Picture the halfway line. On one side of it, Teun de Nooijer is allowed to try anything he likes. On the other side, he isn't. That's how he remembers the instruction from Paul van Ass: "You can create something there. You can do whatever you want, for example, but not on our own half."
It's a short sentence, but I think it carries most of what this piece is about. Creative players and structure aren't a trade-off you settle once in preseason. They're a line drawn somewhere on the pitch, and the interesting part is how each coach decides where it goes.
TL;DR
The coaches here mostly agree. They just look at it from different spots on the pitch. De Nooijer comes at it from the player's side. He felt free under Roelant Oltmans, inside the team's structures, and it worked because his teammates knew his job and covered for him. Tin Matkovic comes at it from the coach drawing the lines: the first ball, and the match as opposed to the training ground. Robert Noall comes at it through decisions, putting the whole sweet shop in front of players instead of handing them one sweet. Rob Gray's book backs all three with a mechanism. Creativity is a search, practice design produces it, and smaller games seem to produce more of it.
Sources
Teun de Nooijer on Nurturing Talent in Field Hockey, webinar with Teun de Nooijer, June 2020
Practical Approaches for Fostering Creative Field Hockey Players, masterclass with Tin Matkovic, September 2025
One Up, masterclass with Tin Matkovic, October 2025
Boosting Field Hockey IQ: Training On-Ball Decision Making, workshop with Robert Noall, May 2025
Book: Rob Gray, How We Learn to Move, chapter 10, including the work he cites by Caso and van der Kamp, and by Orth and colleagues
"Not on our own half"
When de Nooijer joined us in June 2020, he was assistant coach with the German women's team. So he was talking from both sides of the question: as the creative player who'd been managed, and as a coach now doing the managing.
On Roelant Oltmans, his first national team coach, he said: "I felt really free, really free to do what I thought was the right thing to do, of course in the structures of the team."
Look at where the weight sits. "Really free", twice. Then, almost in passing, "of course in the structures of the team." He doesn't present the structure as the price of the freedom. He presents it as the room the freedom happens in. That "of course" is doing a lot of work.
Van Ass's version is more geographical. Create on their half, not on ours. It's a rule a player can carry onto the pitch without a whiteboard, because there's already a line painted across the middle. You always know which side of it you're on.
Why that line, and not your own 23 or the edge of their circle? De Nooijer didn't say, and I don't know whether Van Ass ever explained it. But it's a fair question to ask of your own team. How many passes does it take your opponents to get from a turnover just inside your half to a shot from the top of your circle? How many from a turnover on their 23? If the answers are very different, maybe that tells you where your line wants to be.
De Nooijer also made the case for keeping that space open at all. When the conversation turned to data and analysis, he said: "creativeness as well can decide games and win games. And maybe that's, you have to create room for that and enough room for that."
Room, twice in one sentence. Not licence. Room, with walls.
Continue on reading about creativity is a search you design for. Where the structure stays. And about the team understanding what the creative player is for.
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