LVIV, UKRAINE—A Dutch team that scored 37 goals in 10 Euro qualifying matches could not get out of each other’s way to find even one on Saturday night.
Denmark rode one magnificent goal from unfancied journeyman Michael Krohn-Dehli, an ankle-breaking feint and rush to goal that put Denmark over one of the tournament favourites, 1-0.
EURO 2012 FULL COVERAGEThis was no fluke. Denmark traded blows with the Netherlands, a tactic that is not supposed to work. This Danish team immediately recalls visions of the 1994 squad that won the Euro after being subbed in to the tournament after Yugoslavia’s withdrawal. Is Denmark capable of notching the two least expected big tournament upsets in football history? And would that make them the best, small footballing nation ever?
The Dutch won’t be worrying about that this morning. They’ll be trying to get all their forwards and forward-minded players (just about everyone aside from the goalkeeper) to talk to each other. The old knock on the Dutch was that they were all too good to share the ball. They’d buried that tendency in recent years, but it looked like bad, old ball-hogging Holland in Kharkiv on Saturday.
No team is off to quite so miserable a start here.
Black players on the Dutch team were infamously subjected to monkey chants during a Krakow practice on Thursday. In a subsequent news conference, the manager, Bert van Marwijk, and the team captain, Marc van Bommel, appeared to have completely differing views on how that incident went down — speaking to the old suspicion that the Dutch don’t make good teammates for each other.
This loss badly dents their chances of advancing. Denmark was supposed to be the punching bag in this tournament’s Group of Death, which also features Germany and Portugal.
The Dutch now have to hope Denmark’s display here was only briefly a surprise, soon to become the new normal for the Scandinavians.
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