Antoni Milambo and Mauro Júnior are almost ten centimeters apart, but emotionally it is even more. When Feyenoord rows the ball forward from the defense again, attacking midfielder Milambo makes himself as wide as he can. The legs apart, the chest forward, the elbows far from the body. Ready to control the ball, hold it for a moment at a safe distance from your own goal.
Compared to Milambo, Mauro, the PSV back who stands at his back, almost looks childish. The Brazilian has a lean build, a pointed, narrow face and slender shoulders that always hang slightly towards the ground. As if Mauro, who can be deployed in many positions, is trying to make himself as small as possible.
That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, as he almost always proves this Sunday afternoon. Football is a sport in which weight or muscle mass are secondary to explosiveness and technique. And Mauro Júnior regularly leaves the much more physical Milambo perplexed. For example, when the ball comes in their direction, the PSV player starts as if it were his only sprint of the afternoon, and then catches the ball before his opponent has the chance.
In the last Dutch top match of 2024, it is the seemingly endless energy of the home team that wins out over the risk-averse, static football of the visitors. With Mauro, who immediately rushes back towards Feyenoord’s goal after the interception, but also with PSV attackers and midfielders. After losing the ball, they don’t stand still for a moment, they immediately chase their opponent again.
It is that merciless pressure that PSV coach Peter Bosz prefers to see every match. His players must “grab their opponent by the throat and not let go.” Feyenoord has great difficulty with this, especially in the first half. The Rotterdam team had barely defended before PSV pressed again. With a 3-0 win, the Eindhoven team may even be doing themselves a disservice.
Two losses
Beforehand, the question was with what feeling PSV would end the first half of the competition. Bosz’s team started the season with the same dominance as the previous one, with ten wins in a row. However, while PSV only lost points for the first time in the Eredivisie a year ago at the end of January, with a draw away at FC Utrecht, the leader has now already lost twice.
The first defeat against Ajax seemed an exception. Under their new trainer Francesco Farioli, the Amsterdam team managed to tactically disrupt PSV in early November, just as they had done at Feyenoord a few days earlier. But PSV immediately recovered, with the same greed as before. For example, they won big against FC Utrecht (2-5), number two at the time, and then against FC Twente (6-1).
Yet PSV is more vulnerable this season than the previous one, as became apparent this month. In the Champions League, the team first suffered a disappointing defeat against the fighting Stade Brest (1-0), after which a few days later they suffered a surprising loss to SC Heerenveen (1-0). Bosz later called the match against Brest “the worst match under my leadership”. The following Sunday he had to go back on that statement: it was even worse against Heerenveen.
Was that a coincidence, two such weak games in a row? Or was there more going on, and had PSV’s form gone into a dip? Bosz didn’t believe in that. “I won’t let myself be persuaded into a dip or panic. It is simply not there,” he said after the lost match in Heerenveen. Midfielder Joey Veerman also said the same. “We have played almost everyone upside down over the past year and a half. Then it would be very strange to give up after two defeats.”
‘Throwing with forces’
PSV starts with confidence against Feyenoord. When the Rotterdam team has possession of the ball, PSV dares to play one-on-one at the back. The result is that the people of Eindhoven also have a man marker for every Feyenoord player up front, which means that Feyenoord goalkeeper Justin Bijlow can hardly get the ball to a teammate at times and his team rarely gets around to building up.
Feyenoord does not dare to play that far forward: the number four of the Eredivisie regularly defends with six, sometimes even seven players on the last line. PSV can therefore build freely lower on the field through the backs and controller Jerdy Schouten, who is back in the starting line-up after two months of injuries. This makes it easy for the leader to move the game to another part of the field, where there is more freedom.
Yet the difference between PSV and Feyenoord is not only tactical. The leader starts the race with much more energy and eagerness. Afterwards, Bosz revealed that his team performed almost as many sprints in the first half alone as normal in an entire match. He had asked his team to “throw their strength” from the first minute in order to quickly overwhelm the opponent.
And that works after just over fifteen minutes, when striker Luuk de Jong enters into a header duel with Feyenoord defender Gernot Trauner. The ball hangs, but De Jong reacts much earlier and is able to send right winger Ivan Perišić away at speed. He gives the lead, after which left front Noa Lang sprints out of his opponent’s cover and scores 1-0.
The same Perišić also provided the cross to make it 2-0 ten minutes later. That attack starts with the fierce chasing of Feyenoord goalkeeper Bijlow by midfielder Ismael Saibari, who then passes poorly. Perišić gets the ball and sprints away down the right flank. His cross ends up on the head of Luuk de Jong, who heads in hard.
Despite the many chances at the end of the first half, it took more than half an hour for PSV to decide the match. It is a period in which Feyenoord grows in the game, also because the home team has to slow down after the bright start. The Rotterdam team has several chances to score the tying goal. Just when Feyenoord seems to be gaining the upper hand, the 3-0 falls: a nice long shot from Malik Tillman, from an attack that he set up himself.