Divided they crash

Lack of unity has been the bugbear of many teams, especially The Netherlands, at Euro 2012

Skill, obviously, is primary in sport. But unless there is unity, the 16 national teams cannot get far, let alone win the Euro 2012. Ask the Dutch, and maybe the Portuguese.

They have superbly gifted individuals such as Wesley Sneijder and Cristiano Ronaldo. Their sides are loaded with potential match winners. Yet by the start of this week, one or both of these countries will be on the first plane home, their talents wasted.

Maybe, deep down, some of them want to go. The climate is unforgivingly hot in Ukraine, the politics around the sport are repressive, and while the accommodation is five star, the players confined to it have to be good companions.

The Netherlands once more are a disputatious group. Two apparently incompatible fellow travelers are Robin van Persie and Klaas-Jan Huntelaar. They might be asked to share the striking roles or, as Coach Bert van Marwijk prefers, one to start and the other to wait on the bench.

In Holland’s case, it could be the coach whose presence is divisive. A winger in his playing prime, van Marwijk does not trust the Dutch instinct for expansive “Total Football.”

Some of us learned a new word in Polish before the games began here a week ago when a Polish newspaper headlined van Marwijk’s personal approach as “arogancji.”

It means the same in any language. The local media found the Dutchman somewhat dogmatic. Players might share that opinion, but from the days of Johan Cruyff in the early 1970s, it wouldn’t be Holland without friction.

The same often happens in Germany’s base, and the French, English and Portuguese are occasionally divided among themselves. Encampment, or “concentracao” as the Brazilians described it 50 years ago, is the devil’s garden in which to grow a common purpose. Apart from their families, the players spend a month in confinement. They are asked to live a life as abstemious as monks. Card games, videos, pool and Internet can only preoccupy a certain amount of their leisure time.

Back in 1970, when Joao Saldanha built arguably the best Brazilian squad of them all, he laid down house rules. The encampment then could last three months, so players were allowed basic needs. “I had a rule,” Saldanha once told me, “that the players could have a woman in their room. But they must not change the woman in midweek.”

Saldanha was informed that one player had a new girl. “I had to inspect,” Saldanha said, his eyes beginning the laughter. “I told this guy he was a handsome double-crosser. The girl was beautiful, so I had no choice. I confiscated her!”

Men will be men, and nowadays, when most at this championship are millionaires, laying down the law gets harder.

The teams that hit the ground running in this Euro are those who arrived more concentrated than others. Germany, Russia, Spain, set the pace.

Significantly, the Germans have seven Bayern Munich teammates in their starting eleven. It shows when Mario Gomez makes his move into scoring positions that he knows Thomas Muller and Bastian Schweinsteiger will be looking for his runs between the central defenders even before he starts them.

That isn’t instinct, it is hours and hours of practice in Munich. Should Gomez miss the chances, which he hasn’t thus far, Miroslav Klose will be ready. Klose, before he went to Rome last season, was another Bayern man. It doesn’t mean that Joachim Low, the national coach, slavishly mimics the Munich strategy. He has young players from Borussia Dortmund, which regularly beats Bayern over the past two years, to blend in.

Russia follows a similar plan. Seven of its senior players are from Zenit St Petersburg, where a Dutch coach, Dick Advocaat, trained before he took the national Russian team job. “It obviously helps,” the goalkeeper Vyacheslav Malafeev, said, “that the coach knows what he’s doing, and we know one another’s qualities so well.”

The same is said, though not yet proven, in Italy. “When Juventus is strong,” goes the mantra, “the Azzurri is strong.” This Azzurri, the national squad, contains seven of the current Italian league champion club, Juventus. Even Andrea Pirlo, the playmaker and the most influential passer in the side, joined Juve last summer after a decade at AC Milan.

Ukraine’s squad has nine players from Dynamo Kiev and five from the relatively new power, Shakhtar Donetsk. The team that they are all striving to emulate, and to knock off its perch, is the world and European champion, Spain. The hardest task that coach Vicente Del Bosque has is to create harmony between the seven Barcelona players and the five from Real Madrid in his selection.

Particularly since Jose Mourinho arrived as Madrid’s coach two years ago, the Madridistas have tried, and lately achieved, every trick in the book – and some that are outside it – to disrupt the mellifluous flow of the Catalans. Yet they won the World Cup together, they are defending the European Championship as a unit, and Madrid’s defender Alvaro Arbeloa told the media this week:

“We all know how to differentiate between club and country, and we are all here with the objective of retaining our trophy. If there are differences between us then we’ll sort them out. There is no split.”

Say it often enough, and it might go away until the next time Madrid meets Barca. But drawing together two sometimes embittered clubs is a comparative breeze to the Dutch conundrum.

From a land that lacks the wealthy clubs to keep home talents, the Netherlands pieces together a starting line-up of players earning their salaries in nine different clubs and five different countries.  The Dutch adapt favourably abroad, but sometimes they return to the home camp like strangers.

“It is time we let go some of these pathetic egos,” said Sneijder after the team’s second straight loss. “We don’t need a psychologist, we are grown up men. The ones with problems with other players or the coach should tell them face to face. We have to be united, or face the consequences.”