Talking football

One of the great enigmas in professional football these days is, in the eyes of the fans, how players can communicate in squads with so many nationalities. Some sort of football Esperanto must have evolved over the years to make a new exotic signing instantly understand the offside trap or the quirks of the opponents' set pieces in his debut game.

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Ajax Number 9 Dennis Bergkamp: The original schaduwspits

Hopefully some linguistic researchers will one day put their Old Tupi or Susquehannock textbooks aside and try to get a grasp of this novel tongue, globally spoken and mimicked in dressing rooms and training grounds.

Meanwhile, as supporters we have our own lingo that has evolved over the years through newspaper reports, television shows, press conferences and maybe even fan forums. I believe a citizen of the 19th century would be completely baffled by the language if a time machine would enable him to follow a conversation between football fans in a pub. And every country has made up its own expressions. The Dutch football language might well be one of the most international of all. We have integrated words and phrases from east and west, north and south.

Few football nations were initially so focussed on the English as we were. The highlights of the early years of Dutch football, around the 1890s, were the games against the Brits. Not the national team, but the mighty Harwich and Parkeston Football Club, that crossed the North Sea in 1892 to play the unofficial Dutch champions Sparta in Rotterdam.

Reports of the time suggest a big crowd of close to one thousand and a spirited fight by the strengthened home team. The visitors from the Essex League left with a mere an eight goal victory, much appreciated by the home crowd. Anything British was considered the apex of footballing culture, which culminated in an influx of trainers to the Lowlands in the early decennia of the 20th century.

As a consequence of this influence our language is still awash with English football vocabulary. Words like 'corner', 'keeper', 'goal', 'tackle', 'dribble', 'sliding' and 'penalty' do have Dutch equivalents, but these have never become as widely used as the Anglicism. All over the country you can find Boys Clubs, like Nijmeegse Boys and Wilhelmina Boys. If they have female teams the nomer 'Girls' is usually added. There is also an abundance of clubs with English names, like Go Ahead Eagles. Others have not caught on, like Rovers, which sounds quite criminal, or Kickers. Popular in Germany, but not in Holland where a kikker is a frog.

And it used to be even more. Until deep into the 60s commentators on radio and television would speak of 'free-kick', 'offside' and a 'save'. For unknown reasons these phrases did not survive the Total Football era. In those days the tactical innovations came from other nations and we integrated these as well. From Germany came the 'ausputzer', a defender who had to cover the back of the other three defenders and the 'libero' from Italy.

In the Eredivisie the libero could wander into midfield while an Ausputzer would never leave his position. The centre half never caught on though, nor did the catenaccio system. The latter earned a negative image almost immediately. Negative, but with a poetic ring to it is the German 'schwalbe', which is common Dutch for the dive to fool the referee. Rumour has it that this deceiving plot originated from German football so this can be seen as a tribute to remember the days when the eastern neighbours were not that popular. Since the end of Lothar Mattheus's career this feeling has mellowed greatly.

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Lous Van Gaal: Added to the football lexicon

And the Netherlands have made some jargon of our own. During the nineties Louis van Gaal introduced a position which would become typically Dutch and, as far as I know, was never taken over in any language or by any foreign club: the shadow striker. Dennis Bergkamp was the first attacker lurking behind the strike-force in the early 90s Ajax team that won the UEFA Cup, followed by Jari Litmanen in the Champions League years. The name 'schaduwspits' was an invented by the press to describe this position as Louis van Gaal used to refer to 'the number nine'.

In those days shirts were still numbered one to eleven and Van Gaal defined every position on the pitch with a couple of tasks. He would never speak of a right-back, but of 'the number two', and every football fan in Holland would know what was expected of this player.

Van Gaal graced our language with more novelties as he also introduced squeezing or 'knijpen' in Dutch. When a defender has left too much space between himself and his colleagues any Dutch coach or player on whatever level will yell this term before an opponent will benefit and sneak through.

His colleague Co Adriaanse once coined the term 'scoreboard reporting', when his team AZ had lost 5-1 at home and a reporter asked him whether they had played badly. Adriaanse pointed out that the journalist only considered the score to judge the performance. He himself had seen his players do sufficiently, apart from the scoring, while the opponents had made goals in almost every attack and actually had not much of the game. However, this term is used mainly in an ironic context nowadays.

Other sports are a trove for football expressions as well. Our hat-trick is used in its strict definition as it has in cricket. Only when scoring three goals in a row and in one half a player may claim one, which makes the hat-trick very special in Dutch football. The 'assist' from ice hockey is also very common, while American baseball has brought us 'the pinch-hitter'. I used this in an earlier column for Soccernet and was asked what it meant, so apparently the pinch-hitter is a typical Dutch phenomenon, which in England is known as the super-sub.

So now I finally reach to the point of this exposé and I am able to tell you we do have an actual pinch-hitter in the Eredivisie at the moment. Melvin Platje of Volendam scored six goals as a substitute in the last three months, lifting his team from a hopeless last position in the league and also propelling them into the semi-final of the cup. His coach Frans Adelaar says Platje does not know how to spread his energy over 90 minutes, which makes him ineffectual as a starter. As a substitute he does a perfect job.

And to conclude this article nicely he scored his first two official goals of the season with another typical Anglo-Dutchism. Both goals were 'hands', which is our abbreviation of handball. It may not even be proper English.