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Til looks back: “Then I immediately got rid of that ‘Kuipvrees’ stamp”

Guus Til is still very happy with his choice for Feyenoord. In the program Mirror Talk by ESPN the midfielder told extensively about the reason behind that choice and his time at Spartak Moscow.

For starters, Til called it great to “be a footballer again.” “In the first instance you play football because you like the game. When you end up on the couch, it all falls apart at once. Here I really started to appreciate football again.” Til said he attaches great importance to his starting position. “Your matches show how much confidence someone has in you and whether you are good enough in the eyes of others. If that is not the case, it gnaws and also causes a lack of self-confidence.”

Til was not only having a hard time in Russia in sports. He also said that he underestimated the cultural difference. “I went there all by myself. I remember coming out on the street the first day, looking for the supermarket and then thinking: ‘Oh my gosh, they have a different alphabet here of course’. I couldn’t read those signs and you could don’t speak to anyone either, because they didn’t speak English. Those are things I probably should have thought about more.”

Til is now happy to be back in the Netherlands. At Feyenoord, the midfielder soon felt at home again. An important moment was the home match against FC Drita, in which he helped the Rotterdam team to the next preliminary round with a hat trick in a difficult match. “If you open like this, you immediately get rid of that ‘Fear of the cockpit’ that people talk about differently,” he knows. “At that moment I knew: ‘I’m here, I’ve started’.”

Watch the entire interview with Til below, in which he also discusses the mental health of professional football players and his time as a youth player at AZ.

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