RAMPANT LIONS TEACH DUTCH A TOTAL FOOTBALLING LESSON
“You have to look at a side like Ajax, say they’re the best in the world and ask: ‘What can we learn?’ You can’t copy them, but you have to identify what we can use and what we can’t use.”
When Terry Venables spoke to FFT just before Euro 96, he was hardly giving the game away. England’s head coach had waxed lyrical about Dutch football “ever since my youth-team days”, and their influence had been noted – sometimes sarcastically, but mostly sympathetically. After all, under his predecessor, Graham Taylor, England had regressed from the inconsistent but promising football of Italia 90 to a side of “Hit Les”, “Can we not knock it?” and a worryingly crucial role being played by Carlton Palmer. A long-ball side, in other words – and not even a good one.
Venables wasn’t anyone-but-Taylor: he was the anti-Taylor, designed to replace country-cousin parochialism with continental panache, because you don’t get to manage Barcelona by telling the lads to hoof it upfield for 90 minutes. He wanted players who were comfortable in possession and fluid in position – “a fusion of the best of English traditions with a Dutch influence,” explained the 53-year-old.
He had spent nearly two years coaching his men to play like the Dutch, when the Euro 96 draw destined them to face the
