Netherlands – Japan: 2-2, and the triple change that handed Japan a way back

For seventy minutes at Dallas Stadium the Netherlands looked like a side doing exactly what its manager had drawn up, and that was the problem. Ronald Koeman’s team had the ball — a touch over 60 percent of it — held the lead twice, and carried the cleaner idea of what a game of football should look like. They still walked off Group F’s marquee opener with a single point. The temptation will be to hand the credit for 2-2 to Japan’s counter-punching. The truth is narrower, and more uncomfortable for the Dutch: they did not surrender two points to Hajime Moriyasu’s plan so much as to their own bench.

Start with the shapes, because the shapes explain the hour that preceded the collapse. Koeman built in a 4-1-2-3, Frenkie de Jong alone at the base with Gravenberch and Reijnders shuttling ahead of him and a front three asked to pin a back line. Moriyasu answered in a 3-4-3 designed to give the ball away and live without it: wing-backs tucked into a five when Holland advanced, the three centre-backs swallowing crosses, the whole block conceding territory on purpose. It was the textbook possession-versus-transition duel, and on the scoreboard the Dutch were winning it. Underneath, they were not. Neither side managed even a full expected goal across ninety minutes — a number that tells you how rarely either penalty area was genuinely opened.

That is the first crack in the Dutch performance: both of their goals came from the margins of their control rather than its centre. Van Dijk rose to head in a cross on fifty minutes, the captain attacking a delivery rather than a passing move that had cut Japan open. When Keito Nakamura levelled seven minutes later — driving infield and bending a shot that flicked off Jan Paul van Hecke and wrong-footed his Brighton clubmate Verbruggen — it was Crysencio Summerville who restored the lead, and his goal was the one piece of genuine penetration on the night: a carry from the left, a cut inside, a finish off the far post. On sixty-four minutes the design was, just about, working.

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Then Koeman emptied the part of his team that made the ball dangerous. On seventy minutes, three at once: off came Summerville — booked nine minutes earlier for chopping down a break, so there was a logic to protecting him — but off came Reijnders too, the midfielder driving the side up the pitch, and Malen with him. On came Koopmeiners, Quinten Timber and Memphis Depay. In a single stoppage the Netherlands swapped their only line-breaker and their most progressive carrier for players who wanted the ball to feet and in front of them. The possession survived. The penetration did not. Depay promptly gave it away cheaply in midfield, and a team that had been pinning Japan back became one passing along the edge of their block.

This is the structural idea the night turned on. Possession is only a weapon if someone inside it can beat a man and disturb the shape behind the ball; remove the carrier and you are left with territory, which Moriyasu’s 3-4-3 was perfectly content to concede. Where Koeman substituted to manage the game, Moriyasu substituted to attack the passivity Koeman had just introduced. His own triple change on seventy-five — Tomiyasu, Ogawa, Sugawara — refreshed the press rather than relieving it, and Japan spent the closing twenty minutes camped higher than at any point before. The equaliser, when it landed on eighty-eight, was scrappy: Ogawa headed a corner across the face, it glanced off an unaware Kamada, and Verbruggen could only paw it into his own roof. Scrappy — but invited by the caution that had handed Japan the initiative.

None of this should erase what Japan did, and a fair reading credits it. The back three barely allowed a clean sight of goal, the counters were picked with patience rather than panic, and a team shorn of Mitoma, Minamino and the injured captain Endo found a point against one of the tournament favourites by being more certain of who it was. That is a familiar Japanese virtue, and a real warning to the rest of Group F.

But the column-worthy question belongs to the Dutch. Koeman has assembled a side built to dominate the ball, and on this evidence dominating the ball is the easy part; converting it, and not flinching the moment it starts to work, is the hard one. He took off the man who had just scored. Against Sweden on Saturday he will not meet a defence as compact as this one — but he will face the same choice, and the same doubt: does this Netherlands know what to do with the control it wins so comfortably? Japan, off to play Tunisia, already look like they know exactly who they are.

Tags: Japan, wc26, 2026 FIFA World Cup, Group F, Netherlands

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