Wesley Sneijder believes that Hedwiges Maduro cannot continue at Ajax. The analyst of Veronica Offside takes a scathing swipe at the coach of the Amsterdam team, who will return to his role as assistant under interim head coach John van ‘t Schip. “I just think you have to start all over again. Everything has to change. Everything has to go. A whole new staff and then you literally start at the bottom,” said Sneijder.
Sneijder, like Rafael van der Vaart, believes that Maduro ‘stabbed a knife in the back’ of the dismissed Maurice Steijn. “Maduro says: ‘We’re going to do things differently.’ While he did the field training and focused a lot on tactics. Isn’t it strange that when you are an assistant, you don’t say anything to your head coach? Then you are not suitable for that role, are you?”
Maduro himself indicated that he had indeed discussed tactics with Steijn. “As an assistant, I often indicated that it had to be more compact. But not just me, but also the rest of the team. I think it is logical that you want to play compactly, that has always been a theme.”
Yet Sneijder believes that Maduro plays a bad role. “Now you are a head coach and you start to act smart: ‘I’m going to do it differently.’ If I had been Van ‘t Schip, I would have said: ‘Either everything comes to light, or I continue with my own people.”
Van ‘t Schip will take his permanent assistant Michael Valkanis to Amsterdam. “Yes, okay, but the other two will stay put.” In addition to Maduro, Sneijder is referring to Said Bakkati.
Sneijder thinks that cleaning up the matter would have been the only solution. “You can never get everything out, or Kenneth Perez suddenly has to talk about who gave him all the information. Isn’t it clear that it comes from very close to Maurice?”
Perez was critical of Steijn’s match discussions, although it is not entirely clear whether the analyst ESPN referred to locker room conversations or interviews. “He comes up with terms like ‘we have to get into more matches’ and ‘we have to work harder’, which shows that he has worked at smaller clubs. At Ajax it is not about that, at Ajax you have to play better football, be tactically stronger, show more confidence on the ball and operate as a team.”
Steijn may have been angry about the information that reporter Christian Willaert released on September 30 ESPN. “Another bomb last week,” Willaert began. “There are a number of players, especially Akpom and Mikautadze, who have asked when they will get a chance in the striker position.”