- Portret
Goalgetters: Mijntje Donners, predator in the circle
The Tulp Hoofdklasse Women broke the 20,000-goal mark in November. A great occasion to zoom in on the biggest goal-scoring machines. In part 5: Mijntje Donners, who celebrates her 51st birthday today.
Donners played her entire hockey life with Den Bosch, where she strung together goals as a centre striker. If she was rewarded for every goal, she would have hit the jackpot long ago. In sixteen seasons in the Hoofdklasse, she scored 263 goals. Including all other official matches, the tally stands at 348 goals in black and yellow, a feat surpassed only by Maartje Paumen.
Donners was often compared to a predator by friend and foe alike, so cunning, dangerous and purposeful was she in the enemy circle. Someone with a killer instinct, with passion for the game and ability to perform under pressure. Roger van Gent, one of her coaches at Den Bosch, once aptly said:'Even if they saw off her legs, she's still unstoppable.'
That mentality developed because when she was young she could be found at the hockey club weekend after weekend, from early in the morning until late in the evening. 'Playing with that ball. Playing games. Boys and girls mixed together. Young and old. That really made you better. Those boys didn't pass the ball three times before they scored. You had to work hard, make war. Otherwise you would be swept away. That's where I learned to play hockey,' Donners explained in an interview with Hockey.nl in 2016.
As a teammate of Donners, you couldn't believe your luck with someone who wanted to win so badly, but at the same time she drew blood from under her opponents' nails. Jack Holtman, former national coach of the Spanish women, said in an interview with NRC Handelsblad in 2003 that his players hated Donners. 'Mijntje can be a bitch in the field, because she is never satisfied and is terribly driven. She provokes, she acts and she is successful, which provokes envy and irritation,' said the Dutch coach.
Ten times in a row champion
With Den Bosch - partly due to her goal tally - she captured the national title ten times in a row between 1998 and 2007. She also won eight European club titles with the Brabant superpower. She also showed her infectious fanaticism and scoring ability in the Dutch national team, where she scored 96 goals in 235 international matches.
With the national team, she won silver once (2004) and twice bronze (1996, 2000) at the Olympic Games and twice silver in the battle for the 1998 and 2002 world titles. In 2003, she was voted World Player of the Year, four years later she retired from top hockey.
What Donners showed on the field was not always to be trumpeted. Or, as she put it herself: 'It didn't deserve the beauty prize. But it did work'. Her goals provide incontrovertible proof of that.
