'Scotland can reach final of World Cup' insists Mark Wotte
THE man entrusted with producing a generation of players to restore Scottish football to its former glory is nothing if not ambitious. No sooner had Dutchman Mark Wotte introduced himself at Hampden Park yesterday than he was quietly insisting that there was no reason why the country in which he will work for the foreseeable future cannot reach the World Cup final.
The Scottish Football Association's first-ever performance director comes with an eclectic CV that includes spells in Egypt, Qatar and at Southampton but the most eye-catching chapters of his career have been in his homeland, where he was technical director of Feyenoord, and more pertinently, coach of the Netherlands' under-21 squad. He helped to bring through several of the players who finished World Cup runners-up to Spain in Johannesburg last summer.
If the Dutch can do it, asks Wotte, why not Scotland, another small country from northern Europe? "I am convinced that we can maybe get to reach a World Cup final," he said. "It is not something that can be achieved in one or two years but you have to start somewhere. Maybe in five, seven or eight years, I don't know. With Holland in 2001, we didn't qualify for the World Cup. Ten years later we played in the World Cup final."
In 2001, Wotte was working with the backbone of last year's finalists: Maarten Stekelenburg, Nigel De Jong, Rafael Van der Vaart, Arjen Robben, Wesley Sneijder and Robin Van Persie. While he admits that he was fortunate to be blessed with a golden generation, he insists that they were handled in a manner that served the Netherlands well in the long term.
"Wesley Sneijder, we gave him like a protected status because he was very small. He was sometimes the kind of player you wanted to kick out, but we kept him in the teams. Arjen Robben at 17 played for the under-17s, under-19s and under-21s. Heitinga at 17 was playing for the under-21s. In my philosophy, age is not important. It's the quality. If we have a 16-year-old player who is very good at playing in the Premier League, why is he not playing for the under-21s? It is not logical. If they are good enough they are old enough. This is something that we did for 30 years in Holland."
And it is what the SFA, led by Wotte, will do at all levels in the years ahead. Bemused to find that Craig Levein, the national coach, is given next to no information about Scottish players under the age of 15, the performance director wants to change all that. His aim is to identify prospects at a much younger age, expose them to elite coaching and, with it, an improved standard of football. It will be better for the players, for the clubs and, in the end, the national side.
Wotte, who will start work in Scotland on 18 July, emerged from a long list of 17 applicants to be the most impressive of seven who were interviewed. Levein described the SFA's two-hour conversation with him as a "Eureka moment". The 50-year-old's thoughts chimed effortlessly with plans put in place by the SFA since Henry McLeish, the former First Minister, published his famous Review of Scottish Football.
As well as persuading clubs and coaches at all levels to buy into the nationwide strategy, Wotte's task will be to introduce a new style of play.
Like Levein, he favours Barcelona's slick passing game, the origins of which can be traced to Johan Cruyff, the Dutchman who was manager there between 1988 and 1996. He wants an end to Scotland's reliance on big, physical players, so that younger, more technical professionals, inspired by the likes of Lionel Messi and Xavi, can emerge.
"The modern football player is changing," he said. "The top four in the world are small, clever, have a very good technique and are very agile – but, most of all, they are very intelligent.
"Scotland still has a good reputation in the world because of the fighting spirit and the mentality and the Scottish way of playing, but it's not enough anymore. You need to add something to it. You see Spain and Holland playing. What is most characteristic of this style of play is that they pass five or six hundred times in a game. They don't lose the ball. They are clever. They are brave. The best clubs in the world play the passing game."
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by McNamara That Ghost...
