sport news After Phil Neville's passion, deadpan Dutch coach Sarina Wiegman is fanning ... trends now
There is something about the England women’s football squad and fire pits. Before the last World Cup, coach Phil Neville took the players out into the Qatari desert and sat them down around the flames at dusk to share stories and foster mutual respect.
Sarina Wiegman, the 52-year-old Dutch coach who leads them into the European Championship at Old Trafford on Wednesday night, employed the same method in less exotic surrounds. A large communal room was cleared at St George’s Park last October, and a video of flames projected into a drum created a virtual camp fire, as players lounged on beanbags, drank hot chocolate and related their journeys through the sport.
Wiegman’s more functional and spartan setting says much about the difference in the squad’s management between now and when Neville led them to a World Cup semi-final three years ago.
Sarina Wiegman (centre) is tasked with delivering England a first major trophy since 1966
Neville, who had spent the best part of his life amid the machismo of Manchester United and Everton, seemed to feel a need to convince he belonged in the sometimes bewildering world he had stumbled into. He could be self-deprecating, inspiring, emotional, unintentionally comedic and he expended a lot of energy in the process. ‘Grab it with both arms, both legs, all your body,’ was his message to the team before the semi-final against the United States.
Wiegman, whose Netherlands side lost to the US in the final in 2019, having won the 2017 Euros, feels no need to justify herself. She is the epitome of composure, who does not go in for grand gestures, never uses a sentence when a word will do and can be eye-wateringly direct. Though the players who operated under Neville are reluctant to offer any direct comparison, it is clear that they feel Wiegman represents progress.
‘She takes the emotion out of it,’ says Millie Bright, who will be one of the anchors of England’s central defence. ‘To be in the best football environment you have to have those difficult conversations.
Wiegman has a depth of players Phil Neville was not blessed with three years ago
‘It’s never a comment to me directly as a person, more as a footballer, and you have to be like that; have those difficult conversations. If you want to get from A to B you have to go up another level and have them. It’s not personal. It’s football. That’s been our mindset change.’
The bluntness extended to a final squad selection which entailed players waiting together for a text message calling them individually to Wiegman’s room, to hear their fate. We only have the selected players’ word for it, but Wiegman, who dropped former captain Steph Houghton, appears to have handled the process with an emotional fluency that Glenn Hoddle lacked as England manager in 1998, when the same method reduced a discarded Paul Gascoigne to tearful fury.
The Dutch coach led the Netherlands to victory on home soil at Euro 2017
It helps that Wiegman has a depth of players Neville was not blessed with three years ago. Above all, multiple attacking options including Lauren Hemp, the rapid left-sided 21-year-old forward who is surprisingly self-critical. She declares that her decision-making could be better and that she is too dependent on her left foot. ‘I think I just use the right one
