Mentally broken do you even know what that mean?
I worked with mentally unstable and challenged individuals… so sorry there no one here that is broken… if he was broken he would not play, certainly not at this level and he certainly wouldn’t bounce back so fast, that I can guarantee you.
You do realize this is a figure of speech, right? It's not like he was in clinical depression, why are you being so literal?
I'm obviously talking about an athlete's freaking confidence levels and not about psychiatrics here...
Cycling today is as much a team effort/sport as it’s an individual sports… the sport massively changes the last 10 years. Many teams have tremendous focus on groups, groups dynamics etc and get them
To perform as a unity and to sacrifice for each others, the individual views that I see many look through has long been replaced years ago.
Again. Irrelevant.
I have much respect for Cyclism, but you're trying to create a narrative that's just not there.
No he just figured out how to use him correctly.
Very little has changed and the coach's approach isn't one of them.
It's also still too early to judge, but De Vrij hasn't had a sequence of games like this since early Inzaghi days where he had to work for Dimarco's inability to play LCB tactically or physically, which exposed our defense a lot whenever it happened.
There was never anything wrong with him mentally or else he would not have returned the way he did.
No one magically recover themselves mentally, if that was indeed the problem. So Im sorry I simply don’t buy that hypothesis.
I also don’t buy the contract negotiations hypothesis.
Again, taking something too literally.
A player can regain confidence at any time. It's entirely up to him, provided that the environment isn't toxic.
Contract negotiations are in fact the only thing that ticks all the boxes with timing and performance issues.
They been rather trash for some time… hardly surprising he didn’t exactly perform
Erm, he actually stopped playing apart from a few Nations League appearances ever since that time. Wasn't even called up recently.
He was shit in the Nations League, which they almost could have won. And he was relegated to a bench role. Obviously they also saw a broken player. If it were merely a tactical adjustment, I wonder what changed between November 2021 until today with the Dutch NT that had to relegate De Vrij to a training cone. You'd assume that they switched from a back 3 to a back 4, but ironically enough, the opposite happened. They switched to a back 3 that should have highlighted De Vrij's best traits, but instead he was sent to the bench.
