Lucio: "They can win the World Cup"

Thursday, 8 July 2010

It is a strange World Cup for Holland. In all living World Cup or European Championship memory Holland were the team to thrill the world with one or two fantastic, historic games, to then crash out in the most agonizing ways.

Of course the 1974 final stands out. The team around Johan Cruyff and midfield genius Wim van Hanegem were by far the best team of the tournament, beating Argentina 4-0 and laying to waste the Brazilian reigning champions in an epic battle. "But after we went 1-0 up in the final we wanted to humiliate the Germans, not just beat them, but degrade them," Van Hanegem said a few years after.

Since there have been several such moments when Holland were too concerned with showing off and paying too little attention to actually winning the game. But we loved it, in a way.

For always the Dutch teams were applauded all the way to the airport and as a fan you were satisfied with the great reviews of their games in the world's sports pages. "Well, we didn't win, but boy, did we show them." For most Dutch fans that was enough.

Not for Bert van Marwijk. Since he has taken over a lot has changed. But has it changed for the better? Yes, for we have won 14 (all) competitive games under Van Marwijk, and yes we are in the final.

But not everyone is so nationalistic in the Netherlands that they will just support the national team no matter what. "We look like Germany, or even worse: Italy," someone said the other day. And indeed we see defenders hoofing the ball into the stands, we're happy when we get three passes together and we score unsympathetic goals.

Reading through the world's sports pages we don't read admiration for a positive, offensive approach, no relishing of our great forward moves. No, we get people moaning about Mark van Bommel being a little nasty and getting away with it, writers complaining about the diving of Arjen Robben and the fact that we were lucky on more than two or three occasions.

But we are in the final, where we will meet the team that plays football the way we want to play it. Everybody loves Spain. Everybody fancies Spain.

Have we no one on our side?

Yes we do!

Even after Tuesday's humbling win against Uruguay there are some who love us. And not the least, I might ad. Some much needed compliments have come our way from across the ocean, from the country where football is not sport but religion.

Lucio, the big Brazilian central defender, who seemed so impregnable before he was undermined by the second-half goals of his Internazionale teammate Wesley Sneijder, said he always expected the Dutch to suffer an ordeal of survival against a Uruguayan team who had already exceeded all of their hopes, and thus had nothing to lose.

"You have to realise how ugly a semifinal can be," said the big man. "You have gone so far, played so hard, and yet all of it can come crashing down at any moment. In my opinion the Dutch did very well indeed. Yes, there were times when they seemed weighed down by all the hopes on their shoulders, but they never stopped playing and in the end they could have won easily. The important thing was that they did win, they found a way to do it and so much of that was to do with the leaders in the team."

"Before we played them we knew they were very dangerous, and then when they won, we said, 'They can win the World Cup now'. You have to remember an important thing about semifinals. If you're going to have doubts, they will come when you are so near to the prize."

For Lucio and Brazilian striker Luis Fabiano, Sneijder is most likely to unlock door in the final. "He never rests in a game," says Lucio. "When we won the Champions League he was the one most sure that we could beat Barcelona – and then he did it."

Fabiano had an instinct in the quarterfinal that the winners would probably go home world champions. "They are a clever team and they also have a lot of confidence," he said. "You cannot dominate them for too long. Sneijder and Robben can hurt you at any time."

Thank you. We needed that after all the talk of Van Bommel's fouls and Oranje not being Oranje anymore. After all those dreadful games that were won by the slightest of margins.

Now we know that on Sunday we will finally see all the pieces of the puzzle come together. Now we know that on Sunday we will see a final the world will talk about long after we have all gone to the eternal training grounds.

We will play the perfect game in which Robin van Persie finally shows the world just why we think him as of one of the World's greatest players, a game in which Robben will ad new dimensions to the term 'Flying Dutchman', a game in which Wesley Sneijder will knock the ball around as if he has a wire to it and a game in which Mark van Bommel will get a red card in the 87th minute to appease all who hate us now.

In that game on Sunday we will show Spain that Holland can still play this passing game one touch better than they can, and in the end, shortly after 22h30, Giovanni van Bronckhorst will lift the World Cup and redeem all of the Netherlands with the perfect end to an amazing career.

Right?