were lucky to see off Haiti. After that game, Sarina realised she had to change the system.

I’ve actually never really seen her do that at all — not that drastically. That shows you that she is also still developing, becoming a better coach than she used to be. That drive is a special thing for a manager to have after you’ve already won it all… almost.

She took over as Netherlands coach six months before our home Euros in 2017. In the pre-camps, she broke up our playing style into different blocks. As the tournament got closer, things became more tournament-related. We would have quizzes on our opponents.

World Cup
 Miedema and Wiegman during the 2017 Euros (Photo: Eric Verhoeven/Soccrates/Getty Images)

You can have environments where staff and players feel pulled apart from each other, but she wanted us all to see each other as equals. Sarina knows what kind of characters she needs to have around her to fill up her shortcomings and that’s why bringing Arjan Veurink, her long-serving assistant, to England was a priority. He is a really good coach technically but also hangs out with players, makes sure they’re feeling good and runs many of the individual meetings.

If I felt something wasn’t clicking in the way it should be, or that we could benefit from something else, I could talk to Sarina. She always wanted to have that discussion with her players. She challenged players and she has done the same for England, switching them from a back four to a back three. Change keeps us fresh and it was never boring because we would find little things we could add to our game. She allowed us to do that.

Advertisement

Back in 2017, we’d only qualified for the World Cup once before. We hadn’t really played a massive role in any big tournaments. We started the Euros in the group of death: Norway, Belgium and Denmark. We would have been happy just to get out of it. But Sarina told us that we had the quality to beat anyone if everything clicked. Why couldn’t we go and win the Euros?

The biggest thing for a group is to have a coach that tells you that you are good enough to win the whole thing. Continuously, she made sure we did believe in ourselves. She created a safety bubble for us and took away anything outside our camp that put us under pressure.