Breakdown of We wonnen de beker doordat de scheidsrechter een penalty had gegeven.
een
a/an
hebben
to have
geven
to give
we
we (unstressed form of wij)
Questions & Answers about We wonnen de beker doordat de scheidsrechter een penalty had gegeven.
Since this lesson is about past counterfactuals, how would I change this sentence to say 'We would have won the cup if...' without using zouden?
You would use the past perfect in both halves of the sentence (the 'Double Past Perfect'). By replacing doordat with als (if), it becomes: We hadden de beker gewonnen als de scheidsrechter een penalty had gegeven. The original sentence here is factual, so it just mixes the simple past (wonnen) and past perfect (had gegeven).
Could I use omdat instead of doordat here?
Grammatically, doordat expresses a pure cause-and-effect ('due to the fact that'), while omdat expresses a reason or human motivation. Because the penalty directly caused the win, doordat is technically more precise. However, in everyday Dutch, native speakers frequently use omdat for both situations, so omdat would also be perfectly acceptable here.
Is it okay to swap the final verbs and say ...een penalty gegeven had?
Yes! In a subordinate clause (introduced here by doordat), all verbs are pushed to the end. When you have an auxiliary verb (had) and a past participle (gegeven), they can appear in either order. Both had gegeven and gegeven had are entirely correct and natural.