Dutch look to future but remember past
By Martin Rogers, Yahoo! Sports Thursday, Jul 8, 2010
(Jerry Cooke/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)
Follow Martin Rogers on Twitter at @mrogersyahoo
JOHANNESBURG – Amid the Netherlands’ preparations and festivities and nerve-jangling hope ahead of Sunday’s World Cup final, an extraordinary manhunt is under way. The Dutch nation, now almost universally clad in orange and hoping to celebrate the greatest moment of its sporting history, wants to find the man who came within two inches of giving them the trophy in 1978.
Rob Rensenbrink’s strike in the 90th minute of the final against Argentina 32 years ago was so nearly his finest hour. Yet instead of finding the intended target his effort clanged back off a goalpost and stayed out – and Argentina went on to win 3-1 in extra-time.
Now, just as his country wants to remember him and revel in the match that could ease those tortured thoughts of “what if?” Rensenbrink is nowhere to be found.
“No one knows where he is,” said Marcel van der Kraan, one of European soccer’s most respected columnists and football writer for Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. “It is like he has disappeared off the face of the planet.”
All the Netherlands’ major news networks, countless newspapers and several radio stations have invested their resources in trying to track down Rensenbrink, to no avail. All of them wanted to grab a few words with the player who came so tantalizingly close to easing a nation’s pain and ending its long wait for the World Cup, on a tumultuous night in Buenos Aires.
And none of them could find him.
“It very much looks as if he really doesn’t want to be found,” said van der Kraan. “There have been rumors that he is living the quiet life in France or Belgium, but despite everyone’s best efforts he has not surfaced.
“Every player on that team has spoken regularly about the 1978 final and the way the Dutch came so close. But not Rob. He was always a quiet and shy and reclusive guy and maybe he just wants to stay away from all this attention.”
Yahoo! Sports also unsuccessfully attempted to locate Rensenbrink using soccer contacts in the Netherlands and Belgium, where he spent much of his career.
A popular Dutch radio station asked viewers to call in to its talk show if they had any idea of Rensenbrink’s whereabouts. No one credible came forward, although there were a handful of Elvis-style reported sightings – in a grocery store, on a house boat in a Dutch canal and a car dealership. All were found to be bogus.
The city council in Amsterdam, where Rensenbrink was born, admitted it would like to include him in its series events that coincide with the final. If only it could find him.
Yet even before the Netherlands saw its World Cup fever reignited by the team’s dramatic surge through to this year’s final, where it will meet Spain at Soccer City, Rensenbrink’s name had lived on.
The Dutch have never forgotten 1978, the year when its supremely talented national team played some of the most entertaining soccer ever, and a world title seemed inevitable. It all went to plan until the final and a long-awaited title seemed to beckon. If Rensenbrink’s aim on a tightly angled strike had found the net and not the post, soccer history would be different.
Instead his name is synonymous with sporting notoriety, albeit in a light-hearted way. Rensenbrink’s name is not associated with a curse like fumbling baseball player Bill Buckner’s was with the Boston Red Sox, but it is still uttered frequently by television commentators whenever a shot strikes the post. “Doing a Rensenbrink” is a fate every player wants to avoid.
Especially in a World Cup final.
“We know how much this means to our country,” said midfielder Wesley Sneijder. “We were brought up on stories of Rensenbrink and that team. We would love to go one step further and bring the trophy home to the Netherlands. The country has waited long enough.”