By John Ley
Source: Telegraph.co.uk
Good to talk: Guus Hiddink instructs his Russia squad.
Take Jose Mourinho, add age and vast experience, and you get Guus Hiddink. At 61, he is 16 years the senior of the Special One and comes with all the confidence, wit and cheek of Mourinho. Then again, it is hard to imagine Mourinho driving through the countryside on a Harley-Davidson in the manner Hiddink likes to relax.
On Wednesday, Hiddink maintained his outstanding record of taking national teams out of the qualifying group to lead Russia into the quarter-finals of a major tournament for the first time. He did it with some considerable style, his team outplaying Sweden – who needed only a draw – with a delightful approach that served as a warning to the teams still here.
With a delicious piece of irony, it is his native Holland that stands between Russia and history. At the end of the Sweden game Moscow exploded, the 15,000 Russians inside the Tivoli Neu Stadium could not contain their delight and neither could the players. But Hiddink stood calmly on the touchline and turned to his coaching staff, urging them to keep a lid on their excitement.
The players in this squad and before have discovered he is not a man to mess with. During Euro 96, when in charge of Holland, Hiddink sent home Edgar Davids and more recently, he warned his top two strikers, Andrei Arshavin and Roman Pavlyuchenko, that they could both miss Euro 2008.
Regardless of the result tonight, Hiddink’s future looks good. Asked if he could manage Sweden one day, he laughed, but his response will alert teams around the world. “We’ll see what happens after this European championship.”
He has agreed verbally to two more years with Russia and is paid handsomely, with Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich contributing to his salary. But he ruled himself out of the running to replace Avram Grant at Stamford Bridge. “I’m enjoying my job right now,” he said recently. “I get a lot of positive energy working with young people, teaching them a few things. It’s a big motivation for me to keep going.”
And, on his ability to motivate the Russians, he added: “I demand a response. I don’t want to sound cocky, but if you want to play at international level, then the demands I lay down means you can go one of two ways: either fly, or fight. That’s the choice we offered. They chose to fight.”
As Marco van Basten’s side may discover in tonight’s game, such a warning, probably also uttered to the Dutch more than a decade ago, could return to haunt them.
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