Dirk Kuijt’s coaching career is not yet progressing as he probably thought and hoped. On Thursday, the 42-year-old Katwijker was fired by ADO Den Haag and according to General Journalreporter Stan Wagtman it will be quite a job to find a new employer. “The players at ADO did not see Kuijt as a tactical genius. Painful, since those sounds had been audible since he started the coaching profession.”
Kuijt’s coaching career has few highlights for the time being. After ending his active career, the former the Dutch-international became trainer of Feyenoord Under 19. In his first season as head coach, Kuijt lost the lead on the last matchday and thus the national title to direct competitor Ajax, which was trained by John Heitinga. In the 2019/20 season, he participated in the A-selection under the wings of Jaap Stam as part of his Professional Football Coach training. After the dismissal of Stam and the appointment of Dick Advocaat, Kuijt also disappeared from the first team.
“He might still be able to end up in De Kuip via ADO. But in recent months it has become painfully clear that Kuijt is not ready for that, at least for the time being. ADO, a club that last season had one and a half legs in the Eredivisie he couldn’t get it to work at all,” says Wagtman. “The plans that he said he had come up with when he sat at home for a year and a half after his departure from Feyenoord, were also quickly regarded by the ADO players as ‘too difficult’. And Kuijt never had a plan B. A new Finding a club will be very difficult.”
According to Wagtman, the ADO players did not see Kuijt as a ‘tactical genius’. “And that is painful, since those sounds have been audible since Kuijt started the coaching profession, for example with the youth of Feyenoord. If his one ‘too difficult’ plan does not work, Kuijt is apparently insufficiently able to anticipate it and come up with an appropriate think of other tactics. It makes the doubts about Kuijt’s capacity as a trainer a well-founded one. Perhaps the plans of the former attacker for a team like ADO or the youth of Feyenoord are not suitable, but they do fit with a team with better players. “
Dirk Helwegen
However, Wagtman does not expect clubs with better players to line up with Kuijt. “With Kuijt as a trainer you know one thing for sure: the outside world not only looks cynically and with antipathy at the trainer, but also at his players and at the club as a whole,” says Wagtman. “At ADO, it has been noticed in everything over the past 176 days how much Kuijt’s status has changed, from valued example professional to village pastor ‘Dirk Helwegen’. An image that he will probably never get rid of. It takes a next step, a career as a top trainer and let alone a return to ‘his’ Kuip, already an extremely difficult story for Dirk Kuijt.”
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