Soccer: Dutch masters create their own disaster

Denmark's Michael Krohn-Dehli celebrates after scoring against the Netherlands. Photo / AP

Inevitably there were moments of the highest class, at times even a touch of surreal beauty, but in some vital respects the new masters of Dutch football are pretty much like the old.

So often they leave the killing to others - on this occasion a respected but hardly lauded striker from Denmark - and then look back to all those lost possibilities.

No three more talented performers than Wesley Sneijder, Arjen Robben and, supremely, Robin van Persie, will ever do it more bitterly if this disaster remains unredeemed against the weight of Germany and the potential of Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo to turn any game in which he finds himself.

Van Persie, in this season of maximum career opportunity, will be haunted by his failure to do that on which he has built his prodigious reputation - a touch here, a strike there, some predatory move which can undermine opponents.

The invitation came repeatedly - as Holland outshot Denmark by a huge 27 to seven going into the last desperate moments - but each time the opportunity slipped by.

Robben seemed locked in the disappointment of his second failure to turn a Champions League final in favour of his Bayern Munich. Sneijder seemed no more than a ghost of the man who did it for Jose Mourinho in the colours of Internazionale.

It has been said of the Dutch that they could wake up one morning bored with the hotel decor and promptly go on strike.

Certainly it is true that while an emotionally unstable team - just one European title and three World Cup final defeats through all the glorious years - might fairly claim a more serious psychological buffeting going into this opening of the Group of Death, they once again seemed intent on making some of their own problems.

The trauma of training ground monkey chants was not sufficient, apparently, to prevent coach Bert van Marwijk putting his faith in one of the victims, 18-year-old Jetro Willems, who was picked at left-back as the youngest ever Euro performer, and there was an impressive swagger to the early work of the team which went into such drastic creative hibernation right from the start of the last World Cup final.

So was this the starting point for redemption which came so gloriously in this tournament in 1988, when Marco van Basten announced himself as one of the greatest strikers in the history of the game?

Van Persie, in whom many of the world's great clubs, we are relentlessly informed, see the same potential, had the chance to make a similar impact last night - but three times he made something of a parody of the finishing which made him the scourge of the Premier League last season.

Sneijder twice opened up the Danish defence, and twice Van Persie inexplicably failed to pull the trigger, the second time at a potentially pivotal point when the Dutch, wounded by the first-half strike of Michael Krohn-Dehli, resumed in a frenzy of aggression.

Sneijder opened up the way in his most clinical mode. But Van Persie froze - again.

There was a terrible irony in this for an increasingly concerned Marwijk. In the first half Van Persie had crafted a beautiful cross for Sneijder, who couldn't produce the required conviction.

In the end the Danes, one of the most underrated football nations, had something to spare.

Once again the Dutch had sought out still another disaster of their own troubled making.

In yesterday's other game, Germany beat Portugal 1-0.

- Independent