'I need pressure': clock starts ticking for Bert van Marwijk

“Time is on my side”, crooned Mick Jagger back in 1964. It’s a luxury the Rolling Stones frontman may have once enjoyed, but not one that currently applies to Bert van Marwijk and his rescue mission for the 2018 World Cup. Parachuted into role at the end of January after Ange Postecoglou’s sudden exit, the clock is already ticking on the Dutchman’s limited time with Australia.

At the end of the tournament in Russia he is out and Graham Arnold is in, a sequence already set motion regardless of the 65-year-old’s success at the tournament, and somewhat of an oddity.

Time is certainly not in Van Marwijk’s favour. He will just have four competitive matches – against Norway, Colombia, the Czech Republic and Hungary – and no more than 30 days to work with his players and mould them into exactly what he wants before the World Cup campaign kicks off against France.

It’s an unenviable task, but one the former Netherlands manager is comfortable with after getting Football Federation Australia to agree to a 19-day camp in Turkey and no farewell game on Australian soil. He has joined the green and gold with his eyes open to the challenge ahead. After battling intensive administrative interference in his last job with Saudi Arabia, with the Socceroos he is clearly calling the shots.

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“I am not a magician, I cannot in two days learn a team to play exactly the way I like them to do,” he says in Oslo, where the Socceroos take on Norway in his first game in charge. “That costs you a lot of time. That’s why it’s so important that we can start on 19 and 20 May with a training camp for four weeks. We can train every day, that’s very important, and to play two friendly games is enough.

“For me working with a team, let them believe in something and play in several ways you need really time on the pitch every day, and as a coach of a national team, in general, you don’t have a lot of time. Now it’s even less. That’s also the challenge.”

Van Marwijk is both a pragmatist and a self-described realist, as his past clearly shows. Born and raised in the Dutch town of Deventer, he spent almost his whole playing career in his homeland in the Eredivisie. The midfielder was part of a glorious era of Dutch football in the 1970s and then the late 1980s, the days of Total Football, Rinus Michels and Johan Cryuff, and then the emergence of Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard.

But Van Marwijk’s playing career was curtailed by injury and a series of serious knee problems. The midfielder earned just a single international cap for Oranje, coming in a friendly in 1975 against Yugoslavia.

Van Marwijk had a 20-year career that only eventually ended in 1988 with Belgian club FC Assent. He was determined and driven to battle on. While he might not have hit the highest of highs on the field, he has thrown everything into coaching off it. He led an unfancied Feyenoord side to European and Cup success before taking Holland all the way to the 2010 World Cup final.

His time with the Green Falcons more recently was short and sharp – just 20 games – but he guided the Asian nation back to the World Cup. But principled and strong-willed, Van Marwijk walked out when the Saudi Arabian Football Federation started compromising his control of the team.

“At the moment we qualified, I had a feeling everybody wanted to get it involved,” he says. “My way of working is that I do it my way and when they don’t like that I go home. I like to work with people I like to work with. at the end there were a few people out of my staff, and they put them out. And I didn’t agree with them. I said, ‘You can say what you want, but if you don’t get those people back I will not stay’.”

Frank Sinatra’s My Way, then, might be a better fit than the Stones’ cover for the silver-haired Dutchman. His mantra of team first, individuals second, collective-focused and fast, interchangeable football is aimed at taking a hard-working team out of a dangerous Group C containing France, Denmark and Peru and into the round of 16, which would equal the feat achieved by his fellow Dutchman Guus Hiddink in 2006.

Uncompromising and disciplined, but unafraid to lighten the Socceroo camp with humour when required, Van Marwijk is a seasoned professional who is all about results. Getting the job done and moving forward is the only importance, not aesthetics or lofty ideals or media messaging. This vastly different approach to his predecessor, who was part philosopher and part trailblazer, may just bear fruit in the Russian pressure-cooker.

“My goal is to survive the first round...then I will be very happy,” he says. “If I thought we could not do that, I would not sign. I am a realist, with a little bit of optimism. You have to have pressure, you need pressure to perform. It must not be too high, but without pressure you will not perform. I need it myself too. I think its a realistic goal, it will be very difficult to go for the survival.”