Seven goals in ninety minutes doesn't happen by accident, and it wasn't bad luck or a dominant team easing off once the game was decided. When Netherlands put seven past Greece without reply, the shot counts tell the real story: Netherlands finished with the overwhelming share of shots on target, Greece with essentially one. Netherlands kept creating chances deep into the match, and Greece's defense never worked out how to stop them.
Take the lazy version of this argument: that the Dutch got their five goals by half-time and then went through the motions. If Netherlands had actually coasted, you'd expect the chance count to dry up and the pressing to ease. Neither happened. They kept generating shots deep into the match. A bored team doesn't keep pinning Greece in their own box, and it doesn't need a VAR review to strip them of their only goal, either, and Fotis Ioannidis's effort was correctly ruled out for handball. Netherlands won 7-0 without ever needing to ease up.
The counter that Greece's players don't train together the way a club side does is real, and it's the most honest defense available. International squads get a handful of days together a few times a year, and asking them to defend with club-level cohesion against one of Europe's sharper attacking sides is always going to be a stretch. But that excuse explains isolated mistakes. It does not explain a back line that kept getting pulled apart in the same areas, over and over, for ninety minutes. Plenty of international teams with the same scheduling problems don't concede seven. At some point the explanation for individual defending errors runs out, and what's left is a collective shape that was never organized to cope with what was coming. That's a coaching failure.
The accountability for that lands on Ivan Jovanović. He sent this team out and set the defensive structure, and he had no answer as it got taken apart for most of the night. A result at this scale, against opposition his own team had held to a draw just a month earlier, is a direct reflection on how this Greece squad has been drilled defensively. The manager owns that, regardless of how thin the training-camp calendar is.
The damage goes beyond the scoreline, too. Greece went into the match with a positive goal difference through four group games and came out of it at minus five, a swing entirely of their own making in a single evening. Worse, because Netherlands and Greece drew back in October, head-to-head now sits with the Dutch if it comes down to a tiebreaker for the automatic qualifying spots, and Greece handed them that edge themselves. None of this is over. Greece are still mathematically alive heading into the final group match, sitting level on points with Germany, and a result elsewhere could still see them through. But a team that needs other results to go its way after conceding seven goals in front of its own fans only has itself to blame for the position it's in.
Jovanović picked this shape, and it set his team up to fail. This is a manager who didn't have an answer when it mattered.
