“I am the shop window – he is the goods in the back.”
That was famously how Brian Clough described his indispensable assistant coach Peter Taylor.
There are managerial duos who come as a package and Sarina Wiegman and Arjan Veurink certainly fall into that category. Players describe him as the Lionesses’ “unsung hero” and an irreplaceable part of their set-up, but Wiegman is preparing to face up to life without her right-hand man.
At the end of Euro 2025, he will leave England to take over from as Netherlands head coach. The passing of the baton is already wearing down on current incumbent Andries Jonker, who last week snapped at a journalist who described him as operating a “puppet show”.
Jonker was told the news in January. Now he has a chance to exact revenge – beat England and Veurink’s current employers are likely to be out.
The man from Ommen
Veurink initially forged his reputation with FC Twente. He had coached his local team, Ommen, in a tiny city of just 8,000 inhabitants deep in the Dutch valleys.
At Twente, he had four key principles and believed they were especially important in a women’s team. Players had to be cared for, feel needed, feel appreciated and feel listened to. Before a ball was kicked in training, they had to feel they were a unit – each player would be sat down and told individually why he valued them. He is painstakingly precise.
In four hugely successful years at Twente, he won four BeNe League titles and even more pertinently, had his first encounters with the ADO Den Haag coach: Sarina Wiegman, a rival who became his friend, colleague and ultimately his boss.
While she now relies on him for intense fitness drills and video work, he also plays a similarly important role in building team morale. He has led quizzes in the England camp, making the captain of each team wear an armband.
Captain Leah Williamson has been taken with his “football brain”.
“He works so hard and he’s’ a very tactical man,” Williamson says. “He’s got a lot of ideas about football. And he always challenges me. Sometimes he knows he pushes me because I go to bite at him. But he’s been a great person to have around the team, especially in the 2022 Euros.
“I think we all appreciated him for the role that he played and have done ever since.”
Why is Veurink leaving?
Like Wiegman, Veurink had been under contract until 2027 when he was offered the chance to manage his homeland. It was an offer he simply couldn’t refuse.
“It was a difficult circumstance in a way because it was his dream job and he has a young family in the Netherlands,” explained FA chief executive Mark Bullingham.
“I’m sure it’s the only opportunity he would have been tempted by and it ticked a lot of his boxes on a personal level. Obviously it’s his home country and there was the opportunity to live at home with his family again. We saw it as a unique set of circumstances and given everything he had done for us, we were able to give him that opportunity to leave his contract early.”
Veurink has long had a good relationship with the KNVB, the Dutch football federation. He spent four years with the national side as Wiegman’s assistant, winning the Euros in 2017 and reaching the World Cup final two years later.
When England travelled to Utrecht for a Nations League game in 2023, the warmth with which he was greeted by the Dutch staff was palpable.
The Netherlands playing the Lionesses in a game with such high stakes – you almost couldn’t write it. The same universe that is pitting England’s Beth Mead and her Dutch partner Vivianne Miedema against one another has a funny way of playing tricks.
Veurink will be replaced by not one, but two coaches – also Dutch – who will start work as his successors in October. Janneke Bijl and Arvid Smit were both international footballers and have worked for the KNVB.
Will Wiegman remain a winner without him?
“Oh, I’ll miss a lot about him,” sighs Wiegman. “I don’t want to think about that yet. We want to be at our best and perform at our best so we can support the team at best together with the full staff.
“We’ve worked together for eight and a half years and it goes so smoothly. We’re so complementary and it’s so natural. That’s what I’ll miss. He’s just a very, very good man, a good guy and a very good coach.”
But the other half of that famous Clough quote is worth remembering too: “I’m not equipped to manage successfully without Peter Taylor.”
Wiegman will have to prove she is not so reliant on her protege that she cannot win trophies without him. She has already lost women’s technical director Kay Cossington, a hugely influential figure, and director of women’s football Sue Campbell, key figures behind the scenes.
As much as Wiegman talks of a “new England” on the pitch, how her reinvented coaching staff fare could be equally decisive.
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/z6hkDyV
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