An international match weekend gives Willem II coach Kevin Hofland some time to make it clear to his players what he wants from them in the fight against relegation. Perhaps he can learn something from the way in which Bert Jacobs managed to keep the Tilburg team in the Eredivisie forty years ago from a difficult situation.
Jacobs saw Willem II as a ‘wonderful little adventure’, he said before he started working in Tilburg. It can be read in the book ‘Hotseknotsbegonia football’ – The biography of Bert Jacobs – Football humor from Zandvoort to Hong Kong. The book by writers Michiel Kraijkamp and Ferry Reurink will be on sale from Saturday 26 March.
Jacobs was trainer and technical director at RKC Waalwijk, while he also worked as head coach at FC Utrecht, Roda JC, Sparta Rotterdam, Vitesse and FC Volendam, among others. In addition, in a special period he was ultimately responsible for Willem II, at a time when even the municipality of Tilburg was involved in the purchase and sales policy.
Off the field, a lot happened at the Tricolores. In the first season, all peripheral matters had no influence on the results. In the second season, Jacobs fought against relegation with Willem II. As previously fighting in the lower regions probably did something to Fred Grim, that was also the case with Jacobs. “Sometimes, after a game, I was so deep in the pit that I thought I would never get out of it. Then I would have given up mentally. But in the middle of the week you have lost the worries of the past weekend and you focus hopefully on the coming weekend.”
Jacobs managed to touch his players, even at a time when players were busy with all peripheral matters. Ton van de Ven remembers it well. “He also knew exactly how to boost a certain player. That was where his strength lay. At a home match against Ajax, at the end of his first season, he had written down their starting team on a chalkboard in chalk. Then he put our names to the relevant players and told a story each time. About the walking lines, draft, outside or inside, that sort of thing.”
“When he comes to Søren Lerby, he says my name. ‘Tonnie’, that’s what he always called me. Then it got quiet for a while. And then: “Oh, that won’t work against Lerby.” And he went on to the next. I was furious of course, offended. Well, I really gave that game my all. Bert knew of course that he could motivate me extra in this way. It probably wouldn’t have worked for someone else, but it did for me. I call that the class of a trainer,” says the player who played as a right half under Jacobs in Tilburg.
Later in his career, the trainer called his Willem II period a ‘nail in my coffin’, especially because in Willem II people only did what he saw in the Willem II part of the biography. “I’ve been through everything this season. I had to deal with all the colors of Willem II: blue for taxes, red for my seat in the dug-out of the Sports Park and white, which I was often scared of.”
In 1999 Bert Jacobs died at the age of 58 from the effects of cancer. He still holds the record for the highest number of coached matches at the highest level in the Netherlands: 741. Louis van Gaal, Piet de Visser, Zeljko Petrovic, Aad de Mos, Co Adriaanse and Marcel Brands, among others, contributed to the biography.