Since the beginning of this year, Patrick Lodewijks (55) from Eindhoven has been a goalkeeper coach with the Dutch national team again. During the year and a half that Louis van Gaal was coach there, he was temporarily out of work. At first he found that painful, but once home he felt he needed it. Because in 2015 Patrick lost his wife Yvonne in an accident on the A2 near Eindhoven and only then did he feel that he had not taken enough time to process that. He will talk about it on Wednesday in the TV program ‘KRAAK asks door’.
During that one-and-a-half year break, Patrick worked a lot in the garden at his house in a village near Roermond, where he now lives. And his thoughts went back to the beautiful years with Yvonne with whom he has three daughters. But also that black day: April 29, 2015 when he got his daughter on the phone at Feyenoord with the message that Yvonne was dead.
And how he found a new love in Estelle, who lost her husband to a heart attack five weeks after Yvonne’s death. A new love. He thinks it’s the bravest thing he’s ever done. “If you ever lose someone you love very much, you never want to go through that again,” he says. “That’s a dent you’ll never lose.”
‘Less euphoric with a win’
Since the accident, he looks at football differently. “When I win I am less euphoric and when I lose I know there are much worse things than losing a game of football.”
“But,” he hastens to say, “I’m putting in 100 percent.” Enough to do now with the Dutch national team in a time when not one keeper stands out above the rest, like Edwin van de Sar in his time. He has to laugh a bit at the word ‘goalkeeper crisis’, but he admits: “it’s a bit less now.”
Who will be the first keeper at the European Championship in Germany if the Netherlands qualifies? He says he doesn’t know. The selection now consists of Justin Bijlow, Mark Flek and Andries Noppert.
Keeper until the age of forty
Goalkeeping is lonely work, Lodewijks knows better than anyone. He played for FC Groningen, PSV and Feijenoord, where he was still a goalkeeper at the age of forty. “You are an individual athlete in a team.”
At football club WVVZ in Eindhoven it turned out that Patrick had talent. He didn’t get it from a stranger. His father in his time was also a goalkeeper and he could also go to PSV. But his parents thought that, as the eldest of eleven children, he had better opt for security by taking a job at Philips.
A generation later, there was a Lodewijks in goal from PSV. And the same Lodewijks can now prepare the Orange keepers for the European Championship in Germany next year.
View conversation
‘KRAAK asks through’ is broadcast every Wednesday at 5.15 pm and then repeated. The program can also be viewed online and a longer version of the interview can be found on Brabant+.