When Curaçao’s team are on their Caribbean island, they travel around in an ancient American bus with music booming out of the gaps where a door and windows should be. Among them sits a little 78-year-old Dutchman, Dick Advocaat, oldest coach in the World Cup’s history, leading the smallest country ever to qualify, looking like a grandpa on a family holiday.
It’s not his music, but he accepts it, along with the players’ hugs every day at breakfast — for which in Curaçao he let them join the all-you-can-eat buffet with tourists at their hotel. Now, very unusually for a squad at a World Cup, the players’ families are staying with them in the team camp in Boca Raton, Florida.
This isn’t how a workaholic disciplinarian would choose to prepare an island of 158,000 people to face four-time world champions Germany in Houston on Sunday. But only when training sessions or matches start do Advocaat and his players turn fanatical. Otherwise, he has mellowed because he knows this might be his last job. He told Dutch newspaper NRC he fears death, always asking himself, “How long is left?” For now, though, Advocaat and Curaçao are proving a potent cocktail.