US Edition 
Uruguay v Holland: Mark van Bommel revels in seek and destroy mission at World Cup
Mark van Bommel is psychological warfare in a perm. Watch him today with his unceasing goading of the opposition, the effortless hypocrisy of his dealings with the officials, his relentless pursuit of mental weakness anywhere he can find it. He fouls, he laughs, he dives, he snarls. Is there a more compellingly irritating player?
Uruguay’s attack dogs will meet their match in the Green Point Stadium on Tuesday. Even shorn of his suspended side kick, Nigel de Jong, Van Bommel knows how to street-fight, as the Brazilians found to their horror.
As Dunga’s men lost their heads in the quarter-final, Van Bommel somehow managed to get away with six seemingly bookable offences.
For 33-year-old Van Bommel this tournament is bringing belated international success. He has been among the most decorated club footballers of his generation, winning seven league titles in three competitions and the Champions League with Barcelona in 2006. He has played in nearly 600 club games and twice been voted Dutch footballer of the year but in a decade of international football has won just 61 caps (three fewer than Wayne Rooney, who is nine years his junior).
Van Bommel always knew he would get a recall when Bert van Marwijk was appointed two years ago — and not just because the new national coach was his father-in-law. The two go back a decade, when Van Marwijk was coach of Fortuna Sittard and Van Bommel was at the vanguard of a promising crop of young players. The callow Van Bommel married Van Marwijk’s daughter in 2001. Despite their careers going in different directions Van Marwijk has remained a football mentor to Van Bommel and now, with the Oranje, his mouthpiece on the field.
He performs the same duty for Louis van Gaal at Bayern Munich, always chivvying and organising his younger team-mates, ensuring they retain discipline and shape while going about his own deceptively simple work: trap, pass, tackle. While Giovanni van Bronckhorst wears the armband, Van Bommel is captain in all but name.
He is admired, not loved, at home, though: he has never really been taken into Dutch hearts. He is seen as too cold, too clinical, too nasty, even. When he moved to Bayern Munich four years ago, it seemed to makes sense: he fitted the Dutch stereotype of what it means to be German.
Fittingly he became the first non-German to captain Bayern and last season, with the equally unpopular Arjen Robben and Van Gaal, was responsible for the Dutch regeneration of the German club. Slowly, the Dutch public began to warm to him. Slowly.
Effective he may be, but is Van Bommel really in the spirit of Dutch football? There has been much hand-wringing about what this spirit actually is. The idea that ‘Total Football’ has been ditched is an anachronistic simplification: it was specific to a kind of tactical fluidity practised by the Dutch in the mid-Seventies. It is not just another way of describing attacking football. Like Italian catenaccio, it has been subject to the calcification of cliché over the decades.
No, the real transition in the recent history of Dutch football came three years ago when Van Basten, after meeting his players, ditched the use of wingers and played with two holding midfielders, a switch Dutch football writer Simon Kuper compared to 17th century Dutch Calvinists ditching predestination.
That change got the Dutch up to tactical speed and brought Van Bommel back into fashion. He is too slow to play as a lone holding midfielder but with a partner he can be brutally effective. The platform is made for the individualist showmen — Robben, Wesley Sneijder and Robin van Persie — to do their thing. And if he can wind you up in the process, he will.