A Brotherly Rivalry on the Pitch: Netherlands vs Japan

Japan's Ritsu Doan and Netherlands' Cody Gakpo in action during the 2-2 draw IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters/Tim Heitman

This, really, is what a World Cup is all about.

From early Sunday morning, downtown Dallas was flooded with blue Japan shirts and orange Dutch shirts, all sheltering from a sudden burst of torrential rain, swapping notes on precisely how you make the considerable journey over to Arlington for one of the most highly anticipated fixtures of this World Cup group stage.

The brotherhood off the pitch was, to a certain extent, mirrored by the approaches on it. The Dutch essentially popularized positive possession-based football and integrated movement in the 1970s, and while they’ve often somewhat betrayed those principles — they were eliminated at the 2006 World Cup and 2010 World Cup by Portugal and Spain after playing overly aggressive football — they still fundamentally believe in technical and tactical football.

Japan, meanwhile, are perhaps the ‘neatest’ football side around these days — all clever passes and angles and rotations of position. They eternally seem on the right path, but remain yet to reach the quarter-finals of the World Cup. Maybe their technical approach is why Dutch clubs like signing Japanese players. For the first time in the Netherlands’ 56 games at the World Cup, none of their starting XI play their club football in the Eredivisie. But Japan had two: Feyenoord’s Tsuoyshi Watanbe and Ayase Ueda.

Wherever you looked, interesting things were happening. The Netherlands were determined to get midfield runners in behind in the opening stages, while Donyell Malen twice came close in the first half.

At the other end, Japan were trying to do their usual tactic — overloading the opposition back four by pushing their wing-backs on to form a back five. The Netherlands responded to this in an intelligent manner, with midfielder Frenkie de Jong dropping into a left-sided centre-back role, turning a back four into a back five, but ensuring Virgil van Dijk remained in a central position to head away crosses.

The first half featured no goals. But it was a tense, intriguing game. It exploded into life in the second half. And this is always the preferable order of things. No football match is ever intense and thrilling for 90 minutes. Morocco’s clash against Brazil, the only other game so far that has featured two strong sides, started brilliantly but faded after the break. Here, things became increasingly frantic.

Five minutes into the second half, Van Dijk’s stooped header opened the scoring, and Japan were forced to respond. They did so with a deflected finish from Keito Nakamura, moving inside from left-wing-back to finish with his right foot. He’d hit a similar effort into the side-netting in the first half, and a notable feature of Japan’s system is that they play with inverted wing-backs — both he and Ritsu Doan want to hold width, but also cut inside to play neat passes.

The Dutch also had players cutting inside, and while Cody Gakpo had a couple of decent efforts from the left, it was Cyrensio Summerville who restored the Netherlands’ lead. This was his first international goal, and he was probably only playing because their all-time record goalscorer Memphis Depay wasn’t 100 per cent fit.

That was the second Dutch goal that bounced in off the post, but Japan responded with their second goal that bounced off a player en route goal goal — substitute striker Koki Ogawa, another who plays in the Netherlands with NEC Nijmegen, headed towards goal, and the ball flicked off Daichi Kamada and evaded goalkeeper Bert Verbruggen.

At full-time, the giant screen at Dallas Stadium cut to a shot of Kamada clenching his fists, celebrating the draw, and then a shot of the substituted Summerville ruing Japan’s late equaliser. Both sides had secured a point, but they had very different emotions afterwards.

The post-match press conferences said much about the emotions of the two nations — and, maybe about the varying levels of diplomacy in Japan and the Netherlands. The assembled Japanese journalists politely asked Hajime Moriyasu to outline his impressions of the game, while the first Dutch question to Ronald Koeman was a typically blunt, “So, do you regret the substitutions you made?”, which promoted a simple response of, “I have no regrets, no.”

After Moriyasu’s press conference was seemingly over, his microphone was turned off and his press officer tried to usher him away, he asked to stay on. The microphone was turned on. “Since we have lots of Dutch journalists here today, I’d like to say something else,” he said, speaking in his native language. “I would like to express my gratitude towards Dutch football — as a national team and especially in my case. When we didn’t have a progressional league (in the early 1990s), Hans Ooft came to Japan and was an excellent coach. So many Japanese players trained and developed under him.”

Moriyasu was referencing when Ooft had plucked himself, an unheralded midfielder with seemingly no chance of a professional football career, and turned him into a key part of the national side.

“There have been so many Dutch players and managers who have contributed to our football,” he continued, largely speaking to a room full of Dutch journalists who, sadly, hadn’t bothered to listen in on the translation.

But it was a fitting final note, at the end of a game with a genuine feel-good vibe.

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