By Chigozie Chukwuleta
The Netherlands are satisfied with their participation in the competition and grateful for bringing young players, who will be the stars of tomorrow. Although, they have qualified for the second round after losing last game to Iran 0-1, it was a nightmarish first round competition.
This much was revealed by the chief coach of the Netherlands U-17 team at the on going FIFA U-17 World Cup, Albert Stuivenberg during a chat with africansportsdigest.com. He said that the most important aspect of the tournament to them is to develop the players.
The coach said that in Netherlands’ philosophy, development comes sometimes before the result because the result determines the team for the future; hence the most important thing is to give the players the right development.
According to him, the team would like to stay as long as possible in the tournament to be able to get the right experience and the opportunity to develop themselves in the best way and the highest level. “We would like to stay as long as possible in this tournament to be able to get the right experience of it and the opportunity to develop ourselves in the best way and the highest level”.
“ In our country, our competition, our structure are good, well developed, but these international games especially against teams from countries all over the world are very important for players to make the next step for the future in their careers. That is why it is very important to be here”, he explained.
He continued: “In our philosophy, development comes sometimes before the result because the result at the end decides the biggest national team. Most important thing is to develop players in that way that they can reach that level. Of course the experience on this kind of tournaments is very important for them to be able to reach that level”.
“We like to develop players we also like to stay as long as possible in this tournament to be able to develop players. We have only about 16 million players and we produce a lot of great players all over the world and this is because our philosophy and also our structure and how we organize youth football especially.
“The last time in 2005, the result was very good when the national U-17 team was third place, this is the second time they are here now and of course we want to reach as high as possible”.