There’s no press quite as critical as the Dutch these days, and Brighton and Hove Albion defender Jan Paul van Hecke is getting a taste of that this week.
That’s at least according to Voetbal Primeur, who cover how the player’s brother has ended up defending the Brighton man from criticism.
Van Hecke recently made his full debut for the Netherlands, playing 90 minutes for Ronald Koeman’s side as they beat Hungary 4-0 in Nations League Group A.
It was a big moment for the Brighton man, who continues to rise quickly for club and country and can now boast a full international cap after making his debut against Germany in the 2-2 draw back in September.
While the win was comfortable for him and his side, the defender did endure a ropey couple of moments that could have been worse in different circumstances.
This led to criticism from Henk Spaan, who was keen to point out that had such mistakes been made by Manchester United’s Mathijs de Ligt, it would have been a different story in the press.
He gave the Brighton man, who incidentally earned his first cap replacing the Manchester United defender after he suffered a horror first 45 minutes in that draw with Germany, a five rating in his player ratings and was full of criticism.
“Suppose De Ligt had made that kind of mistake: a ball that jumped meters away from Van Hecke’s foot, how would people have reacted? Psychotherapy would have been the first suggestion,” is he said in Het Parool.
“In the 50th minute there was an offside case, which particularly suited Van Hecke. The man with the ‘play-in pass’ played in a Hungarian more often than we would have liked.”
This prompted a clever response from the Brighton defender’s brother, Guus van Hecke, on X (formerly Twitter).
He quote tweeted the piece from Spaan and then threw some stats out, including how his brother completed 118/121 passes, enjoyed a 98% pass success rate, won 2/3 ground duels, 4/5 aerial duels and excelled in various other stats.
This was all accompanied by a laughing face emoji, a clear indication of what he thought of Spaan, whose attempt to defend the Manchester United man by bringing down Van Hecke appears to have fallen on deaf ears.
