“Congrats to Mark van Bommel for being first player to win league titles in four different countries (PSV, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and AC Milan).”
When I read this on Twitter on Sunday morning, I nearly went straight back to bed.
If there is a player who epitomises the way the Dutch national team has been transformed over the past decade from Europe’s foremost footballing artists to a group of efficient, but soulless functionaries, it is the tall, hard-tackling midfielder.
It is quite an achievement to make a side including the likes of Wesley Sneijder and Robin van Persie boring to watch.
But, for my money, Dutch coach Bert van Marwijk – who also happens to be Van Bommel’s father-in-law – managed it last year in South Africa.
And that was before the Oranje’s brutal display in losing the World Cup final to Spain.
Van Marwijk’s tactics were successful, of course, in the sense that the Netherlands got closer than most expected to outdoing even the great Dutch teams of the 1970s by actually winning a World Cup.
But at what a cost to the image of Dutch football.
On reflection, though, I decided I was being too harsh.
Van Bommel’s success, after all, underlines that, for all the media’s relentless focus on star names such as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, football is and will always be a team game.
Like it or not, Van Bommel is one of the world’s top exponents of the art of protecting a back four and stopping the opposition from playing.
Going back through history, the best teams have generally had such a player – in the Dutch teams of 1974 and 1978 it was Wim Jansen.
When Real Madrid tried to construct a squad entirely out of galácticos and graduates of the club’s youth academy – the so-called “Pavones y Zidanes” policy – it didn’t work.
It is no coincidence that the Spanish club hasn’t won the European Cup since it transferred Claude Makelele, a consummate holding midfield player though with a very different approach to Van Bommel, to Chelsea.
So, yes, congratulations to Van Bommel for underlining the universal value of the feisty yet canny and positionally astute sitting midfield-player.
The 34-year-old Dutchman is unlikely to feature at those glitzy ceremonies where the Player of the Year Gongs are handed out, more often than not, to mesmerising playmakers or fleet-footed strikers.
But it is no bad thing that the name Mark Peter Gertruda Andreas van Bommel will be gracing the record-books nonetheless.
It reflects the reality of modern football.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938