Talk:Netherlands national football team/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Kosack (talk · contribs) 20:44, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

I'll take this one, will post review as soon as possible. Kosack (talk) 20:46, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Lead

• "and under the jurisdiction of FIFA the governing body for football in the Netherlands", this could do with reordering otherwise it reads like FIFA is from the Netherlands.
• "Het Oranje Legion", translation?
• "appearing in the finals three times", the finals would normally mean the tournament itself rather than the actual final.
• neighbors > neighbours
• Link Belgium and Germany to the respective national sides.
• For an article of this size, the lead is a little short overall.

Beginnings: 1905–1969

• "from the Dutch football association", use the full name of the KNVB here for the first mention in the main body.
• "Coupe van den Abeele", without a link we could do with an explanation as to what this is.
• "into overtime" > extra time?
• Link Denmark in the second paragraph.
• "they skipped the first World Cup in 1930", skipped is a bit informal. Also add FIFA before World Cup and link the phrase.
• Drop the FIFA World Cup link in the next sentence.
• The last paragraph is only two sentences but covers thirty years. Is there nothing more for this period?

Total Football in the 1970s

• It's a bit odd to claim Total Football was invented in the 1970s when our own article on it states that it's been seen in many forms since the 1930s?
• Why is Football Further a reliable source? It appears to be a blog of some kind.
• "The 1976 European Championship the Netherlands qualified", this doesn't make sense.
• "by Czechoslovakia who kept Cruyff and Van Hanegem within arms-length of another player", I'm guessing this means they were tightly marked? I think it could be made a little clearer.
• Again, overtime > extra time?
• "After finishing runner-up in Group 4 behind Peru" > after finishing as runners-up in Group four.
• Extra time is linked in the final sentence here but that (plus overtime) is used at least three other times before this.

Failure before European champions

• The heading doesn't really make sense grammatically.
• Link hat-trick.
• You use both Soviet Union and USSR in the same paragraph. This could be confusing to unfamiliar readers, stick to one title.
• "reached the semifinals in the Euro 1992 in Sweden", this sentence is quite clunky.
• Most of the fifth paragraph is unsourced.
• "which was noted for the emergence of Dennis Bergkamp", source?
• "It was also the last hurrah for Rinus Michels", last hurrah needs rewording.
• "team for the World Cup. In the 1994 World Cup in the United States", move 1994 to the first use of World Cup. Start the following sentence with "At the tournament" or similar.

Golden generations: 1996–2014

• "After they had comfortably qualified with maximum points in Group E and Slovakia", the Slovakia part of this sentence doesn't make sense. Can't say I'm a fan of the mid-sentence ref placement either.
• "becoming the second national football team, after Spain, to top the rankings without previously winning a World Cup.", source?
• Eight paragraphs, five images. It's a little cluttered in this section. None of these images are particularly compelling, I'd suggest dropping two of them.

Decline and recovery: 2014–

• "Guus Hiddink followed Van Gaal as manager for the Euro 2016 qualifying campaign. On 29 June 2015, Hiddink resigned and was succeeded by assistant Danny Blind", is that it for Hiddink's spell in charge?

References

• Refs 5, 41 and 42 need a publisher and accessdate.
• Avoid shouting in ref titles, per WP:ALLCAPS.
• Refs 9, 14, 19, 20, 27, 81, 88, 89 need a publisher.
• Ref 26 appears to be dead.
• Ref 49 author, Beavn > Bevan.
• Use the newspaper parameter for The Guardian in ref 66.
• Ref 67 needs dates and lists FIFA twice?
• Ref 72 is the Daily Mail which is generally to be avoided, per WP:DAILYMAIL1. The information it's supporting should be covered elsewhere so another source should be easy enough to swap out.
• Ref 83 is just a title.

There are some big issues here and I've ummed and ahhed about whether to proceed with the review for a while. The prose needs a good copyedit for grammar, there is some rather clunky wording throughout, and it's a bit much to be going through sentence by sentence in a GA Review. I would recommend asking at the WP:GOCE, for a user there to give this a look to tighten the prose. On top of that are the issues I listed above. I would say this a bit much to be sorting in a single GA review, so I'm afraid I'll be failing this one. Once the issues above are addressed and the article text has been looked at, I think this will be in much better shape for another nomination. Kosack (talk) 12:23, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

@Kosack: Thanks for doing this review, I will get to work on doing some editing before I attempt to nominate this again. HawkAussie (talk) 05:40, 8 September 2019 (UTC)