Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer

"This is about Holland and Dutch football and what makes it special. I grew up in Holland, so I have a particular tie to this book. Actually I was in Amsterdam the winter that David Winner was there writing his book. We were both writing books and we’d occasionally meet for dinner. And I got to know David and I really liked him, but I thought ‘Poor old David, he’s going to write a book about Dutch football, and nobody’s going to read it.’ Also I grew up in Holland, and I thought, there’s nothing he can tell me about Dutch football, it’s all going to be old hat or he won’t get it right. But he gave the book to me in manuscript and I read it, and when I finished it, I just wanted to break out into applause. He did it beautifully. It’s completely original. David is a film buff so it has all these film references and it’s just very surprising. He interviews architects and rabbis about what makes Dutch football special. It’s not like other football books – he approaches football through architecture and space and landscape and painting, and it’s absurd, but it works. It’s about Dutch society, it’s about Dutch painting. One of his ideas is that because Holland is a small country, the use of space is very important. There’s an obsession with space, and you see that in Dutch football, where the use of space is very important. So he draws those parallels. And he presents the Dutch team, in the middle of the 1970s, the great Dutch team, as a product of the individualistic seventies, in a very original and non-clichéd way. Also, when he interviews players, people come out of it as humans, not as footballers. He interviews this player who didn’t want to go to the World Cup. The player says, ‘I was having a difficult time with my family, I didn’t want to spend the summer at the World Cup. We wanted to go away and we went on a family holiday.’ And David asks, ‘Don’t you regret it? You missed playing in maybe the best football team in history.’ And the guy says, ‘No, this was what my family needed.’ So you have these wonderful little human moments. I think one challenge in writing about footballers, particularly now they’re so shielded, is to present them as real people, and David does that in a very touching way."