The supporters of Manchester United may have their doubts about the galvanising, va-va-voom influence of club manager Louis van Gaal. But if anybody needs a reassuring check on what can happen to a team without him, they might look at the last one he was in charge of.
That was the Netherlands.
The Van Gaal Netherlands of the two years up to July 2014 did some great things.
They beat Spain 5-1 in their opening match of the Brazil World Cup, a triumph with plenty of dazzle in the second half.
The performance laid down quite a marker, and the losers – who happened to be reigning champions – never recovered, eliminated in the first round.
Van Gaal’s Dutch meanwhile ended their tournament on the penultimate day, with a bronze medal from the third-place play-off against the hosts, having narrowly lost their semi-final to Argentina.
Van Gaal’s second spell with the Netherlands – the first was over a decade earlier – is not the shiniest entry on his record in management, nor is it the shabbiest. He was in charge for 28 matches and lost only two of them.
Under Guus Hiddink, who followed Van Gaal and now Danny Blind, who replaced Hiddink in June, the Dutch have lost seven of their last 12.
That is quite a plunge in form for a nation with a super-sized reputation for great coaches, sophisticated players and a history of three World Cup final appearances and a European championship crown.
As former Netherlands captain and leading opinion-shaper Johan Cruyff commented, theirs are a team who seem to have lost their bearings.
They lack “tactical education”, have “no depth to their play and no movement”, he wrote.
Senior figureheads have diminishing influence, with Arjen Robben and Kevin Strootman injured, and Robin van Persie in and out of the first XI at his club Fenerbahce.
Critics talk of a missing generation, a gap between the players in their 30s and those in their early 20s, talented but unworldly.
The Dutch will scrap today for a chance of a late backdoor entry into the largest, easiest-to-reach European championship in history. They depend not on just themselves and but on another underachieving team – Turkey – slipping up even to maintain the hope, beyond this weekend of a play-off route to France next summer.
Turkey beat the Dutch 3-0 last month. In the same Group A, Iceland have beaten them twice.
The Czech Republic, who the Dutch face in their last group match next Tuesday, started the problems by inflicting a defeat on what would become Hiddink’s hapless squad on Matchday 1 of a tough but negotiable group with an injury-time decider in the 2-1 win.
Since then, the Dutch have been struggling to play catch-up.
Of the 53 teams who sent out to contest the 23 places available at the finals – a 24th, France, qualified automatically as hosts – only Andorra, Malta, San Marino and Gibraltar have spent more time at least a goal down in their matches in qualifying so far.
None of those minnows entertained hopes of going through. The Netherlands’ prospects, as they prepare for their away match in Kazakhstan today, now rest on their gaining three more points than Turkey over the two fixtures left.
There is scant confidence they can do so, and the likeliest scenario is their spending a major tournament summer watching from afar.
That has not happened since the 2002 World Cup, when one Louis van Gaal was in charge of a wretched qualifying tournament.
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