This sympathetic portrait of the Dutch super coach, Guus Hiddink, is written by fellow compatriot, Maarten Meijer. The author interviewed Hiddink, his parents, brothers, friends, and former colleagues in the Netherlands and is a fascinating and intimate account of the "Hiddink phenomenon".
From Hiddink’s childhood years in Varsseveld, a small Dutch town hugging the German border, to stints as a professional player at De Graafschap, NEC-Nijmegen, and PSV-Eindhoven - the soccer madness in Turkey , Spanish managerial intrigues and drilling the Socceroos at training camps hidden in Dutch forests - all this has helped to shape Hiddink into the multi-talented, psychologically sharp, international soccer authority he is today. He led the Dutch national team, "Clockwork Orange," to the quarter-finals during the 1998 World Cup through his insistence on performance-based soccer. He employed the same strategy in Korea and successfully coached the Korean national team to a fourth place in the World Cup.
This new and updated edition covers Hiddink's latest adventure as coach of the Socceroos. The "commutes" between PSV-Eindhoven and Socceroos-Sydney show to what lengths the Dutch soccer master is willing to go to give new meaning to the term "total football." The super coach managed to pull off the unthinkable - take Australia to its second World Cup after 32 long years.
