It is difficult to think that a club other than PSV, Ajax and Feyenoord could climb onto the podium of the Eredivisie. Yes, of course, in the past it has happened that AZ Alkmaar or Twente managed to temporarily dethrone one of the three queens. The point, however, is that this year, in the fight to get into the Champions League, there is a team never seen before, and not only because it has never reached these levels: it is the way it plays that makes it unique and special. It is N.E.C. (acronym for Nijmegen Eendracht Combinatie), which represents the city of Nijmegen and which in 125 years of history has never gone beyond qualification for the UEFA Cup (reached in 1983, in 2003 and in 2008). And which this year, when we are at the 30th matchday of the championship out of 34, has put together 72 goals scored and 48 conceded.
The table at the moment says that N.E.C. is third behind PSV (already mathematically the winner of the championship) and Feyenoord, which however has only a single point of advantage. In fourth and fifth place, therefore still in the running for qualification for the Champions League (the Eredivisie enters two teams in the League Phase and one in the preliminaries), are Ajax and Twente. The point, as said, is that N.E.C. is living through an incredible championship – the best in its history – and has also reached the Dutch Cup final against AZ, scheduled for Sunday 19 April, thanks to a tactical approach that can be considered very ambitious. Not to say reckless. It is the fans of Nijmegen and surroundings themselves who confess it: Stefan, a 67-year-old who has followed the team at the stadium ever since he was little, told ESPN that «N.E.C. plays in a crazy way, madness is precisely the right word. The other teams now come here and tremble with fear».
The basic idea, among those on which the play of coach Dick Schreuder is based, is that of pressing. A total pressing, very intense, suffocating. A pressing that is born in the course of training sessions that the Dutch journalists define as «exhausting, with no respite between one exercise and another». From the point of view of the spacings, that is the formation, the arrangement on the pitch of the N.E.C. players would seem to retrace the 3-4-2-1 system. In reality, however, the so-called wing-backs of the midfield are actually pure wingers. And the central defenders too push forward and overlap incessantly. The offensive mechanism preferred by Schreuder is precisely the search for width and for the isolation of whoever finds himself on the flank: N.E.C. is the second team in the Eredivisie for dribbles attempted and the third for crosses from open play.
It is clear: an approach of this kind, so radical, determines inevitable defensive imbalances. At times, especially against the more gifted opponents, the very high pressing – the only way to defend on transitions when so many players move into the opponent’s half – is eluded and the spaces widen: thus results like the 3-5 against PSV in mid-September, the 2-2 against Ajax before Christmas, the 1-3 conceded to Utrecht in February are explained. At the same time, however, N.E.C. managed to beat PSV both in the Cup semi-final and in the return match of the championship, on both occasions 3-2, and remained unbeaten (1-1 and 2-2) against Ajax. In short, the game is worth the candle.
Then there would be other absurd things to recount: for example the story of the owner and president Boekhoorn, an eccentric billionaire who took over a zoo near Utrecht and did the impossible to import a pair of pandas from China, succeeding in 2016. N.E.C. is in reality managed by important directors, first among them the technical director Carlos Aalbers (considered a sort of master of the Japanese and Asian transfer market in general), but it remains nonetheless a team that borders on madness. In the last match of the championship, the head-to-head with Feyenoord, coach Schreuder brought on three attackers in place of three defenders to try to recover a one-goal deficit, and precisely one of the substitutes (Danilo) found the equalising goal in the 97th minute. A few instants, what’s more, from a sensational miss in front of goal. Nothing that one could not have expected, from N.E.C.