Netherlands have rallied around striker Cody Gakpo after he and his partner lost their unborn son during pregnancy with coach Ronald Koeman and captain Virgil van Dijk hailing the couple’s fortitude.<\/p>\n
Gakpo\u2019s partner Noa van der Bij posted about the loss on social media on Saturday and Gakpo has been given time off to spend with family who are staying near the team base in Kansas City as the Netherlands compete in the World Cup.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have done what was within our power in terms of support, as players, as staff,\u201d said Koeman.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course, the first few days he had the freedom to go out to his family and be with them. He dealt with it very well, there was never a moment where he said \u2018I want to go back, I want to be with the family\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Van Dijk said he had lots of respect for how Gakpo and his family had dealt with the situation and said he expected the striker to be fully focused on Monday\u2019s clash against Morocco in the last 32.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most important thing is to ask: \u2018what do you need?\u2019 It\u2019s awful news and it shows that football is secondary. There are more important things in life. It\u2019s very sad but Cody deals with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s very mature, very adult. I have lots of respect for the way he and his family are handling this. However awful it is, I respect it very much.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gakpo has made no comment but is expected to play in Tuesday\u2019s match.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Netherlands have rallied around striker Cody Gakpo after he and his partner lost their unborn son during pregnancy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":768152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-768151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/768152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}