Analysis: Ronald Koeman did not understand the consequences of his choices

After a match in which the Dutch national team scored twice between the posts, Ronald Koeman and Virgil van Dijk were positive about the game plan. This illustrates the fundamental error in the choices made by the national coach: the side effects of the system change have been massively underestimated. What if Issa Diop hadn't sneaked forward to head in a cross in the 91st minute? That question haunted Ronald Koeman's mind after the elimination of the Dutch team.

Where he could have referred the critics of his tactics to the result in a 1-0 victory, he now stood empty-handed, claiming that his battle plan had turned out 'positively'. The national coach was referring to the defensive effects of adding Nathan Aké to the final line. "Defensively you can think what you want about it," Koeman analyzed. "We gave away much less against a much better team than Sweden and Tunisia. If I had to do it again, I would do it again. If that goal does not come, the 1-1 in extra time, then I get the compliments and now I am fairly finished based on the fact that I choose five defenders. But again, I thought that was necessary. I talked to the players about it, and in the end they thought so too, because we gave away too many moments, too many spaces. And if that had happened tonight, we would have I haven't been in extra time for a long time. But that's my opinion, you see it differently. You criticize me for that and that's okay. You see that football from the side. I know what we had to improve in this way. And again: if I had to do it again, I would have done the same.

Yet even Koeman had to admit that his team played below par with the ball. 'We brought less offensively.' Koeman refused to see that one thing (creating extra security) was directly related to the other (hardly creating decent attacks). The Dutch team seemed not to have taken these negative side effects into account. Three predictable problems that Koeman overlooked when evaluating his battle plan.