He had also, for the Dutch, come to embody some of the values and contradictions at their heart of their country: hard-working and plain speaking, sometimes offensive, but always motivated by a basic underlying decency. He was a strict disciplinarian who cried when introduced to a terminally ill child on live television, nearly quit football when his wife died of cancer, and wrote heartfelt poems to read out at press conferences. He was, like the anarchic Dutch themselves, brilliant and slightly crazy at the same time.
