In international football, there used to exist a deep superstition about third-place finishes at World Cups.
Walk away with a bronze medal from the game’s biggest tournament, it was said, and you risked a horrible burden, a curse, for years to come.
Germany, gold-medallists at the World Cup four months ago, seemed to bury that legend. They won the trophy after being third on the podium in 2006 and 2010.
But the jinx appears to be returning with a vengeance on the Netherlands, whose 2-0 defeat against Iceland leaves their Euro 2016 campaign in genuine crisis.
Read more: Already, ‘it’s finished for Hiddink’ says De Boer as Netherlands reel
Semi-finalists in Brazil in July and victors over Brazil in the World Cup’s third-place play-off, they have now lost three of their four matches since Guus Hiddink took over as coach from Louis van Gaal and are currently outside the top two positions that guarantee progress to the expanded finals in France.
No question, the lead-up to Euro 2016 has a serious design flaw. Bluntly, it is too easy to qualify.
Uefa’s enlargement of the tournament so that 24 European nations make their way to the finals means it seems almost as hard to reach the end of the qualifying group phase without a chance of going through as it is to progress.
Yet in Group A, where the Netherlands trail Iceland and the Czech Republic in the standings, a lively mini-league is defiantly providing suspense and drama despite the failings of the system.
It has giant killers at its summit, a previous European champion slipping up every match day, and some bizarre off-the-pitch storylines.
Take Turkey, whose World Cup bronze medal from 2002 really does look like a curse. The Turks have reached just one major tournament since then, when they were semi-finalists at Euro 2008.
A country with the potential of a football superpower has become a chronic underachiever.
Like the Dutch, for whom the worldly Hiddink has recently embarked on a second spell in charge, Turkey turned to a distinguished veteran to try to arrest their slump.
Fatih Terim, who was in charge of the Euro 2008 campaign and is the only Turkish manager to have won a European trophy – Galatasaray’s Uefa Cup in 2000 – has endured an even worse September and October than Hiddink.
Turkey have one point from three qualifying matches. On Monday, away to Latvia, they showed several familiar symptoms of nervousness in front of the goal before Bilal Kisa gave Terim’s team the lead. It did not last. Latvia’s equaliser, via the penalty spot, kept Turkey anchored to the bottom of Group A.
Two will go through automatically and the third-place side will have a chance in the play-offs after the group stages are completed next autumn. So there is still margin for error for the Dutch and Turks, despite the fact they trail Iceland and the Czech Republic by six points after three rounds.
Despite the fact that third place is well in sight at this stage, Terim is under pressure. His alibis are running out, and besides dealing with a significant injury list, he has enmities within the squad causing him headaches.
Like the antagonism between striker Gokhan Tore and his international teammates, Hakan Calhanoglu and Omer Toprak.
Besiktas’s Tore is reported, by Calhanoglu’s father, among others, to have threatened the Bayer Leverkusen players Calhanoglu and Toprak with a gun last year. Ever since, the Germany-based pair have been unwilling to share a dressing room with Tore.
No firearms have been brandished around Hiddink’s squad, but after the laboured win over Kazakhstan last week – which earned the Dutch their only qualifying points so far – some of striker Klaas Jan Huntelaar’s comments about his deserving to be in the starting XI might easily be interpreted as the kind of restless grumpiness that Hiddink, and several of his predecessors in the Dutch manager’s chair, have experienced Dutch international players in the past.
The Netherlands and Turkey play their two fixtures against one another next year. Highly charged they will be, too.
Hiddink used to manage Turkey, he oversaw their unsuccessful Euro 2012 qualifying, and the fixture in the Netherlands should draw a substantial number of noisy away fans from the large Turkish diaspora in the Benelux countries and northern Germany.
Thanks to the forgiving nature of Uefa’s qualification system, there will almost certainly be something at stake for at least one of the teams well into the new year, although their margins for error grow ever more slender in topsy-turvy Group A, a corner of Europe currently governed by Iceland, a country of just over 300,000 citizens, at least 11 of whom are no longer to be described as minnows.
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