Cinderella will look to see if the slipper still fits on Saturday when Costa Rica takes on the heavily favored Dutch.
Costa Rica surprised the world by winning the Group of Champions defeating Italy, Uruguay and England en route to their first ever quarterfinals appearance. Led by their defense, Los Ticos defeated Greece with 10 men last Sunday, but now will have to face a completely different looking team in the Netherlands.
Coach Jorge Luis Pinto manages the Costa Rican side and adopts a counter attacking style that forces other team’s offenses into mistakes while waiting for their opportunities to score. Their counter attack features the likes of Bryan Ruiz and Joel Campbell. Ruiz and his teammates call Campbell “baby boy” because at 22, he is the youngest player for Costa Rica in the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Although he’s made a few mistakes, he’s shown maturity beyond his years, including converting a pressure packed penalty kick against Greece in the second round. “He still has a lot of lessons ahead of him,” Ruiz said smiling. “We’ll give him what he needs.”
The Netherlands play an opposite style than Costa Rica, adopting a high octane offensive attack led by the Oranje’s big three of Arjen Robben, Robin van Persie and Wesley Sneijder. The trio had no problem advancing out of the difficult group B which featured defending champions Spain and South American power Chile. They won every match scoring a World Cup high 10 goals in the process.
They appeared stymied by Mexico for over 80 minutes however as it was the Dutch defense that was vulnerable. The offense managed to rescue Holland’s hopes of winning the World Cup with two late goals including a controversial penalty kick call after it appeared Robben had dove in the box after making contact with Mexico’s Rafa Marquez.
“I wouldn’t swap Robben for any player in the world. He’s having an amazing World Cup.” The Netherlands Coach Louis van Gaal said glowingly.
Robben knows they have the work cut out for them against Costa Rica who likes to frustrate their opponent’s forwards and strikers as they bait them in to jumping off sides.
“I think they’re a strong team. We have to stay focused. Costa Rica have a very good team, they have already proved that in their group, which was very tough with Italy, England and Uruguay in there. They’ve been really impressive and we’ll have to prepare very well if we’re going to beat them.” Robben said.
The Dutch will be without their top midfielder Nigel de Jong with a groin injury which could see a tactical switch for the Netherlands. Costa Rica will be without Oscar Duarte who scored a header against Uruguay, but received two yellow cards and shown red in the match against Greece.
The game is set to kick off at 4:00 PM EST at the Arena Fonte Nova in Salvador. It can be seen on ESPN and in Spanish on Univision. If you want to live stream the match, simply go to WatchESPN here and here for a live stream in Spanish.
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