After Dutch skipper Edwin van der Sar weighed into the debate over the omission of Ruud van Nistelrooy and Mark van Bommel from the squad for this evening's game at Lansdowne Road yesterday, Marco van Basten suggested that, for the moment at least, the alternatives are simply too good to ignore.
Van der Sar surprised Dutch journalists yesterday by making it clear that if he was in charge the established stars would have been included, both for this game and the forthcoming European Championship outing against Luxembourg.
His coach, however, insisted that with so many talented youngsters to choose from the time had simply come for a change.
"We're lucky that we have a lot of good attacking players, so we had to make some hard decisions," he said before raising the possibility of a return for those currently out in the cold. "If you make a decision in this sort of situation then it attracts a lot of attention, but in international football you never know what's going to happen in six months' time, so none of this has to be definite."
Back in Holland, his decision to discard van Nistelrooy is partly seen as the result of a clash between two strong personalities but there is an acceptance too that the Real Madrid striker's time as an automatic choice has simply passed.
While Dirk Kuyt has kept the British tabloids busy these past few months, there is far greater excitement in Holland about Klaas Jan Huntelaar. The Ajax striker, who turned 23 last Saturday, has already been setting the Dutch league alight for a couple of seasons.
"He is a young player in whom we have a lot of confidence," said van Basten of a striker whose omission from the squad for the World Cup finals was at the heart of the national coach's last major controversy.
Now, it seems, he has seen the error of his ways and the youngster, a member of the Dutch under-21 squad that won the European Championships in Portugal this summer, is set to make his senior debut this evening against the Irish.
If even half the hype is right, then this will be a date long remembered by Dutch supporters who, like van Basten, now see the young striker and fellow debutant Stijn Schaars as part of the team's bright looking future, one built around a new generation of stars.
Huntelaar's statistics certainly go a long way towards justifying their optimism. Judged to be a failure at PSV who released him after just one league game, the striker dropped a division to play at AGOVV where his impact was immediate. Having scored 26 goals in 35 games he moved on to Herenveen where he showed he could cope at the higher level after all.
By last season he was the league's new striking sensation, scoring 17 goals in 15 games before the transfer window and 16 in 15 for Ajax after it.
Throw in cup and international games and his tally of goals topped 50 last season alone, while the prospects for the new campaign are bright too if last week's Champions League qualifier against FC Copenhagen are anything to go by. In that match the 23-year-old scored both of his team's goals in a 2-1 away win.
"He's an easy goalscorer, an intelligent player," observes van Basten. "He's a good football player, one with a good combination of skills, strong with his head and with his feet . . . that's why he scores a lot of goals."
By handing him prominence in the national team at the expense of van Nistelrooy, of course, van Basten could hasten the striker's departure to England, Spain or Italy but, the manager insists, the player would be better biding his time for a while yet.
"He was playing at Herenveen just eight months ago and things went well for him when he went to Ajax. Still, I think it is good for him to have some time to develop within the Dutch game before he decides to move on to a different level."
