Raciocínio

[Valdano a propósito do fantástico golo de Maradona face à Inglaterra em 1986; não o da mão de Deus, o outro] «On a visit to London in 1998, Valdano recalled: "He [Maradona] told me that at that moment, he remembered a game seven years earlier at Wembley when he'de been in a similar position and had played the ball to Shilton's [precisamente o mesmo guarda-redes do jogo de 1986] left and missed the goal. He assessed the current situation and decided that he didn't need me [a ideia original era furar a defesa e passar a bola a Valdano]; he could solve the problem of scoring himself. In a quarter-final of the World Cup, after a seventy-metre run, he was able to recall a situation from years earlier, analyse it, process the information and reach a new conclusion. And he did it in a fraction of a microsecond. That is genius."»

«Arnold Muhren was famed for both his technique and his singularly Dutch ability to approach the game as if it were a kind of physical chess. "It's a thinking game. It's not running around everywhere and just working hard, tough of course you have to work hard too. Every Dutch player wants to control the game. We play the ball from man to man; we wait for openings. That's how to play football: with your brains not with your feet. You don't have to be a chess player, but you must think ahead. Before I had the ball I knew exactly what I would do with it. I always knew two or three moves ahead. Before I get the ball I can already see someone moving in front of me, so when the ball arrives I don't have to think about it. And I don't have to watch the ball because I have the right technique." If ball control comes naturally to a player, he needs only one touch to get it where it needs to be. This is not the case if a player in possession has to stop to think. A pass which is a fraction of a second too late will have repercussions in the pass after that, and so on. "(...) In Holland we don't think about the first man. We think of the third man, the one who has to run. If I get the ball, the third man can run immediately because he knows that immediately I will pass to the second man, and he will give it to him. If I delay, the third man has to delay his run and the moment is over. It is that special moment, that special pass."»

«"We think football is a passing game", says Gerard Van der Lem, who is now in charge at AZ Alkmaar. Van der Lem's team, like those of his friend and mentor Louis van Gaal, are based to an extreme degree of possession of the ball and switching it around the field at extraordinary high speed, probing for weakness and space in the opponents' defence. Creating fast, compact passing-triangles has become one of the central dogmas of Dutch coaching in the last decade. This requires intelligent, quick-thinking players who, when faced with several options (run with the ball? or pass? if passing, who to?), are able to choose immediately and correctly the right option for the team and the system. "The most difficult thing in life is choices", says Vand der Lem. (...) Van Gaal is the most extreme version yet of a Dutch coach who sees football almost entirely as a highly ordered collective endeavour: "Football is a team sport, and members of the team are therefore dependent on each other", he says. "If certain players do not cary out their tasks properly on the pitch, then their colleagues will suffer. This means that each player has to carry out his basic tasks to the best of his ability, and this requires a disciplined approach on the pitch."»


Golo de Van Basten no jogo Holanda-Inglaterra no Europeu de 1988 (que a Holanda acabou por vencer).

As citações são retiradas do livro Brilliant Orange. The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, de David Winner.