{"id":6817,"date":"2022-10-19T15:54:12","date_gmt":"2022-10-19T14:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=6817"},"modified":"2022-10-21T10:04:16","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T09:04:16","slug":"easing-past-eindhoven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=6817","title":{"rendered":"Easing past Eindhoven"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>PSV Eindhoven comes calling early Thursday evening for our fourth Europa League group stage tie; it is the fixture postponed for lack of plod following the Queen&#8217;s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a id=\"w-LAMMP1RGhDqq5aB_tjIQ\" class=\"gie-single\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/73516840\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color:#a7a7a7;text-decoration:none;font-weight:normal !important;border:none;display:inline-block;\" rel=\"noopener\">Embed from Getty Images<\/a><script>window.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'w-LAMMP1RGhDqq5aB_tjIQ',sig:'qRwOYF6LsMMJekqCwwgnqUzWmUE_M83OQToym-vX2mI=',w:'594px',h:'415px',items:'73516840',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});<\/script><script src=\"\/\/embed-cdn.gettyimages.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\" async=\"\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p>We last played PSV in March 2007 when they knocked us out of the Champions League, 2-1 on aggregate in the Round of 16. Their Brazilian defender Alex scored all the goals in a 1-1 draw at the Emirates after we had lost 1-0 in Eindhoven, our only loss in six Champions League games against them. The clubs also met in the group stages in 2002 and 2004. Our overall record stands at two wins, three draws and one loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like us, PSV has its roots in a works team, for the employees of Gerard and Anton Philips&#8217;s light bulb factory in Eindhoven, then an emerging industrial town in the North Brabant region of the southern Netherlands. Today, the club&#8217;s formal links with the company are lighter, although its Philips Stadion stands in the same spot where PSV&#8217;s precursor, Philips Elftal (&#8216;the Philips XI&#8217;), played its first game in 1911.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Frits Philips, Anton&#8217;s five-year-old son, ceremoniously kicked off that match. He was involved with the club throughout his life and attended games up to his death in 2005. His seat in the Philips Stadion, section D, row 22, seat 43, is always left vacant in his memory. Frits was also a real-life Schindler, saving several hundred Jewish employees during World War Two by having them designated essential workers. (Your bonus historical trivia: Frits&#8217;s grandfather was a first cousin of Karl Marx.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PSV, Ajax Amsterdam and Rotterdam&#8217;s Feyenoord comprise Dutch football&#8217;s Big Three. Only Ajax has won the league title more often than PSV, 36 times to 24. PSV also has ten KNVB Cups and a record 12 Johan Cruyff Shields, a Community Shield equivalent, including this season&#8217;s 5-3 win over post-ten Hag Ajax.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A perennial in European competition, it won the UEFA Cup in 1978. Ten years later, it won the European Cup despite failing to win a game from the quarter-finals onwards: two ties decided on away goals and the final on penalties. Never in doubt, eh?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PSV fans revel in their Brabantian regional identity and call themselves boeren (&#8216;farmers&#8217;) to contrast with the big-city followers of Ajax and Feyenoord, no matter that Eindhoven is a hub of advanced engineering. Yet it is also an expression of North Brabant&#8217;s complex historical, religious and cultural relationship with the rest of the Netherlands. It is the only one of the four provinces of the old Duchy of Brabant to lie outside modern-day Belgium, and neither the traditionally Roman Catholic Brabantians nor the Calvinist Dutch have ever regarded it as being Dutch Dutch. There is a lot of political previous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perhaps uniquely, PSV allocates its fans a squad shirt number, 12. No player can wear it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The opposition<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PSV is currently managed by Old Horse Face himself, Ruud van Nistelrooy, who will need no introduction to most here. It is his initial season in charge of the first team after coaching PSV&#8217;s age group sides for several seasons.<br>His team sits second in the Eredivisie, with 24 points from ten games, one fewer than leaders Ajax and one more than third-placed Feyenoord. PSV put six past Utrecht last Sunday and seven past Volendam at the end of August, plumping their goals-for column to a league-leading 35.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They have won all three of their Europa League games after dropping down from the Champions League following elimination by Rangers in the Qualifying Round. Last time out, they put five past FC Zurich without reply, having beaten them 5-1 away and previously drew 1-1 at home with Bod\u00f8\/Glimt. They trail us by two points, but the Zurich wins give them a plus-nine goal difference to our plus-five.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Their most familiar name will be Cody Gakpo. Reportedly of interest to Arteta but probably following the same path out of Eindhoven to the OT as his manager before him, Gakpo is a local boy and this season&#8217;s leading goal-scorer with 13 goals and 11 assists in all competitions, operating, at pace, from the left wing.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For the opposite flank, Barnet-born England U-21 international Noni Madueke is back in the squad after the latest in a series of injuries, but a start might be too soon. Anwar El Ghazi, who won two Dutch caps in 2015, will fill in unless van Nistelrooy switches from his preferred 4-3-3 to 4-2-3-1, as he has done for Europa League games. Mexico international Erick Gutierrez would then come in as a second No 6.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With Mario Gotze returned to Germany, 19-year-old Xavi Simons, who spent nine years in Barca&#8217;s youth set-up, and the Zambian-born but otherwise very Dutch Guus Til share the 10 role. Til, five years Simons&#8217;s senior, arrived from Feyenoord in the summer, where he had been on loan from Spartak Moscow. He is on the fringe of the Dutch national squad and has seven goals and two assists this season. Simons has ten goals and four assists. Joey Veerman (six goals and five assists) is the box-to-box central midfielder. Ivory Coast international Ibrahim Sangare (four goals and one assist) plays the Partey role and provides the muscle. All four are getting covetous looks from some of Europe\u2019s top clubs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is a young, pacey and energetic midfield whose goal tally points to the impact of the protracted injury absence of veteran club captain and centre forward Luuk de Jong. Like Madueke and Mauro Junior, a regular at full-back last season, de Jong returns to the squad for the first time in a while.&nbsp;<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Academy youth product Armando Obispo and journeyman Brazilian Andr\u00e9 Ramalho will likely be the starting centre-halves. German international Philip Max on the left and the Austrian international Phillipp Mwene on the right will flanks them, assuming Mauro Junior does not start (like Tomi, he can play either side). Argentine Walter Ben\u00edtez will be between the sticks. He arrived in the close season from Nice ahead of Kasper Schmeichel exchanging the sun-drenched, sparkling waters of the East Midlands for the mundanity and grey skies of the Cote d&#8217;Azur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PSV has quality, but we should have better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The Arsenal<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After fitfulness in the fjords and alarms at Leeds, Arteta will not want palpitations against PSV. We need one win from our final three group games to ensure a play-off place; a win and a draw against PSV or any two wins secure top of the group, avoiding two extra matches in January.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not an easy team selection to predict. Arteta needs to juggle picking a team strong enough to win with resting some weary legs; we still have half a dozen games to go to the World Cup break In mid-November. I hazard that Arteta will err on the side of strength, including deploying Tomiyasu to shackle Gakpo and starting M\u00d88 over Vieira. That may be why our captain came off so early on Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">Turner<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">Tomiyasu, Saliba, Holding, Tierney<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">Lokonga, Xhaka<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">Nelson, \u00d8degaard, Marquinhos<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">Nketiah<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bench: Ramsdale, Hein, White, Cedric, Gabriel, Partey, Vieira, Jesus, Martinelli, Saka, Smith and Edwards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The &#8216;holics pound<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At 8\/15, the bookies have us as shorter odds favourites than I would have expected. Not much is available above tens in the score betting unless we hit four or more. Pleasing though that would be, especially if goal difference comes into play later, a 2-0 win seems more realistic against the second-strongest team in the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Enjoy the game, &#8216;holics, near and far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PSV Eindhoven comes calling early Thursday evening for our fourth Europa League group stage tie; it is the fixture postponed for lack of plod following the Queen&#8217;s death. Embed from Getty Images We last played PSV in March 2007 when they knocked us out of the Champions League, 2-1 on aggregate in the Round of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6817"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6817"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6827,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6817\/revisions\/6827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}