Henk Fraser started his job as head coach of RKC on Wednesday. The Surinamese native has been living a short distance from Waalwijk for several years and feels at home here. The trainer talks about his bond with Brabant, this year’s goal and discusses last season’s incident in Utrecht one more time.
The question why he chose RKC cannot be summed up in one sentence for Henk Fraser. But the first thing he mentions is the favor factor that the team has throughout the Netherlands. “Nobody hates RKC, it’s just a nice club.”
The former defender also has that nice feeling at Brabant, he has been living in Lith for a number of years now. “Brabanders are top notch. I’ve been living there for a while now and Brabant suits me very well. The mentality and culture within this club and province has also been a factor in choosing RKC.”
“If you run a red light in traffic, you pay the fine and you can go back on the road.”
Because if you say RKC, you say family. The club feels like your own family to players, staff and everyone else involved. “The culture here is also familiar,” the new head coach agrees. “That is precisely why the people in Brabant are also great to work with. It was not for nothing that I brought Twan Scheepers (former striker of PSV and NAC) into my technical staff at Utrecht.”
Yet his adventure in the Dom city was not a great success. At a mid-season training camp, Fraser grabbed one of his players, Amin Younes, by the throat. It led to his resignation from FC Utrecht. “I don’t want to go back to it too much. I’m happy to get started here again. If you run a red light in traffic, you pay the fine and you can go back on the road. Then no one will come back to it. It makes sense for you to ask. But it was an incident.”
“Enforcement is the goal.”
That incident certainly won’t happen to Fraser again, if only because of the brawlers he’s added to his staff. Anouar Hadouir and Adil Auassar were known as street fighters as soccer players. “It is a staff with solid content. They are relatively young but they are intelligent guys and have a lot of empathy. And they can keep me calm!”, says the trainer jokingly.
Ultimately, he knows what he has to do in Waalwijk. “They are very realistic here. Enforcement is the goal. But I myself have the ambition to match my predecessor. I have a lot of respect for that and he did a fantastic job.”
We won’t know until May if that will work. On August 12, RKC will start the competition against SC Heerenveen.