Relishing the return of Dick Advocaat

Graham Spiers
Timesonline.co.uk
Monday 5 May 2008

I believe I hear further stirrings of progress and crowing in the old Soviet patch in the east. In St Petersburg, where history and modernity are said to blend beautifully, Dick Advocaat is once more chasing glory. The manager of Zenit St Petersburg, having ravaged Ottmar Hitzfeld and Bayern Munich in the Uefa Cup semi-final, is about to bring his own distinctive style to the final in Manchester in nine days’ time.

This is one of football’s great survivors, a 60-year-old Dutchman who, rather like his compatriot, Leo Beenhakker, has foraged the world in his odyssey in the game. Advocaat, though, differs sharply from the former Real Madrid manager in one vital aspect. He has always tried to keep his coaching credentials gleaming.

Advocaat has always been fascinating to be around. Like a lot of outwardly swaggering and bumptious people, he is essentially a shy and even unsure man, who has always been something of a loner in football.

At the 2006 World Cup in Germany, I sat one evening and watched Advocaat train with his South Korea players in the World Cup Stadium in Frankfurt. For a whole hour he stood by the side of the pitch alone, watching his players but saying nothing, speaking to no one.

When he was manager of Rangers between 1998 and 2001, other Scottish club managers could not quite get the fact that, unlike the rest of them, Advocaat would not pop in to the host manager’s office for a postgame drink. “They didn’t understand Dick,” John Greig, his friend and confidant at Ibrox, said. “He was shy and he didn’t do small talk.”

Advocaat’s journey of self-doubt, and his constant quest to prove himself as one of Europe’s top coaches, stems in part from happenstance. In 1984 he was plucked from relative obscurity by Rinus Michels, the great master of Dutch football, who hailed his coaching abilities and claimed him as his assistant with the Dutch national team. For Advocaat, then a young coach at 37, it was a unique and memorable compliment, though it left others querying Michels’ judgment. Just who was this wee barrel-shaped bloke, they asked in Holland, and what has he done to deserve such an honour?

Advocaat belongs to a generation of great Dutch coaches, in which such men as Beenhakker, Johan Cruyff, Louis van Gaal and Guus Hiddink went out and conquered and received rich plaudits along the way. Somehow, Advocaat was always on the outside of that group. When he was appointed manager of Rangers in 1998 it was a fine move for him, and quite a coup for Rangers, but nonetheless, with Cruyff having been at Barcelona, and Van Gaal about to go there, and Beenhakker having been at Real Madrid, Advocaat’s coming to Glasgow and the SPL somehow didn’t look quite the same.

For a while Advocaat’s Rangers were utterly vintage. He built a team of skill and combat in such players as Giovanni van Bronckhorst, Arthur Numan, Claudio Reyna and Michael Mols, a side whose neat, crisp, passing football was viewed as Rangers’ finest in 30 years. Yet Advocaat was struck down by extraordinary bad luck.

In Mols, Advocaat had lured an heroic striker from the small-club scene of FC Utrecht to the big time of Ibrox, and whose scoring rate was almost one per game until an injury against Bayern Munich in the Champions League in November 1999 forever impaired his ability.

That night in Munich, while repeatedly pranging the Bayern woodwork, Rangers went out, but not before the watching Sir Alex Ferguson hailed it as “one of the bravest performances by a British team on the Continent”. It was a classic Advocaat near-miss, another brush with glory.

Football managers exist to be sacked. Eventually, Advocaat was hounded out of Ibrox, a domestic treble and a double quickly counting for nothing. He returned to coach Holland, then the United Arab Emirates in an odd interlude, before he took on South Korea and led them into battle at the last World Cup.

All the while he has hankered for the Premiership in England but never quite got there. Will it come? It is possible.

With Zenit, Advocaat is only proving what Rinus Michels believed all those years ago, which many observers have seen in dramatic episodes ever since: that he is a talented football manager. Yes, the Russian club have had millions to spend, but his team play that distinctive Advocaat brand of swift, pleasing football that brings supporters to the edge of their seats.

Zenit’s 4-0 drubbing of Bayern last week - 5-1 on aggregate - spoke for itself.

As a sore Hitzfeld said: “Bayern don’t lose 4-0. Any team which beats us like this is a force to reckon with.”

In Manchester next week I will savour seeing Advocaat strike out for glory again.