A day before the European Championship final of England against Germany, national coach Sarina Wiegman walks on holy ground. She can’t wait for the game at Wembley: ,,You don’t start coaching with the thought: I want to be a coach for 90,000 people.”
By Lisette van der Geest
It’s just evening at Wembley, and Sarina Wiegman (52) is walking across the grass with her hands in the pockets of her sweatpants. Short, quiet steps. But on holy ground. Just under twenty-four hours left, she knows. Then it happens here. Then the calm is over. Then she can write history, as the first national coach to become European champion twice in a row, with different teams.
She passes players from her team, who spin their phones in the air to capture 360-degree images. She walks past for a group photo of posing football players. ,,I think the team did very well,” she said shortly before. ,,I think we have grown in the season, but I think we have grown even more during this tournament.” She stops in the middle, at the center line and looks around.
You do it just because you love football, because you love your job
Three group matches with two impressive results. A hard-fought quarterfinal and a semifinal. And now England are where they hoped for: in the final, against Germany. As for that English hope: tickets for the final were already sold out well before the European Championship, within an hour.
About ten minutes earlier, Wiegman was sitting on a chair in a small hall, a few yards away, behind some gray walls, past the many red folding chairs that dot the Wembley grandstand. The German team had just trained, at the same time seven men were doing laps behind a hand-held lawnmower. The day before a match, every team playing at the European Championship has a standard press meeting, with national coach and a player, in this case captain Leah Williamson. This time the hall is filled with about eighty people.
Wiegman answered questions in her characteristic way: clear, friendly, sharp, sober and in reasonably short terms. About the route to the final: ,,It seemed relatively easy, but it is never easy.” About her approach and the bumps along the way: ,,In the preparation we try to find out: what can we expect on and off the field? And if you prepare well, and if some of those cases arise, at least we know how to respond to them.” When asked about the line-up tomorrow: ,,I don’t want to say anything about that. Everyone is fit. We have to make difficult choices. Knowing how strong our team is, we have a lot of options.”
It will be Wiegman’s second time coaching at Wembley. Last year in October she played a match for World Cup qualification (4-0) against Northern Ireland. With over 23,000 spectators at the time, 90,000 are expected tomorrow – it would be a championship record. ,,You don’t start playing football, or don’t start coaching, with the thought: I want to become a coach for 90,000 people. You just do it because you love football, because you love your job. But this is really great, although in the end it’s just a game that we play, and yes, it’s the final, but we approach this like any other game.”
What message will she give in the locker room tomorrow, just before her team takes the field? ,,I usually think of that just before we start. But it will be clear, I think.”
Five years ago, Wiegman won the European Championship title with the Netherlands in her own country, a fact that has been pointed out to her almost daily these weeks. She knows how it is, how it should be. In the meantime, she is now the national coach of the football nation par excellence, where special fan zones have been set up all over the country and the number of fans is many times larger. But she does not want to make comparisons between the pressure and expectation then and now.
“I didn’t put my mind to that,” she says again. ,,I keep my focus on the game. With our team and how we want to play and how we want to approach it. We have analyzed Germany and then we make a plan, together with the coaching staff, and then we train again, we talk to players, we train again and that is mainly where my focus is.”
Until after the game. ,,Probably. I’m not stupid. I see what’s happening, it’s great. You see it, you are aware of it, but then you focus again on your task: preparing for Germany.”
And that includes a walk on the field. Looking around the stadium for about twenty minutes, beholding the immensity, while the seven lawnmowers wait patiently at the side. Wiegman joins a group of players and points upwards, to a point that is out of sight for other spectators. Less than twenty-four hours, she can make history.
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