Van de Ven at left-back: Wrong role, not the wrong player

I still remember the moment Micky van de Ven turned and chased a long ball over the top. The legs of a tall centre-back striding like a track athlete, and in that instant his speed was a weapon that made the stands hold their breath. Then he drifted to the left flank. The ball sat at his feet, the Dutch midfield waited for a line-breaking pass, and I saw something else entirely: the hesitation of a man asked the wrong question. Van de Ven is not slow. He is simply playing where speed is not the answer. In the stands, people love a burst of pace. But they pay for the pass. That is the starting point of the story Dutch media have been stirring all week. Valentijn Driessen, the veteran De Telegraaf writer on the Kick-Off programme, publicly tore into Van de Ven's performance for the national team. He did not talk about attitude. He did not talk about effort. He talked about something far harder to fix: role fit. According to Driessen, the Tottenham man only needs "clear instructions" and not "all kinds of tactical tricks". It sounds like praise for simplicity, but it is really an indictment of how the coaching staff are using the player. The context is not complicated. The Netherlands had just drawn 2-2 with Greece. Driessen said the problem had run "three matches in a row". That is a small sample, but a directional one. And in football, three matches are enough for an opinion to harden into pressure. The name Driessen offered was not random. Ian Maatsen, the Aston Villa left-back, was put forward as the replacement. Jorrel Hato of Ajax was on the list too. What those two share is obvious: both are more comfortable with the ball at their feet. That criterion is not sentimental. It is the core requirement of the modern full-back role. I have spent years watching matches and recording what the stat sheet leaves out. That experience taught me one thing: when a full-back is asked to push high and join the circulation of the ball, his value lies not in how fast he runs back, but in how fast he decides. Van de Ven owns something few centre-backs in the world have: elite recovery speed. But that is the trait of a transition system, where the back line sits deep and waits for counters. In a possession system, where the full-back must be a second midfielder, that trait is burned on correcting errors instead of creating value. That is precisely what Driessen called "if he is only there to correct mistakes, then you are defeating your own purpose". A sharp line, and structurally I agree with it. When Van de Ven's speed is spent covering gaps others leave behind, the team never harvests his greatest asset. Speed becomes a safety brake instead of an attacking engine. I keep the rhythm for seasons gone by, even when no one is listening anymore. And history teaches me that the full-back has never been a fixed position. There was a time when a full-back was asked to defend first. Then came the era of the flying full-back. Now people want them as deep-lying playmakers. Every era draws an ideal type, and every era is wrong in its own way. But here is where I want to stop and ask the reverse question. Is Van de Ven bad at left-back? Or, more precisely, has he been placed in a role that was never meant for him? Van de Ven is a natural centre-back. Pushing him wide is an experiment, not a definition. And an experiment should be judged by whether it creates value, not by whether the player is good enough. That distinction matters, because it completely changes how we read this story. If the problem is the person, the fix is to change the person. If the problem is the structure, the fix is to change how the person is used. In this story, I lean towards the second. Driessen went further, saying the Dutch players "have got it into their heads that the coach's instructions are more important than playing with freedom". That is a systemic critique, not just a critique of one player. It paints a squad overloaded with positional detail, where every run is prescribed and instinct is replaced by compliance. For a player like Van de Ven, who needs simple instructions to unleash his physical strengths, that overload is a kind of confinement. Mike Verweij, Driessen's colleague, offered a softer view. He did not deny the limitations, but stressed that Van de Ven's speed remains an important defensive asset. That shows the Dutch opinion landscape is far from uniform. There is a genuine debate, not a verdict already handed down. I like debates like that. They are more honest than headlines polished to please an algorithm. The most interesting thing here is not who is right or wrong. It is that the Netherlands have too many options. Van de Ven, Maatsen, Hato. Three names, three different profiles, competing for one spot. The Netherlands are not short of people; they have a surplus. And problems like that are often far harder to solve than they look. Take Hato. An Ajax academy product who can play both centre-back and full-back. That versatility is a gift to any coach, but also a trap. Versatile players tend to be used to plug holes rather than handed a role to grow into. Hato may become the chosen one for convenience, not for a clear plan. The counter-intuitive angle I want to propose is this. The media ask "who deserves to start". But the right question is "what does the system need a full-back to do". Maatsen has repeatedly failed to win the favour of head coaches, despite strong club form. If that repeats across different regimes, it is no longer one man's preference. It is an archetype mismatch. The system prioritises one kind of profile, and other profiles, however talented, are pushed to the margins. That is the blind spot of most media debates. They argue about names while the problem sits in the model. In a transfer window, signals like this carry their own weight. A talented full-back repeatedly left out at international level can soften how the market perceives his value, even when his club form stays high. Conversely, Van de Ven being pushed wide could reinforce his image as a versatile centre-back, if clubs read the criticism as mis-deployment rather than deficiency. So what is the next signal to watch? Not whether Van de Ven starts. It is whether the coaching staff change how they define their left-back role. If they keep loading positional detail and expect a transition centre-back to become a deep-lying playmaker, the problem will return. If they simplify the demands and hand Van de Ven a cleaner role, he can stay quiet and answer with his feet. Data is the map; the match is territory that has never been measured. And at full-back, that unmeasured territory is the instant a player decides whether he dares to play football. In Shenzhen, I learned that a screen cannot replace the stands. A stat sheet can tell me how fast Van de Ven runs. It cannot tell me whether he trusts the ball at his feet. Perhaps that is what Driessen really saw. Not a bad player. A player playing in a room that is too small.