Scout Report : Marco van Ginkel

Surprise, surprise. Another season without a manager and Chelsea are looking to buy another player. In today’s episode we have Marco van Ginkel, who plays for one of our affiliated clubs.
Social networking sites have been buzzing with comparisons of the youngster with Steven Gerrard. Despite starting out as an attacking midfielder, he has gone deeper, much how we expect Oscar to do one day. Plays like Yaya Toure but is barely as strong as him. He’ll need to work on his strength to shine in the English Premier League. On the field, he keeps his play simple. No trick-flicks and no flashy rabonas and rainbows. He sticks to the basic principles of being a complete deep midfielder, and that is an extensive range of passing. Vitesse Arnhem need a player in the center of the park who can run constantly for 90 minutes. Marco van Ginkel gives them exactly that.
Medium pace, but beautiful control of the ball. From the few clips I’ve watched of him, one commentary piece caught my ears. The commentator referred to his method of controlling the ball as using an imaginary force field. The moment he gets the balls, it is entrapped in this force field created by his mind. Though that sounds a lot like freaky Jedi power, van Ginkel does not take a lot of touches before releasing a ball to a team-mate. He carefully weights his passes and finds team-mates that are making a run. Other Chelsea youngsters like Tomas Kalas have often been found by his passes while making overlapping runs.
He is quite short in the goal category, but scoring is not what you expect from a deep lying midfielder. He is the only player I’ve seen to date who can make the same kind of late intelligent runs into the box like Frank Lampard has done for a decade. However the best part about his play is versatility. Stick him anywhere on the field except as goalkeeper or defender, and you have a solid player.
After the tomfoolery Chelsea committed of letting orthodox central midfielders like Meireles to leave the club, the board should have opened their eyes to make sure they have suitable cover. A combination of Essien, Mikel, Ramires, Luiz, Lampard and van Ginkel is very deep for a team that expects to win the league. Out of all the possible players, Mikel and Ginkel together would be beyond perfect.
To end this report, I had seen a news clip by a local Dutch channel which described what he does perfectly. If you watch a match live, in which Marco van Ginkel’s team wins by 3 to 4 goals, you would clearly notice one thing. That guy in the front was good, this other guy on loan was pivotal and the goalkeeper was terrific. However, if you were to watch the game again and had your eyes set only on Ginkel, then you would realize that everything accomplished by his team-mates on the field, were down to the exemplary vision of the young 20 year old.
10 million? Sign him up Roman !
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Iq3epMbAg]