Jonker’s last hurrah calls on daring Dutch to upset Bonadei’s high-flying France | OneFootball

Convention plays a big part in football. There’s the convention that settled starting XIs help winning teams build momentum, the convention that experience really matters at major tournaments and, perhaps above all, the convention that head coaches are best off saying nothing remotely controversial.

The good news from Basel is that, in Andries Jonker and Laurent Bonadei, the Netherlands and France possess two managers who pour scorn on unwritten norms and treat received wisdoms with suspicion.

Both men defy the unwritten rule that management is an increasingly young person’s game. Their presence contradicts the notion that leading coaches need to become No 1s while relatively youthful and, ideally, before their 40th birthday.

If all this unorthodoxy has produced distinctly mixed results for Jonker’s Netherlands – they are teetering on the brink of elimination and Sunday night’s concluding Group D game could well be the 62-year-old’s last game in charge – it is working wonders for France. A point would secure Les Bleues top spot, and avoiding defeat by a three-goal margin guarantees progress to the quarter-finals.

Bonadei had coached mainly with men’s youth teams at Paris Saint-Germain, Nancy and Nice before he finally stepped into the spotlight last August with France when Hervé Renard, whom he had been assisting, returned to his former post as manager of Saudi Arabia’s men.

The 55-year-old had also served as Renard’s assistant in Saudi Arabia and, before that, Angola, yet if his promotion with France promised continuity it has not quite worked out like that.

Bonadei’s laid-back manner may be thoroughly redolent of a man with roots in the relaxed, Mediterranean ambience of the Côte d’Azur, but he is proving a revolutionary, albeit of the quiet, distinctly velvet, variety.

“I spent many, many years preparing to become a No 1,” he says as a man determined to end France’s cycle of underachievement his way. This has involved omitting longstanding stalwarts including Wendie Renard, Eugénie Sommer and Kenza Dali.

When eyebrows were raised at Renard’s exclusion, Bonadei retorted that Albert Einstein regarded doing the same things over and over while expecting different outcomes as a form of insanity. Maybe, just maybe, his methods will finally secure France the major tournament win they crave.

The early indications are encouraging. Where, under the divisive and dictatorial Corinne Diacre, the squad was riven by internal politics, with some of those wounds not quite camouflaged during Renard’s reign, the new man has fostered harmony.

Significantly, Bonadei has taken time to tour France, visiting players at their clubs for private, informal, get-to-know-you chats. Dressing-room toxicity seems consigned to the past.

Bonadei’s focus on player development perhaps informed his decision to follow the opening 2-1 win against England in Zurich by heavily rotating France’s starting XI for the 4-1 victory against Wales in St Gallen.

Seven key players were rested, including the centre-forward Marie-Antoinette Katoto and the wingers Sandy Baltimore and Delphine Cascarino. Although France’s consequent lack of width enabled Wales to produce a much better performance than the scoreline suggested, Clara Matéo shone at centre-forward and the Paris FC forward hinted at why she won France’s golden boot last season when she volleyed a brilliant opener.

It would be a surprise if Baltimore, Cascarino, Katoto and the highly influential midfielder Sakina Karchaoui did not return against the Netherlands, but Bonadei does not necessarily rely on the tried and trusted. “I’ve got 23 players and I’ll play different teams depending on the shape and form of the opponent,” he says. “Against Wales I wanted to rest some players and give others minutes.”

Another thing he is most definitely not is a paint-by-numbers coach prone to bombarding players with precise, sometimes inhibiting, tactical instruction. Before kick-off against Wales his 21-year-old centre-back pairing of Thiniba Samoura and Alice Sombath decided they want to switch sides, with Sombath on the left rather than the right as planned. Rather than regard this as subordination Bonadei embraced the pair’s desire to improvise. “They’re young, they’re courageous,” he said. “So I thought it would be good to let them think for themselves and work things out together.”

It all appears part of a wider process of encouraging the “Jeunettes” as the squad’s average age reduces. The back four that finished against Wales were all aged under 22.

Jonker, too, has spent a high percentage of his career as either a youth coach or a No 2, most notably to Louis van Gaal at Bayern Munich. Sunday could easily mark his final turn in the Netherlands technical area before Arjan Veurink, Sarina Wiegman’s assistant with England, takes over.

Jonker disagrees, vehemently, with this changing of the guard, and still hopes to somehow prove why his contract should have been extended. After a 3-0 win against Wales in Lucerne a coach accused by Dutch media of treating his players like “puppets in a puppet show” gambled on a high-risk, ultra-attacking approach against England intended to showcase Vivianne Miedema’s exceptional goalscoring skills.

After the ensuing 4-0 defeat, defiance and “no regrets” proved the order of the day. “I wanted to play for victory,” he said. “I know we can be a top team.”

The moment to prove it is slipping away but Basel offers Jonker one last chance to demonstrate that his particular brand of rule-breaking can burst Bonadei’s bubble.

Header image: [Photograph: Hollandse Hoogte/Shutterstock]