🇦🇼 An Ajax legend is helping Aruba get its confidence back
Aruba is 205th in the FIFA rankings. Can Stanley Menzo help change that?
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The Aruba men’s national team has lost 10 straight matches. Its last victory came back in 2018. The win before that was in 2015. Their FIFA ranking is 205, fifth-worst in Concacaf. So why are spirits high ahead of Aruba’s World Cup qualification match Wednesday against the Cayman Islands?
Stanley Menzo is in the house.
The ex-Ajax goalkeeper went on to coach in the Netherlands and South Africa after a long career between the sticks and most recently was running youth teams in China with Beijing Guoan. When the pandemic struck, however, Menzo was unable to see his family and a project he’d been briefed on in 2018 came back to mind.
Menzo decided to accept a job as Aruba’s technical director. Born in Suriname, Menzo said he often has felt a pull to the Concacaf region. Plus, he’s now able to see his loved ones, and, well, there are worse places to be based than the Caribbean island known for its sun, beaches and cultural diversity.
“I thought, ‘This is a chance to do something else a region l like, in the climate I like, to be with my family, and there are not a lot of a lot of teams that could offer me a place like this,” Menzo told me Monday via Zoom.
With big-picture projects well underway in neighboring Curacao and Suriname to the southeast, Menzo’s appointment may seem like an effort to attract Aruba-eligible players in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe to shoot up the FIFA rankings by relying on imports who came through European academy systems.
There are some new recruits in the mix, including former Willem II and Netherlands U-19 defender Fernando Lewis. There also are Europe-based players, such as VVV-Venlo winger Joshua John and Germany-based Javier Jimenez and Terence Groothusen, who already have Aruba experience.
Yet, Menzo said, the bad news for the senior men’s national team is the well may not go much deeper.
“As far as we know, we don't have a big pool of foreign players like Suriname has and Curacao has, but the ones who are coming they bring some extra to football on the island,” he said. “It's important that those players come and play for the national team, simply because they bring the mindset, the attitude, the skills that the ‘island boys’ - let me call them like that - they can look up to them and try to improve because of those players.”
Menzo himself is a figure worth looking up to. He made nearly 250 appearances for Ajax from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, playing for managers such as Johan Cruyff, Leo Beenhakker and Louis van Gaal.
In a recently published biography (I believe out only in Dutch at the moment), he spoke about the horrible racist abuse he received as one of the first Black goalkeepers to excel in Europe.
When it came to what he actually did on the field and not what he looked like, Menzo also was a pioneer as one of the first goalkeepers who often played with the ball at his feet, easily latching on to Cruyff’s desired style from his goalkeeper thanks in part to his time playing street soccer in Suriname.
Even so, Menzo said he’s doing much more telling than showing these days.
“You try to show your experience, but it's not easy, because when you're 57 years old, you can't do all the things they can do,” he said, laughing. “But the things I can do, I show them, especially in convincing players in simple things like attitude, body language, passing speed. Those things, I can show them.”
Menzo is transitioning out of the managerial role, which he assumed on an interim basis when he took over the job as technical director. Unlike a technical director for a national team like Holland, for which Menzo has six caps, or Mexico, the technical director of Aruba is responsible for the strategic plan for essentially all aspects of the sport on the island.
“It's a plan where we try to develop football in all layers: Club, referees, women's, and I have to roll out the plan with my technical department,” he said, adding that selecting a new men’s national team coach also falls under his purview.
Rather than fall in love with coaching the team and keep the role for himself, Menzo already has a candidate lined up to take over when Aruba resumes action after these qualification matches. The team is eliminated from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar after lopsided defeats to Suriname (6-0) and Bermuda (5-0), and the finale against Canada doesn’t look promising given the North Americans’ depth.
So, Menzo hopes to find something for the next coach to build on in Wednesday’s contest against the Cayman Islands.
“Sometimes you need a little bit of success after all those losses they’ve had the last years and in the last games,” he said. “A small success against Cayman can relieve and can help the people and the players get more confidence.
“For us, I think the match against Cayman is important to get confidence that you also can win again. Although they are ranked higher than we are, if you can manage to win a game, the players can give (fans) a lot of confidence that yes, we can also win again. And if from here, we start to improve ourselves and to develop ourselves, maybe youngsters can be inspired them. A win or a good result can help a lot.”
So too can the veteran influence of a man who has played on some of the biggest stages and now is working to get Aruba pointed in the same direction as some of its regional rivals.
Wednesday’s WCQ slate:
Not scintillating, but a chance for, in addition to Aruba, Dominica and Anguilla to get a big-time result.
Cuba also should have eyes on its first victory in the ‘new era’ with foreign-based players welcomed to the team and Puerto Rico is still mathematically alive to win the group, but only a win will do.
Follow me on Twitter @ArnoldcommaJon and I’ll try to share legal streams provided by the federations or their partners since I’m currently not seeing any of these matches on Paramount+ or Telemundo
A shame that there doesn't seem to be the same diaspora that Suriname and Curacao have but if Menzo can really help professionalize the program they can at least become a more competitive side.