The pass, delivered with the sweep of a left foot, is as fine and accurate a thing as any throw authored by the greats, from Brady to Clemente. A surpassing pass by any measure.
It was the 90th minute of a tied World Cup quarterfinal game in Marseilles when Franciscus de Boer booted this high arcing kick, 50 yards, diagonally across a field, over all Argentine resistance, landing it precisely on the right foot of Dennis Bergkamp. That Bergkamp controlled the ball and artfully converted it into a winning goal for the Netherlands meant that his name would be branded into one of the great World Cup moments. Ah, but the pass abides, too.
That was 1998, and nearly 21 years later de Boer – call him Frank – is well past the point of living on one exploit. When asked if he has tried to recreate that famous pass on a certain Marietta practice field with his latest team, it is the coach who answers, not the one-time star reliving old glories.
He can barely get into the subject before he’s turning it into a coaching moment, invoking the name of a 21-year-old Atlanta United defender he’s got his eye on now.
“That was my specialty,” he said. “Miles Robinson, for example, I don’t want him to (try those type of passes) because that’s not his quality. He’s a better defender than me, that’s for sure. He’s a better athlete than me. He has to know when he has the ball, he has to give it as fast as possible to the players who can distribute it the best.”
The path that has led de Boer to concern himself with the qualities of a young American playing on a young American team is a wholly twisting and unforeseen one. Much like the coach before him at Atlanta United – the man who produced a championship like it was instant grits, Gerardo Martino – de Boer couldn’t have imagined a soccer life leading to a spaceship of a stadium off Northside Drive in Atlanta, U.S.A.
Yet, here he is, imported to continue the work that the wildly popular Martino began. Not easy work, either. New coaches normally step into a mess, and have years of leeway while slinging the wet-vac. This one is replacing the MLS Cup winner amid expectations that anything less this season is a tattered retreat.
Growing up in the town of Hoorn, about 30 miles north of Amsterdam, de Boer wears the agrarian nature of the place in his name – it translates to “the Farmer.” Although his father was a plasterer by trade.
He was never short of someone to play with, being one of a matched set of athletic twins. And both Frank and Ronald explored an assortment of sports, some even involving the use of their hands (tennis). And, yes, when winter came and the water froze, de Boer went all Hans Brinker and ice skated for kilometer after kilometer.
But when Amsterdam’s Ajax soccer club – possessing one of the world’s premier youth training programs – came sniffing around both brothers in their adolescence, the direction was clear.
The ties between Frank and Ronald were unbreakable. As they played together around the world – sharing time on teams in the Netherlands, Spain, Scotland and Qatar – one always seemed to be better in combination with the other. Frank the deft defender, passing to Ronald on the attack.
“When he took one step forward, I knew exactly what he wanted. When he took one step forward I already knew he wanted the ball at his feet,” Frank said.
“(Frank) was a great player. You could see it with Frank and Ronald that sixth sense they had, that ability and awareness on the pitch that they obviously got from playing with each other from when they were two years old,” Atlanta United President Darren Eales said.
“Look at the delivery of that (World Cup pass), that awareness, that quickness of mind. That springs to mind when you think of Frank,” Eales added.
(When asked which twin he’d take in their prime, Eales the personnel guy yielded to Eales the diplomat: “I don’t want to get hit by Frank, so I’d take Frank.”)
Coaching and raising two young children back in the Netherlands, Ronald was not part of the package when United hired Frank in December. “Maybe in the future, you never know,” Frank said.
As an elite player, Frank de Boer made 112 international appearances for the Netherlands and spent the bulk of his career playing for Ajax (1988-99) and Barcelona (1999-2003). He was known as an instinctual defender who could show sparks of goal-scoring ability. Lean and fit, he still looks the part at the age of 48. “You watch him doing free kicks at the end of training, and Frank is scoring more goals than the rest of the team,” Eales said.
Then, too, there was the steroid thing.
In 2001, de Boer tested positive for nandralone. Initially suspended for a year, he appealed, applying the defense that he had unknowingly taken the performance enhancer as part of a “contaminated supplement.” His suspension was reduced to 11 weeks.
To this day, he maintains his innocence.
“I don’t think it’s a black mark because I didn’t use it. I can look everyone honestly in the eyes and say that,” he said.
De Boer figures a simple visual inspection should have convinced anyone he wasn’t using steroids back then. “I’m looking stronger now than when I was a professional football player,” de Boer said. He said he never smoked, scarcely drinks – “My only guilty pleasure is a glass of wine” – and discovered the benefits of better nutrition and CrossFit training in his mid-40s.
Coaching had never been a part of the big plan, de Boer said, until the end of his playing days came into clear view. Then he began taking roll of all the coaches he had played for, some good, some bad. Maybe, he began to think, he could put that experience to use, accentuating the positive traits.
As a player he dove into the various cultures of those places the global game took him. So, over five years in Barcelona, he thought it important to learn Spanish. Little could he have known then that becoming comfortable with that language would be an important asset in landing a job on a team with a heavy Latin American influence. “His Spanish is better than my English,” reports Atlanta United scoring star Josef Martinez, through an interpreter.
His diverse readings have no doubt been helpful, too. At one point during an interview last week, de Boer reached across sports and quoted from Michael Jordan’s coach in Chicago, Phil Jackson.
This coaching thing looked pretty easy when de Boer went back home to rev up that part of a career. After serving his internship with the Ajax youth program, he was bumped up to the bigs in 2010, where he promptly won four straight Dutch Eredivisie titles.
The harsh chill of reality blew over him once he left the shelter of his familiar home team. De Boer’s two postings in advance of getting the Atlanta United job were both failures that burned hot and brief. First, he was fired after just three months with Inter Milan. Then he lasted but four Premier League games with Crystal Palace – losing all four, shut out in each.
Of course, Eales and Atlanta United leadership had concerns over this recent history, but they were dispelled by de Boers’ larger body of work in developing young talent and fostering a style of play that would suit United’s dynamic and winning ways. They, like de Boer, came to see the failures in Italy and England as the kind of bad marriages usually made in the early morning hours in Las Vegas.
In return, de Boer, like the big-name film star who is coming off back-to-back flops, needs a place where he can produce a hit again. He thinks he has found that. “That’s why I chose Atlanta – it’s an organization with a good structure, a good environment to train. You don’t have to look around for people with other agendas than me or who want to stab you in the back,” he said. “We’re on the same page and can really focus on what we’re here for, that’s to try to get the team to play as good as it had, or maybe better.”
There was a fitful beginning for United and its new coach in late February when traveling to Costa Rica for a CONCACAF Champions League opener. The 3-1 loss was unworthy of the top MLS team. But the rebound Thursday night - a 4-0 victory over the Costa Rican side to stay alive in CONCACAF play - was impressive. The attention and pressures only ratchet up Sunday when United begins defense of its title at D.C. United.
It’s a delicate job de Boer assumes. There are no obvious holes in this dyke for the Dutchman to plug. He must blend his ideas with the concepts that Martino installed, ones that made United the most successful and watchable team in its league.
As midfielder Julian Gressel said, “It’s Atlanta United, it’s not FC Frank de Boer. We’ll still stay true to our identity and our style and I think he has already done some adapting to that. But also we adapt our style toward (his) way. It’s a meeting in the middle in a way, that’s a big thing.”
“Do I come in saying we have to do it the way I did at Ajax? No.” de Boer said. “I have to respect the things they did, because they have the results.”
This coaching job will require supreme touch, not unlike the deft, cross-field pass. One de Boer will be asked to perform on a near daily basis now.
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