Kenneth Perez is not too critical of Ajax after Sunday’s scoreless draw against Go Ahead Eagles. The analyst of football talk saw the team from Amsterdam try everything, but the club from Deventer simply handled it well.
‘In principle I thought that Ajax didn’t do much wrong’, the former Ajax player judges. “They tried through the flanks and through the middle. All you could say is they needed to go more in depth. But where are you supposed to run when there’s a wall 16 yards from the goal?’
In any case, Perez knows that Ajax brings out something in every Eredivisie club. ‘The opponents play against Ajax in a completely different way than against PSV. Go Ahead Eagles went full throttle against PSV. They do smoke. That is what Ajax has brought on itself.’
Go Ahead Eagles does it the old fashioned way
Sjoerd Mossou saw that Go Ahead Eagles did it in a quite different way than Heracles Almelo and FC Utrecht, who also took points from Ajax. The club from Deventer did it in a way that didn’t seem possible in the present. ‘Actually, the conclusion was: if you play against Ajax in this way, just stand in front of the goal, sooner or later you will face him and it will still be 3-0 or 4-0. This recipe seemed a bit written off against Ajax and it appears to work after all.’
“It is a development that is positive,” the reporter continues. ‘Ten years ago everyone did the same and now they are looking for ways to play Ajax. It is of course also simply at Ajax. When you have so many qualities and you already have nine loss points, you can’t think of them as isolated incidents.’
