Guus Hiddink’s time at the Netherlands national team for a second spell is fast turning out into a nightmare after his team’s latest defeat.
Even though it was only a friendly match, the 4-3 loss against United States has raised a lot of questions about the manager and his immediate future. Since taking over from Louis van Gaal after the World Cup 2014, Hiddink has overseen a terrible run of form. The team are not in the automatic qualification places for the Euro 2016. After having managed to wins from the last five qualification games, the Dutch sit five points away from Iceland and a further one point away from table leaders Czech Republic.
For the last few months, it seemed thatHiddink had finally managed to take hold of this Dutch team. The team have gone through three matches without defeat and this included a friendly victory over Spain back in April. Things, though, have turned sour once again after this latest defeat against United States. It is made worse by the fact that Netherlands had a 3-1 advantage after 53 minutes. Yet, they threw the game away and managed to lose courtesy of a late goal from Wood.
“If you look at the first half, we did create some chances, but even at 0-0 they went clean through on [goalkeeper] Jasper Cillessen. You know you have to slow the game down in the last couple of minutes. We had to make it 4-2 but instead we gave away the match.We need to kill a match and that’s what we didn’t do. Especially with these temperatures it’s important to do that. I don’t want to talk about individuals, but we did give away chances too easily,” said the manager. The national team’s next match is a qualification match against Latvia.