NOS Football•
With a victory against Villarreal (1-2), Ajax maintains hope in the Champions League and the team regains some confidence for the rest of the season. The Amsterdam team could use that, said trainer Fred Grim after the victory in Spain.
“This is good for the whole team, for the staff and all the people around it, for Ajax,” Grim said. He hoped that his players could show that they had learned from last Saturday, when points were lost against Go Ahead Eagles (2-2) in the Premier League.
“You also want to see good play rewarded in points, in winning. Last weekend we failed to finish in the second half. That’s why I was very curious to see how the team would react today.”
Partly thanks to Oliver Edvardsen’s late winning goal, the response was adequate, Grim thought. “Much better to press ahead, keep the lines closer together and then you will run into fewer problems.”
Captain Davy Klaassen felt the same way. “Maybe I’m looking through Ajax glasses, but I thought it was a deserved victory,” Klaassen said at Ziggo Sport.
“I think we played quite well. If we had done it like that in other games, we would have had a better chance.”
View the results and standings in the competition phase of the Champions League here:
With the second win in seven Champions League matches, Ajax is on six points, two points behind a place that entitles it to a place in the intermediate round. Ajax must win next week, preferably with a big goal difference, to have a chance of extending the European adventure.
“I was good at math, but not so good that I knew the probabilities exactly,” Klaassen admitted. “We had to win twice, we succeeded today. Win again next week and then we’ll see.”
The chance that Ajax will reach the next round is 11.5 percent, according to statistics agency Opta:
