Valentine Driessen is tackling: Erik ten Hag has football from . according to the chef The Telegraph proved to be ‘a real Ajax trainer’. According to Driessen, the coach made the right choice by preferring Steven Berghuis to Davy Klaassen as an attacking midfielder. With this, Ten Hag took ‘a test of competence’, Driessen writes in a column on the website of his newspaper.
The trainer chose ‘an ex-Feyenoord player over a true Ajax player’. “It resulted in an unparalleled football show and the ultimate reward (4-0) against the number two in Germany with 200 million euros more turnover than the Dutch champion,” writes Driessen, who has been critical of Ten’s functioning several times in the past. Hag. “The trainer-coach opted for the flight to the front, for dominance, the game at the ball and therefore for Berghuis’s creativity over Klaassen’s running ability and switching.”
Ajax leads the Champions League with nine points from three matches. The team from Amsterdam also has a goal difference of 11-1. Although the good start does not say everything about ‘the expected performance and form in the spring of 2022’, according to Driessen, the European campaign has so far been ‘a major advertising tour for Ajax’. “Because Ten Hag dares to fully propagate the Ajax philosophy with his team against an opponent like Borussia Dortmund. To show that you can also play dominantly, attractively at the highest level, according to the Dutch school with pure wing attackers, an offensive, creative midfielder, with a defense against the center line and self-trained Ajax players, as befits a real Ajax coach.”
Ten Hag himself calls the match ‘one of the best’ of Ajax under his leadership in the press conference. “It is always difficult to compare, but I remember a match in Madrid, which was nice too”, he refers with a sense of understatement to the 1-4 victory that Ajax booked in the 2018/19 season when visiting Real. Madrid. “We just played great today. That’s great and will give us confidence. We should also take that with us.”