Steven Berghuis has been suspended for two games after a hard foul against Vitesse left back Maximilian Wittek. Not for the first time this season, the Feyenoord captain has disadvantaged his team with a rash action. Berghuis has been criticized extensively in the media in recent days for his red card and his behavior on the field earlier this season. Sparta Rotterdam trainer Henk Fraser and analyst Hans Kraay junior take it up for the 29-year-old winger.
Berghuis misses the upcoming league matches of Feyenoord against ADO Den Haag and Feyenoord due to the suspension. Earlier this season, he was sent off in the cup match against sc Heerenveen (4-3 defeat), while at the end of February he made a hard foul against Pantelis Hatzidiakos in the 4-2 loss against AZ. The AZ defender is still injured by the charge of Berghuis. Arno Vermeulen added on Sunday evening Studio Football that national coach Frank de Boer better not take Berghuis to the European Championship. “If he does this twice in three months, while the European Championship is in six weeks? What guarantee do you have that he will not chase Ukraine after twelve minutes if he loses possession of the ball and will do so again? Then you play against Ukraine with ten men ”, said Vermeulen.
Former Feyenoord defender Fraser knows where the actions of Berghuis come from. “It’s pure assertion,” he says The Telegraph. “He is by far the most important player at the club feels that responsibility within the expectations that always exist and then ends up in situations where things just don’t work out. First of all: I certainly don’t speak it right. He should never react like that. But the people who think or say that he cannot go with the Dutch to the European Championship because of this are the most hypocritical there are. What nonsense.” The trainer of Sparta Rotterdam does not see Berghuis make such a violation in the Dutch national team so quickly, because he plays with better footballers around him in the Dutch than at Feyenoord. “The quality of the national team can influence him. From an objective point of view, Feyenoord is really a bit less than Ajax, PSV and even AZ at the moment. In my opinion, this man has Dutch national team level, he has shown that very often at Feyenoord. ”
Dick Advocaat about Steven Berghuis’s red card ?? “I will also have made these kind of slides, but Ronald and Perez certainly not” pic.twitter.com/0hU6Xemx1W
– ESPN NL (@ESPNnl) April 25, 2021
Kraay junior, who regularly speaks to Berghuis in his role as a reporter for ESPN, the attacker says he has sometimes been ‘irritated’ in front of the camera. “I regularly had the impression that it was due to a lack of quality among other players. He is involved in more than thirty goals, while at Feyenoord no Sneijder or Van der Vaart runs in midfield who play the balls in his feet for a moment. But on Sunday, that red card was not due to irritation or frustration by his environment, in my opinion. ” According to Kraay junior, after the international period with the Dutch national team, Berghuis returned with ‘a different mindset’ to the selection of Dick Advocaat. “That he had planned to brush his teeth in front of the mirror in the morning: I am now going to Feyenoord, working my ass, not disturbing me anymore and I have to finish it well. For myself, for the fans and for Dick, who has always supported me. ”
The ESPN analyst thinks that the tackle that Berghuis made on Hatzidiakos at the end of February had a different cause than his violation on Wittek. “That tackle on Hatzidiakos was a wild one out of frustration. Now he just wanted to show it so badly for those 6,500 people in De Kuip. From: I do make those meters back for you and I want to finish it well. An I-want-so-badly stupid red card. But a big fat one, which a referee with a white stick and red stripes on it had also given ”, says Kraay junior.