Why do you like Holland?

blutgraetsche wrote:Their achievements and class speak for themselves.

Van Basten, Bergkamp, Cocu and Davids

same can be said.

This thread is a German/ Dutch festival now, good to see that we still can always count with your love for each other.

Seriously, you make the Brasil-Argentina rivalry look too boring.

Afellay wrote:
Van Basten, Bergkamp, Cocu and Davids

same can be said.

Then why do you feel the urge to 'remind' everyone and their grandmother about it?

People ask questions; of course you have to fill them in with information and answers.

Juligen wrote: This thread is a German/ Dutch festival now, good to see that we still can always count with your love for each other.

The major difference to the 'rivalry' with the English, at least in one direction that is.

I WANT AN ALL TIME GERMANY!!! West-east-north-south, I dont care just include any c**t that you want.

Then lets compare it to Holland!

We had a thread about that in the past Fey, search for it.

The all time German team is so great it's ridiculous. No need to bother even.

Aye..who could forget all those penalties..remember the 4th one of Schlieffenzieger in that Semi final??? That was a penalty! God, that's what football is all about!

Yef wrote:I WANT AN ALL TIME GERMANY!!! West-east-north-south, I dont care just include any c**t that you want.

They'd probably include Van Bommel because he's an Uberdeutsche c**t

Only in Holland is a player banned from the national team for being too German

Yef wrote:Aye..who could forget all those penalties..remember the 4th one of Schlieffenzieger in that Semi final??? That was a penalty! God, that's what football is all about!

Fey, you truly are a LEGEND

I thought this article, despite being quite old' is very apt for this topic;

by Simon Kuper

When I moved to the Netherlands in October 1976, I was seven years old and had never previously heard of the country. Only later did I realise I had arrived in the middle of a Golden Age.

My father had taken a job in the town of Leiden, and our new house stood in what I now know to be a typical Dutch street. The tiny terraced houses were fronted by huge windows, through which passers-by could peer in to make sure nothing untoward was happening inside.

On our first Dutch evening, my brother and I ventured onto the street to meet the other children. They greeted us by singing what were probably the only English words they knew: 'Crazy boys, crazy boys!' But over the next few evenings relations improved. Soon we became regulars in the street's daily football match.

I had barely ever kicked a football before. In London, nobody I knew had. But in Leiden everybody did. The Netherlands was then the best footballing country on earth. In 1974 the Dutch team had reached the final of the World Cup playing a brand of football that tens of millions of people today still remember. 'Total football,' the English called it, while the Hispanic countries named the team 'la naranja mecánica', or The Clockwork Orange. From Jacques Tati to Rudolf Nureyev, the world watched entranced. At the next World Cup, in 1978, Holland reached the final again. Playing against Argentina in Buenos Aires, in a stadium packed with armed soldiers and the generals who then ruled the country, the Dutch went 1-0 down. Then, a lanky flower seller from the north of Holland named Dick Nanninga headed the ball into the confetti-strewn Argentina net. I can still hear the cheer erupting from our neighbouring houses. In the end Argentina won, 3-1.

I left the Netherlands in 1986, and I now feel Dutch in one regard only. At Euro 2000 I will be rooting for Oranje (as we call them in Holland). So will millions of other people from Jakarta to Timbuktoo who barely know that the Netherlands is a country as well as a football team. The reason is not merely that the Dutch have an excellent team, although they do: they are the bookmakers' favourites to win this championship.

The important thing is that the Dutch play the beautiful game. In February, after they had humiliated Germany in a friendly, Oliver Kahn, the German goalkeeper, said: 'We have played against the finest that there is in European football. It's madness when you see these perfect footballers.' In the seventeenth century the Dutch produced great and distinctive painters. Now this overcrowded country of just 16 million people manufactures footballers. Why? At the risk of giving away the secret, I will explain.

Soon after my arrival I discovered that every boy in Holland belonged to a football club. In Leiden, which then had just over 100,000 inhabitants, there were dozens. Some of them fielded twenty senior teams, seven teams of under-eights, and so on. Not to play football was not to exist. My brother and I joined the Ajax Sportman Combinatie, a club founded in 1892, which had once been one of the best in Holland and still possessed a genuine stand. ASC was no longer any good, but that never deflected me.

As a child I would arise each Saturday at 7am and race to the ground. The gates would still be locked, but my team-mates and I would rattle them until, at last, at about 8am, someone unlocked them. Then we would play on ASC's gravel pitch until our match kicked off. Afterwards we would hang around the ground hoping for a game with another team. Then we would go to someone's house to play football. When the football was rained off 'a time of bleak despair in the Kuper household' we would race to the ground anyway, where we would be taken to a hall to play indoors, or be shown videos of the 1974 and 1978 World Cups.

Almost all Dutch boys spent their youth much as I did. Of the 14 million people living in Holland in the Seventies, one million played football at clubs like ASC. No other country had a higher proportion of registered footballers. Franz Beckenbauer said he finally understood why Dutch players were so good when he flew over Holland in a helicopter and saw that it consisted chiefly of football grounds.

No wonder we all played. My parents paid ASC about £50 a year, and in return my brother and I were allowed virtually to live at the club. Twice a week we were trained by coaches who had completed long courses for the privilege. One had played professional football. We played on pitches obsessively watered and mowed by the local council. Dutch football, in fact, is a testament to Dutch social democracy.

In England, when two lovers of football meet, the first question is: 'Which club do you support?' In the Netherlands, the question is, 'Which club do you play for?' The Dutch are players first, fans second. I once asked Boudewijn Zenden, who plays for Barcelona and Holland, which club he had supported as a child. None, he said. Nor did he have posters of idols on his walls. Zenden played.

When I later returned to England, I met people who professed to love football, watched their team each weekend, but never kicked a ball. I discovered that in England it is hard to get the chance. It is no myth that Margaret Thatcher sold off the school playing-fields. She did. Between 1981 and 1997, an estimated 5,000 playing fields were sold in Britain and turned into houses and supermarkets. There are other problems besides. The Liverpool and District Sunday League has lost more than half its teams in recent years, as councils raise the pitch rent and players get fed up changing in the bushes to play in the mud.

I now live in central London. Within a few miles of me there are a couple of million people, but they are served by fewer football pitches than are the people of Leiden. It is often boasted that Hackney Marshes is the largest football complex in Europe, but Hackney Marshes is well over an hour from my house. No wonder England is not very good at football.

Albert Camus, the late goalkeeper and sometime novelist, said: 'All that I know most surely about morality and the obligations of man, I owe to football.' Well, all that I know most surely about Holland, I owe to football. Playing the game was an education in the country. We encountered teams from seaside villages where the people were so devoutly Protestant they only played on Saturdays. They lived on brown bread, fish and dairy products, so that even in the under-elevens many of them stood six foot tall. Edwin van der Sar, the giant who is today Holland's goalkeeper, comes from one of those clubs.

In villages further inland, where the local farmers had become millionaires selling flower bulbs to the world, the local teams would draw crowds of several thousand. The best players received such lavish payments under the table from the farmers that many of them refused to turn professional, saying they could not afford to.

Each club we played against had a distinctive culture: Protestant or posh, bulb-farming or Dutch West Indian. The Netherlands, I discovered, is a country of clubs. The Dutch have the time for it. Particularly in the 1970s, vast numbers of people did not work. They had once gone to a doctor complaining of stress or tiredness or minor backache, and had been told to retire and draw 70 per cent of their last salary ad infinitum. Those who still worked did so gently. Even today, virtually every office in Holland is deserted by 5pm. My father usually returned home at lunchtime and spent the afternoon skulking indoors in case a colleague saw him. When he went outside, my father used his leisure time to play cricket. Most people used it for football. But playing was only one way of passing time at the club. Many Dutchmen think that their real job is chairing their football club, or its materials committee, or coaching the fourteenth team. Club culture in Holland was a universal. Ajax Sportman Combinatie was one of the worst clubs in the country, yet it was recognisably related to the best, which also happened to be called Ajax.

When Ajax of Amsterdam was founded, in 1900, its board wrote to my club asking permission to use the name Ajax. We granted it, but said we would review the matter a hundred years later. Ajax agreed. Sadly, by the time 2000 rolled around it turned out that ASC had mislaid Ajax's letter. The Amsterdammers have thus retained their name.

In the 1970s Ajax of Amsterdam was still a neighbourhood club rather like ASC. It just happened to be the best neighbourhood club in the world. Ajax won three consecutive European Cups between 1971 and 1973, with a team consisting mainly of local boys who would provide the nucleus of the 'naranja mecánica'. Barry Hulshoff, the bearded socialist who was then the Ajax centre-back, ran into an old man in a Greek mountain village many years later. 'He took my hands and held them and he cried,' Hulshoff recalls. 'It went on for four or five minutes. I was very embarrassed. I just didn't know what was going on. Later my translator explained it. He said there was no television in the village, so this old man used to walk for two hours to reach another village to watch Ajax games on television. The man had loved Ajax and now, in front of him, he saw one of the players he used to watch.'

The players whom the Greek had watched came predominantly from Amsterdam-East. Sjaak Swart, the Ajax outside-right, and Piet Keizer, the outside-left, grew up around the corner from each other a short walk from the old Ajax ground. Johan Cruyff, the centre-forward, as a child used to wander up the road to watch the Ajax first team train.

Last December I met Swart in his restaurant above an ice rink, just behind where the old Ajax stadium had stood. 'The other day,' said Swart, 'I walked into the canteen at the new Ajax ground and Johan and Pietje were sitting there. And I come in and I shout, 'There they are again, the great forward-line!'

Then they all had a cup of coffee. I can imagine a similar scene at ASC. So rooted are almost all Dutchmen in club culture that when a star retires, he often instantly finds himself another, lesser club. Swart played nearly twenty years of amateur football after retiring from Ajax. Wim Meutstege, an Ajax player in the late 1970s, later joined ASC. Frank Rijkaard, another Ajax man and the current manager of Holland, plays for the third veterans' eleven of his local club, Abcoude.

Rijkaard, still only 37 years old, told me: 'We have a nice team, a team of friends, and for an hour and a half we chase, run, play football. Well, fantastic! And then you've sweated, you've done something, and you go into the canteen and drink a beer and chat about the game. Often you have a nice opponent, have a joke along the way. I have no aspirations to anything more.'

This winter I watched Rijkaard's contemporary, Ruud Gullit, play for the fifth team of an Amsterdam club named AFC. The opponents were the third eleven of a club called OSDO, and there were about 20 spectators, one of whom remarked to his son: 'Look, that's Ruud Gullit.' 'Does he play for OSDO?' the boy asked. The father was chocked: 'Ruud Gullit, who played in Italy and for the Dutch team! You know him, don't you?' 'Yeah, yeah, you're kidding me,' said the boy. One could understand the child's doubts, because by half-time Gullit's side were 5-0 down, though they eventually recovered to lose just 5-3. Yet Gullit looked happy. Once or twice he almost scored, but on each occasion he missed the ball entirely. After the game he shook everyone's hand and congratulated the pygmy woman referee. As he walked off the pitch, he exclaimed to no one in particular: 'The second half was better!' We have all left the field on a Saturday afternoon thinking exactly that.

The mere fact that almost everyone in Holland plays football cannot itself explain the country's success. Until the 1970s Dutch football was mediocre. Holland would occasionally lose to Luxembourg, and considered their main rivals to be Belgium.

It was Johan Cruyff who made the Dutch good at football, but it took me a while to realise this. In October 1976, when I first began to ponder these questions, Cruyff was starting to disappear from the scene. He still played for Barcelona, but had already said he would skip the World Cup in Argentina. He retired from football in 1978. Then, discovering that he had lost all his money in a pig-farming venture, he began playing again in the US.

So I got an inkling of who he was only on December 6, 1981, when he returned to Ajax. This little man, whose body had been wrecked by two decades of chain-smoking and being kicked, astounded me most Sundays for the next three years. I remember a penalty-kick he took on December 5, 1982 against Helmond Sport. Instead of shooting in the conventional manner, he passed the ball forward and to his left. There his team-mate Jesper Olsen, running into the penalty area, collected it, and passed it back to Cruyff, who placed the ball in an empty net while the Helmond keeper watched open-mouthed and motionless.

Cruyff shaped all Dutch footballers: Gullit and Rijkaard who played with him, the Dutchmen who will appear at Euro 2000, and all of us at ASC. The main change he unwittingly effected in Leiden was to get us talking about football. Cruyff himself, when he later became a manager, was to complain: 'The moment you open your mouth to breathe, Dutch footballers say, `Yes, but... that was his own fault. Cruyff was the man who turned Dutch football into a sort of academic debating society. 'Football is a game you play with your head,' he once said. Other countries do not see it that way. I once asked Gullit to compare the English, the Italians and the Dutch. 'In a Dutch changing room,' he said, 'everyone thinks he knows best. In an Italian changing room everybody probably also thinks he knows best, but nobody dares to tell the manager. And in an English changing room, they just have a laugh.'

I have interviewed British chief executives, Argentine generals and Ukrainian mafiosi, but the most talkative people I know are Dutch footballers. You speak to them for an hour and a half, ask every question you can think of, and when you finally turn off the tape recorder they hold forth for another half hour. Sjaak Swart, who told me at the start of the interview that he had no time, said, when I finally managed to cut him short: 'Another cup of coffee, boy?' I will be rooting for the Dutch this month. And I know they are the most gifted team in the championship. But I expect them to lose. That is because the Dutch think that winning is beside the point.

I realised this ten years ago when I took my football team on a tour of Holland. We won our first match 8-0, and afterwards, over a beer in the canteen, one of our Dutch opponents said to me: 'But of course we played the better football.' He meant that his team had combined better, thought harder, played the prettier game, whereas we had merely been brutish. He was talking nonsense, but he was making a common Dutch point: that playing 'good football' matters more than winning.

To the Dutch, 'good football' is the passing, thinking, balletic game invented by Cruyff. The master himself has taken to saying that Holland 'really' won the World Cup of 1974, even though they lost in the final. How so? 'Well', says Cruyff, 'everyone still remembers the beautiful football Holland played, and that is a victory more enduring than mucky gauges like final scores.'

Guus Hiddink, coach of the Dutch side that reached the semi-finals of the 1998 World Cup playing beautiful football, said later: 'You have to say that our style, our philosophy has impressed the world and that's what I'm proud of.' He added: 'I don't know if I'd have been happy with a World Cup won in a bad way. We couldn't have done that.' No coach of any other country could have said that. Rijkaard told me that he wants to turn Dutch players into winners. This summer, he won't be happy if Holland end up with plaudits but no prize. Or so he says. Win or lose, come autumn he will be chasing after the ball at Abcoude again.

http://www.ajax-sc.nl/voetbal/kuper.html

I'll never get bored reading that, so utterly recognizable

(SC Overwetering by the way )

one thing IS sure

you CANNOT imagine a c**t like Guillit, Rijkaard, Koeman, Sneijder, VDV or Seedorf in a clean, white shirt (with eagle and three stars)

in

con

cei

vable

For all the english people here...Dont be blue, be orange!

http://justgodutch.com/

And be dissapointed.

Winning is not the most importing thing in life DS..you still have to learn a lot!

All my life I have always heard losers say that wonder why, yes it is one most important thing in life thats all the struggle about.

Though I am not calling you a loser but thats what is really common.

DS wrote:All my life I have always heard losers say that wonder why, yes it is one most important thing in life thats all the struggle about.

have you heard that life is not about the destination but about the journey?

110% wrote:

DS wrote:All my life I have always heard losers say that wonder why, yes it is one most important thing in life thats all the struggle about.

have you heard that life is not about the destination but about the journey?

Is it ?
I actually would like to reach a destination rather then left somewhere in the middle.
Philosphy and poetry are beautiful and the dream world is well dreamy but the hard facts are it normally deosnt works like that.

DS wrote:

110% wrote:

DS wrote:All my life I have always heard losers say that wonder why, yes it is one most important thing in life thats all the struggle about.

have you heard that life is not about the destination but about the journey?

Is it ?
I actually would like to reach a destination rather then left somewhere in the middle.
Philosphy and poetry are beautiful and the dream world is well dreamy but the hard facts are it normally deosnt works like that.

your destination is death, life is the journey

110% wrote:

DS wrote:

110% wrote:

DS wrote:All my life I have always heard losers say that wonder why, yes it is one most important thing in life thats all the struggle about.

have you heard that life is not about the destination but about the journey?

Is it ?
I actually would like to reach a destination rather then left somewhere in the middle.
Philosphy and poetry are beautiful and the dream world is well dreamy but the hard facts are it normally deosnt works like that.

your destination is death, life is the journey

The difference between Germany and Holland has never been made more clear than you just have

110% wrote:

DS wrote:

110% wrote:

DS wrote:All my life I have always heard losers say that wonder why, yes it is one most important thing in life thats all the struggle about.

have you heard that life is not about the destination but about the journey?

Is it ?
I actually would like to reach a destination rather then left somewhere in the middle.
Philosphy and poetry are beautiful and the dream world is well dreamy but the hard facts are it normally deosnt works like that.

your destination is death, life is the journey

Well according to me death is just the beginning.

...I wonder if there are Germans in the afterlife????

Fey wrote:...I wonder if there are Germans in the afterlife????

Fey wrote:...I wonder if there are Germans in the afterlife????

Not in hell, where all the Dutchies end.

blutgraetsche wrote:

Fey wrote:...I wonder if there are Germans in the afterlife????

Not in hell, where all the Dutchies end.

If Petrus was German, he would let you take a penalty first to get into heaven.

Or wait..before germans die..they actually go to heaven first and reserve a spot by laying down a towel somewhere!

How Dutch are you?

http://www.justgodutch.com/quiz.html