall and angular, with a twist of light brown hair and pale eyes that fix you with a constant, steady gaze, 52-year-old Verbeek is the consummate football professional. Over more than 30 years as a player and coach, he’s seen the good, the bad and everything between. Also, he tells the media what he has to but not much more. It’s not quite coach-speak (“it’s one game at a time”, etc), but can come close.

He’s married with three daughters – two of them are back at university in the Netherlands and the youngest, aged 18, is about to join them there. His nomadic life – from the leagues of his homeland and Europe to Asia, the Middle East and now Australia – has often been hard on his kids. “Children like their father as close by as possible, and if you look at it like that I was not always the perfect father. But in the end they are proud, of course, and they love football and have enjoyed time here (in Australia). So as long as my family is happy, I can do my job.”

Verbeek was born and raised in the working-class port city of Rotterdam, down the highway from much more cosmopolitan Amsterdam. His father was a professional footballer and Pim and his younger brother, Robert, now also a coach, were brought up on the game, playing in the streets after school. At 17, Pim was signed to Sparta Rotterdam, a small club in the Dutch league. They were the battlers when pitted against their cross-town rivals, the much bigger Feyenoord. It was at Sparta that he learnt to apply himself with mind as well as body – work hard but think harder.

At 24, his world all but collapsed during a game when he tore his knee ligaments, ending his pro playing career. “They had to cut the knee completely open and now it looks like an injury from a war. I was devastated. For two years I did everything to come back. I worked hard to recover but in the end had to admit it was not going to happen.”

By then, he had his coaching licence and started out with youth and lower grade sides. In the late ’80s he was appointed first division co-coach of Sparta’s great enemy, Feyenoord. He was 33, and seven of his players were older than him. He admits now that taking the job was a mistake – too much too soon. “I’d never been a great player and as a coach I’d never worked at a great club like that. You’d think it would be heaven, but definitely not. Most of the time I spent working on other things, not football. There’s the media, the business side, board members, former players … egos. It was totally different to being on the field and training, which I liked most, trying to make our players better. In the end I thought, ‘Well, if this is a big club then maybe I don’t like it so much.’”

After more than a decade coaching in his homeland, he decided on a new horizon and in 1998 headed to Japan, where the game was booming. He coached Omiya Ardija, a team based in the commuter suburbs of Tokyo. It was a sharp learning curve that kindled a fascination with the way the game is played and coached in Asia.

For starters, he realised quickly that his new team couldn’t handle criticism or argument – a totally different reaction to European players, the Dutch in particular. It took him six months to adapt. If he chided his charges, it had to be done gently and one on one. “You can’t say, ‘What you did wasn’t good’ – you have to say, ‘You must improve.’ You never use the words ‘no good’ to anyone, especially when the whole squad is there. They lose face within the group.”

In the run-up to the 2002 World Cup finals shared between Japan and South Korea, Verbeek was assistant coach of the South Korean team – which was under the direction of Guus Hiddink, then just another Dutchman with a strange name as far as Australians were concerned. “The Koreans are more open, more outspoken, than the Japanese,” Verbeek reckons. “They’re easier to work with because you can have dialogue with them.” In a career highlight, he and Hiddink took the Koreans to the semifinals, the highest ever World Cup placing by an Asian team. But in the 2006 finals in Germany, where Australia advanced to the second round under Hiddink, the South Koreans went out in round one, this time coached by Dick Advocaat with Verbeek still as assistant – a continuation of the Dutch connection.

After that disappointment, Verbeek finally landed the number-one South Korean job for two years and took third place in last year’s Asian Cup. But with a year to go on his contract, he quit after the tournament, saying he needed a break. In fact, there was more to it than that; he was unhappy with mounting criticism from a rabid South Korean press for, among other things, his trialling of junior players in “friendlies”, games between nations that don’t have championship status – a common practice in Europe.

And so when Advocaat – or “Dirty Dick” as he was branded by an equally excitable Australian press – turned his back on the Socceroos, Verbeek found himself with a new job anyway. Again, there was media speculation – after all, wasn’t he second choice in the job hunt that had already run the rule over more than a dozen coaches? He laughs at this and suggests finishing second in a field of 15 or so isn’t bad. “I think I did quite well.”

But, most importantly, he has the backing of the elder statesman of the Australian game, FFA chairman Frank Lowy. On signing him, the Westfield shopping centre magnate – with the same steely resolve he uses to stare down business adversaries around the globe – proclaimed Verbeek was the man for the job. “We have interviewed 10 to 15 different coaches in the past year or so and all of those were qualified for the job – he’s not the second choice,” Lowy said. “We didn’t know Pim at the time. Had we known him, he probably would have been first choice.”

About all this, Verbeek simply shrugs and suggests everyone is entitled to an opinion. “In the Netherlands we like to say the national team has millions of coaches and they all know what’s right.” No doubt, as the World Cup campaign heats up, he will learn that Australia, like his homeland and Korea, is no different.

THE JURY IS STILL OUT ON Verbeek. It’s early days yet, of course, but his two World Cup performances so far – a 3-0 victory over Qatar in Melbourne in February and a 0-0 draw with China at altitude in Kunming in March while seven top Socceroos were missing – were impressive. Still, sterner tests come next month with four more games, including Iraq and Qatar away, before, hopefully, moving on to the next stage of qualification.

Les Murray, SBS Television’s doyen of local soccer commentators, says it’s so far so good. “I’m impressed by the way he’s read the circumstances. He’s evaluated the players at his disposal well, he’s evaluated the opponents well and the conditions under which we’ve played. So far, I’ve seen no fault in the guy. But it’s about how he’ll respond to the speed bumps along the way. If we’re down 2-0 at half-time against Iraq in the heat of Dubai, how does he respond? That’s when he earns his money.”

Murray is glad the Socceroos are continuing to play what he sees as a more educated game under Verbeek. “The old Australian way of having a go at 90 miles an hour all game, well, he’s controlling that. That’s not the way good teams play. It has to be varied and so he has them playing a continuation of the Dutch method and the European mentality.”

Left-field commentator Damien Lovelock, seen on Sky News and heard on Sydney radio, thinks Verbeek is a more conservative tactician than Hiddink. “Damo”, as he’s known, says it should be remembered that Hiddink has had his share of spectacular failures as well as successes – and these may have tempered Verbeek’s style. “For example, in the China game with 20 minutes to go Hiddink would have gone for it, taken risks to get the win. But Pim didn’t and maybe as Guus’s understudy he came to realise that taking risks fails as often, if not more, than it succeeds.”

Paul Williams, who co-hosts Football Fever, a soccer interview and talkback show on Sydney commercial radio with Lovelock, says their callers seem genuinely pleased with Verbeek – again, so far. “That’s because he’s got results.” Williams labels the Socceroos coaching job the toughest in Australian sport and, because of the logistics of time and distance, the hardest in the world game. “There’s no doubt about that. But you get the impression that while he’s on the job, he’s doing nothing else – 24/7 he’s thinking, plotting, hypothesising and playing games in his head, which can only be good for us.”

Indeed, asked what he does to relax, Verbeek says he watches DVDs – of football matches, usually of the players in his squad. And as so many of them play across Europe, there’s a lot of watching to do. “For me this is not work. I can still sleep well because … I know I’ve done the best I can.”

He’s also coming to terms with Australia and its obsession with sport. “No matter what time of the day, six in the morning, I see people outside running, rowing, swimming … The facilities and weather are so good and it’s very competitive and the people are proud and thinking they’re the best in the world – and that’s good. And if they’re not the best in the world, they want to be. So it’s an exciting culture to be in. One thing that is different is that I sometimes have to go to page eight or nine of the sports (in the newspapers) to find something about football (soccer). But it’s not a competition because I know how much you love rugby and AFL and cricket. I think it’s perfect that football is now becoming a big part of the sports culture and that we’re doing well at the moment.”

But he’s also had his prickly moments. His Dutch plain-speaking got him into trouble soon after his arrival when he dared to criticise the local pride and joy, the new A-League, saying it would be better if a couple of his European-based players continued to train with their clubs in the German league than come back to play full-time here. Despite mock outrage from a few locals, most level-headed commentators conceded he was right.

“People should not be insulted by that, it’s just true,” Verbeek says now. “It’s also my job to improve (A-League) players and make them better. But the only way to be a better player is to know how good you really are and what you have to do to improve. If you think you’re good enough already, that’s never good enough.”