Missing Vivianne Miedema becomes painfully clear in Leeuwinnen’s defeat against Austria | Dutch football

Imagine the selection of the Orange Women as a game of football in the schoolyard. National coach Andries Jonker wins with piss feet and is the first to choose a player from all the football players in the Netherlands. There is a good chance that he will choose Vivianne Miedema (26), above any other option imaginable.

Exactly there is the crux for the World Cup selection that he is already modeling in his head and about which he will continue to practice this week and a half in Malta. Miedema will miss the final tournament in New Zealand and Australia after tearing her anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee in an Arsenal match in December. How do you cope with her loss? How do you replace someone who has a goal average of 0.83 hits per international match? Who at the age of 26 is already sanding against the limit of a hundred international goals, with 93 hits in 115 games?

That is not possible at all, national coach Jonker also realizes. ,,It’s a shame that you don’t have a player who makes a difference on a global level. We surrender that extremely high goal average. I can worry about that, but I prefer to get on with the order of the day. Others will have to fill it in.”

So others. In concrete terms, Jonker has four options for the striker position with Fenna Kalma (23, FC Twente), Lineth Beerensteyn (26, Juventus), Romée Leuchter (22, Ajax) and Katja Snoeijs (26, Everton), leaving aside creative variations. Kalma and Beerensteyn seem to be the strongest contenders.

Kalma got the chance in the point tonight against Austria on the island of Gozo, belonging to Malta. Beerensteyn replaced her fifteen minutes before the end. Although Kalma acted as a decent starting point, it didn’t manage to do much. Like Orange created little anyway. Her partner on the left, Lieke Martens, gave the Lionesses the lead. But Austria had been insisting for some time and took the game completely to itself in the final phase: 1-2. Just to indicate, this Orange needs goals.

It is not surprising that Jonker tried it with Kalma. Every week she shoots the premier league upside down. 26 goals and ten assists in, mind you, fourteen league games. For FC Twente, the premier league is a playground this season, with 69 goals for and only two against.

The level differences between the top and the bottom are actually much too great in the competition, which means that Twente achieves good results almost every week. To be able to properly assess Kalma, she should actually go abroad. After all, she is also ‘already’ 23 years old, an age at which Miedema was already a global topper.

At the same time, she does have that nose for goals that we know from Miedema. With that she seems to have an edge over Beerensteyn, who is much more experienced (86 international matches and 21 goals) but is at her strongest on the side or in a two-striker system, if she can look for depth with her speed.

Replacing Miedema: this is one of those issues that Jonker is working on in Malta. Although he also knows: replacing the all-time top scorer and a leader of the team is not possible at all.