Kees Jansma is no longer available to announce his opinion about football in television talk shows, he says in an extensive interview with the General Newspaper. The former journalist and press secretary of the Dutch national team has recently officially retired, after he was last seen as a presenter in a European Championship show of Voetbal International around the European championship.
Jansma is a well-known figure in football and has participated in all major final tournaments of the Dutch since 1966, as a journalist and as a press secretary. In that capacity, he also worked closely with Louis van Gaal. “Van Gaal is someone who can unleash something in players. I have experienced that up close,” says Jansma. “He is old, but he comes into contact with those young guys. Still. That’s great to see. And of course we all enjoy the whole circus, don’t we. A press conference is something to look forward to again. “
“Louis is, let me put it this way, someone who knows what his qualities are and is convinced of that,” says Jansma. “Louis thinks about everything. If he says to a journalist ‘in your newspaper’, he does it consciously. I often think that he is doing himself short. in those years all together in Zeist. And then you had to indicate how or what in your field. At the time, Louis was not comfortable with a newspaper and a football weekly. Then I wrote those two points at the top of the list and said that he had to interview journalists.”
Jansma only found out in his role with the Dutch national team what the tension did to players prior to a match. “I underestimated that,” Jansma continues. “Top players who dreaded matches because of the tension. Who woke up very early in the morning and couldn’t sleep anymore. Yes, Wesley Sneijder was always awake early. Then he called and said: ‘Swimming cap, coffee now’. But he knew no nerves. Never. The best thing I experienced was the evening before the World Cup final in 2010 with Bert van Marwijk and a bottle of wine. We went to play the final, a great achievement.”
For Jansma it is now definitively over. “Last summer I made thirty episodes of a talk show online for VI during the European Championship. That was great fun to close like this. I no longer join talk shows such as Op1 or Jinek to tell me what I think of a football topic. That’s over. At a certain point I also got a little tired of giving my opinion, you know. Those programs then had a few heavy topics around, for example, corona or flood problems and then I told something light about football for four minutes. midnight back to Doorn and I thought: why am I still doing this?’“
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