Guus Hiddink is the man you call when you have a broken soccer team. A coaching mercenary if ever there was one, he has made a brilliant career out of coaching ragtag outfits and making them competitive, and taking good clubs to make them great.
The latest chapter came last weekend at Wembley Stadium when he lifted the F.A. Cup trophy with Chelsea, the club he joined on an interim basis in February. After the debacle of Luiz Felipe Scolari — a brief tenure that was not to owner Roman Abramovich’s liking — Chelsea reached out to Hiddink with a bizarre three-month deal. But in those three months, he changed the spirit of the team and brought several of its misfiring players back to form. Florent Malouda and Didier Drogba are cases in point.
It is exactly the same thing he has been doing for the better part of a decade.
In 2001, he took over the South Korean national team. A year later, he had them lighting up the World Cup and riding an improbable wave to the semifinals. They beat Spain and Italy in front of their home fans and ultimately finished fourth.
By the next tournament, Hidding was in charge of another football minnow in Australia. They snuck through the qualifying rounds, beating Uruguay on penalty kicks in the deciding game, and then shocked the world by getting out of the group stage. In the second round, under the slogan “No Guus, No Glory,” they held on against Italy for over 89 minutes until a dubious penalty kick did them in.
But Hiddink’s reputation did not suffer. He was snapped up by the talented Russian national team and, within two years, had them in the semifinals of Euro 2008 after upsetting the favored Netherlands. He is still officially their coach and returned to that job today after riding into the sunset from Chelsea. The fans in West London, however, had been begging him to say, chanting “Sign him up” on the terraces at the tail end of the season. Instead, they have secured the services of former A.C. Milan boss Carlo Ancelotti.
It’s hard to say what exactly makes Hiddink such a brilliant managers, but the trademarks of his teams always seem to be discipline and organization. Those qualities, combined with his eye for talent, mean that Russia could be a popular dark horse come the 2010 World Cup. And if he gets them to, say, the quarterfinals, Hiddink will be writing his own ticket anywhere in the world afterwards.
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