Tricky Dick Goes On, Takes The Money And Runs.

April 16th, 2010 | by: chris | Comments Off

There was breaking (sort of) and surprising (not really) news that Dick Advocaat left one of his coaching spots (he’s still filling in at AZ) as Belgian gaffer less than one year after taking the reins, with the good money saying he did so to take the big money with Russia.

Fret not, you are not suffering through a bout of déjà vu.

In 2008 he signed on with the Soccerroos, only to cancel the deal when his current club offered him a mammoth new contract. How do we know? Dick told us:

“I couldn’t refuse this offer. It was quite a lot of money, to be honest. It was not double, it was more. Much more.”

So between this and hist recent highly successful stint with Zenit in Russia, it’s pretty easy to put one and one together to make rubles. The fact that no reason was given makes it even more likely. However, there’s potentially more lurking behind the scenes, as Dick isn’t the first one to resign from the current constitution Belgian national team.

The medical staff resigned last year because, as they say, they’re Europe’s “childish snobs”.

Seemingly unable to gel, the dressing room has reportedly ”divided into factions”. Newspaper La Dernière Heure was told last month by an ‘insider’ that: “There is the [Daniel] van Buyten clan, the France-based players, the trio of [Timmy] Simons, Sonck and [Stijn] Stijnen, the guys from Amsterdam, the guys from AZ, and then, of course, the Standard and Anderlecht factions.”

The fall-out from the reigns of Vandereycken and Vercauteren also saw the entire medical staff resign. ”The mentality of some of the players is deplorable,” former national team doctor Marc Goossens told the Guardian. ”We got fed up with the many intolerable things that made it impossible for us to do our jobs… they are pseudo-stars… with the sick attitude of childish snobs.”

The appeal of the Belgian nat’l team is and was massive; there’s a tremendous generation of young talent coming up, including Defour, Hazard, Verthongen, Fellaini, Witsel, Vermaelen, etc. The only apparent problem is they know it. And really, self-realization is the diciest of dice rolls.

So if/when Dick is named the next coach of Russia, we can be damn sure he checked the checks first, but also knowing he likely got a convincing helping hand. Hopefully then he’ll reveal the offer to have been triple, too.

Until then, let’s petition FIFA for a rule which states every time Dick emerges from a tunnel, it must be accompanied by his soundtrack: