Denzel Dumfries has remembered how fellow Netherlands players weren’t impressed with him when he first trained with the national team.
Dumfries has become a key player for his country since making his debut in 2018, being their first-choice right-back ever since.
Back then, he had only been at PSV for a few months and before that had only played for Sparta Rotterdam and Heerenveen. As a result, the training sessions he had participated in had never been particularly technical or intricate.
Given that, the now-Inter player feared the worst when he first trained with Oranje, and admits some team-mates weren’t too impressed with how he coped.
“I always have to laugh about that with Stefan de Vrij”, Dumfries said on De Cor Potcast.
“I hoped that we wouldn’t do positional play in my first training, and then I came on the field and I saw all kinds of squares. Then I thought: sh*t.
“In the beginning, I sometimes played balls that make you think: what is this boy doing here? And when we started playing, my team just won.
“You know how that goes. Then there are comments like: ‘so, at PSV you certainly don’t play positional games?’
“I don’t think it’s f*cked up that these kinds of things are said, but I think it’s f*cked up if I don’t succeed. Then I get really mad at myself.”
