Ronald Koeman’s inbox is getting crowded with opinions, but one plea cuts through the noise. Hugo Borst wants Bryan Linssen in the Dutch national team. Not as a romantic sideshow. As a serious option.
In his column for Algemeen Dagblad, Borst puts the 35-year-old NEC forward at the centre of the debate. NEC, the club many tipped for mid-table anonymity, suddenly sit third in the VriendenLoterij Eredivisie. Linssen is one of the main reasons why.
At an age when most strikers are winding down, he’s accelerating. Borst writes that Linssen is “getting better and better,” and that it is simply time for him to make his debut for Oranje. No more footnotes, no more “what ifs”.
Linssen has never played at the absolute top of European club football. That’s the usual argument against him. Borst brushes that aside. For him, the profile matters more than the postal code of a player’s employer.
He points to the numbers. Linssen’s statistics are strong, but it’s the way he fills the pitch that really catches the eye. The columnist highlights something Koeman has struggled to find in recent squads: depth in attack. Runs in behind. Constant movement. A forward who stretches defences instead of just standing between the centre-backs.
“Linssen scores regularly,” Borst notes, and he doesn’t just mean the goals on the scoresheet. The NEC striker offers the full package of forward play: pressing, chasing, harassing.
The description is vivid. Always fit. Always working. Defenders can’t rest, goalkeepers can’t relax. Linssen, Borst writes, is a bundle of muscle without an ounce of fat, a striker built for 90-minute chaos.
Then comes the comparison that will sting in some quarters. Borst sets Linssen against Wout Weghorst, a player who has become a symbol of Koeman’s preferred type of centre-forward. And he doesn’t hold back. In his eyes, the NEC man is the better striker in every department.
He even steps outside the chalk lines. Linssen, he says, is amiable, cheerful, sociable – everything he feels Weghorst lacks. In a squad sport where chemistry matters, Borst is clearly hinting that personality should count too.
On the pitch, he goes further. Linssen, he argues, is the better header of the ball. He claims the veteran forward reaches higher than Weghorst, who he still calls “not half bad”, but not the superior option. For a national team that often turns to crosses and set pieces when the football dries up, that detail is not insignificant.
So Borst ends with a nudge that feels more like a challenge. If Koeman wants a sociable, hard-running, goal-scoring forward who brings depth and energy, then he should at least consider the man driving NEC’s unlikely rise.
“Do give Bryan Linssen a thought,” he writes.
The question now is whether Koeman will just read that line, or act on it.
