Angry to Be Benched, Meerveld Hit Heerenveen's First Sub Hat-Trick and Toppled Feyenoord

Ringo Meerveld thought he should have started for Heerenveen against Feyenoord on Sunday. He came on at halftime instead, with his team down 2-1, and scored three times in a 5-3 win that ended the league leaders' unbeaten Eredivisie season. According to the Eredivisie's own review, he is the first Heerenveen player ever to score a league hat-trick as a substitute. Dutch newspaper NRC reported it was the first hat-trick of his professional career, and that he was "very irritated" about being left out of the lineup.

By the end of the day, Feyenoord were no longer top. PSV won 5-2 at Cambuur a few hours later and went into the international break one point clear.

Giovanni van Bronckhorst's team went 2-0 up with a fine strike from Anis Hadj Moussa and a penalty from Nacho Ferri, which NRC called debatable. Heerenveen captain Maas Willemsen pulled one back from a corner in first-half stoppage time, after several Feyenoord players had already started running forward and left him free.

Van Bronckhorst called that goal "naive." With a two-goal lead away at Heerenveen, he said, "you have to play that out very businesslike."

Levi Smans equalized at the begining of the second half with a shot that deflected off Tsuyoshi Watanabe and beat goalkeeper Tjark Ernst. Meerveld then finished off a move started by Jacob Trenskow to make it 3-2 just after the hour. Sem Steijn came off Feyenoord's bench and tied it 3-3 four minutes later, but Meerveld scored again from the edge of the box and completed his hat-trick on a rebound in stoppage time.

"That 1-2 just before halftime was decisive," Meerveld told Dutch broadcaster NOS. "You could feel it in everyone, in the stadium too, that it was alive again. Every time we lost the ball, we had it back within a few seconds."

The Eredivisie's data was brutal for the visitors. It was only the second time this century that Feyenoord lost a league game after leading 2-0, and the first time since October 2011 that they conceded five in a league match. Heerenveen had 40 touches in the Feyenoord box, their most in a league game this season.

The loss also stretched Feyenoord's winless run to five games in all competitions, NL Times noted, after defeats to Real Betis and Inter and draws with PSV and Fortuna Sittard.

Van Bronckhorst pointed at attitude, not tactics. "I think we think we're very good, and we can be," he said. "But in the games where we played well, I saw a team that fought for each other, that was mentally strong, that kept running, also when we didn't have the ball."

"Being a footballer is nice, but you have to work very, very hard," he added. "That hard work, I missed it a bit today."

Captain Luciano Valente called the defeat painful, "also because of the way. That you're 2-0 up and leave with 5-3. It's clear that things have to change."

PSV did their part quickly. Sven Mijnans headed in after 46 seconds, and the champions were 3-0 up inside 19 minutes before a stoppage for cups and bottles thrown on the field by Cambuur fans. Mijnans finished his hat-trick with a free kick over the wall. It was his second hat-trick in his first 10 league games for PSV, something only Dries Mertens had done for the club before, per the Eredivisie. U.S. international Sergiño Dest was booked in the second half as Cambuur pushed back.

That leaves a tight table going into the break: PSV on 26 points, Feyenoord and Ajax on 25, Twente on 24 and AZ on 23. Ajax drew 2-2 at Twente on the same day, and the 31 goals scored on Sunday were the most ever on a single Eredivisie matchday outside the last two rounds of a season.

Meerveld will have two weeks to make his case for a starting spot. After Sunday, his argument is hard to ignore.