Veteran Curacao coach hails 'crazy' World Cup qualification

AMSTERDAM :Veteran coach Dick Advocaat said tiny Curacao's qualification for the World Cup is the "craziest thing" he had ever achieved in his long-standing career.

The Caribbean island of barely more than 150,000 people, which is a self-governing part of the Netherlands, became the smallest country to qualify for the World Cup when they drew with Jamaica in Kingston on Tuesday. 

The 78-year-old Advocaat was not there because he had to return to the Netherlands for family reasons. 

Nicknamed “the Little General”, he has been the national coach of eight different countries and took the Netherlands to the semi-finals of the 2004 European Championship and the World Cup quarter-finals in 1994.

Now he will be the oldest coach in World Cup finals history. 

"After a performance like that, you're tempted to say this is the most beautiful thing I've ever experienced, but that's short-changing so many other moments," Advocaat told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper on Thursday in his first public reaction to the feat.

“It’s the craziest thing I've ever achieved as a coach. This is so wonderful for the island and the players who came from far away.”

Advocaat watched the match on television at home in The Hague in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

"I was completely finished after the match, much more so than when I'm standing on the pitch. You can set things up exactly the way you want, but you lose all your energy. This was such an important match," he said.

“Look at Jamaica, Steve McClaren was already gone as national coach a few hours after the draw. Yet they hit the post twice and the crossbar once. And then there was the penalty."

VAR INTERVENTION KEPT FAIRYTALE ALIVE

Curacao’s fairytale looked shattered in the fourth of the five minutes