The Netherlands have had the fans of the tournament. That may not be much consolation for them after losing to England so late in Dortmund, but it’s true. Yet the legions of Dutch supporters who turned the city into a sea of orange could not help their team over the line. Ultimately, it was the players who came up short.
Was it the injury to Memphis Depay that turned the game after what had begun as a full-throated Dutch assault? Or the penalty given against Denzel Dumfries for apparently inconsequential contact? Or was it what the critics of Ronald Koeman’s team had been saying all along: that this team was just not Dutch enough, not technical enough in the key areas to ensure victory at the latter stages of a tournament?
In the end it felt like the last of these. Depay had flitted in and out of the tournament and when he went down with a hamstring injury on the half-hour it gave Koeman a chance to staunch a lot of bleeding. England had dominated the first half after going behind to a Xavi Simons belter and the manager had to stiffen his side. That he duly did, with first Joey Veerman then Wout Weghorst coming into the play, and the Netherlands reverted to the kind of compact, functional team that could hold England at bay for long periods but not properly impose themselves. And in the end, the dam burst.
So let’s scroll back for a moment and think about what will be an indelible memory for so many Dutch football fans. The party had begun at about 9am when it quickly became clear that any estimates as to the number of Oranje in Dortmund were way under. By 10am there were people dancing on the streets to techno coming out of an orange pickup truck. By 11am, the bars were full. By 1pm the streets were full too.
The pre-game peaked, naturally, with the fan march, which moved from the city centre along the “green path” to the stadium more than four hours before kick-off. Being inside it felt like a cross between the density of people you get at Notting Hill carnival and the noise of the Kop on a European night, except with people hanging off lamp-posts, bobbing left to right and wearing all kind of orange apparatus; from a plastic coif to a bishop’s mitre and a humble toilet plunger.
Inside the ground the promised Orange Wall turned out to be an Orange Quoin, bending round the south-west corner of the BVB Stadion. But there was energy in abundance for the Dutch to feed off and Simons was wolfing it down. His opening goal happened in the blink of an eye; robbing Declan Rice, driving forward and slamming the ball beyond Jordan Pickford in four touches. Looking like a player who’d been told he could take a leading role on such a big stage, Simons led the press, linked the play and was the emblem of the team’s good start.
With Simons in a No 10 position, however, it was two Dutch central midfielders against a miasma of England attackers and midfielders, floating about the place, picking up space. As soon as it became clear that England backed themselves to get into the game, the Netherlands struggled to hold on to what they had won and the noise from the fans began to ebb away. The penalty was contentious, and afterwards the Dutch players seemed willing to cling to an injustice as consolation, but their manager acted to change the shape of his team entirely by half-time to lessen the English threat.
The substitutions had the effect Koeman intended, but the adjustment was something he may have wished to avoid all the same. Gone was the high press and all the intensity off the ball. Gone was much of the sense of attacking threat. Instead the Netherlands were playing like Slovakia and Switzerland had before them, getting numbers behind the ball and looking to prosper from set plays. This is what his critics have held against him.
With 15 minutes of the second half gone, whistles began to drift up. But then Jerdy Schouten forced Luke Shaw into conceding a throw-in and the first cheer for some time could be heard. From that throw a free kick followed and Veerman floated an expert ball to the back post where a touch from Virgil van Dijk forced Pickford into a low save.
That was enough to swing the momentum of the game for a spell. It wasn’t pretty to watch, but as England laboured to unlock the massed ranks and started to force their play, the Netherlands began to see more of the ball. With every cross there was danger in the England box. That in turn meant England had to change. With 10 minutes to go, Gareth Southgate did and the pendulum swung once more, this time decisively against the Netherlands.
