Mohamed Ihattaren resumed training on Monday under the guidance of Wesley Sneijder. The attacking midfielder, currently rented by Ajax from Juventus, wants to get back to match fit as soon as possible with an individual program. “He started training today. He’s going for it,” said Sneijder at Veronica Offside.
Sneijder took the initiative to help Ihattaren. The latter initially did not seem keen, but eventually accepted the offer of the record international the Dutch. “He said to me: ‘I look up to you very much, so I found it very difficult to reach you,” said Sneijder, who has mapped out a plan together with Ihattaren. “It has been a tough period for him,” says the former midfielder. “He also knows that he was wrong, he says that too. He wants to go bang, as he says himself.”
Wilfred Genee wonders what went wrong with Ihattaren at Ajax, which did not take the option to buy. “He has been in the news a number of times and has made mistakes that you should not make as a professional football player,” says Sneijder, without going into detail. “He is ready, he says. He wants to put everything aside. He has to persevere, that is of course the hardest.”
Sneijder describes the main pitfall. “If you come from such a neighborhood (Kanaleneiland in Utrecht, ed.), then it is lurking,” knows the TV analyst, who grew up in Utrecht’s Ondiep. “When you step out of your house you run into certain guys. He realizes that too. I said: ‘Try to avoid everything and focus purely on getting fit again.’ And he’s going to do that, he says. And I’m going to help him with that. Even if I have to pick him up in the morning … I’m on top of it. But I’m doing that for him.”
Ihattaren has a long way to go, but Sneijder believes in his pupil. “If he had been five years further, he might have been different. But he is young, you can see that in him. He started today and I can see in his eyes that he really wants to. I told him : “I’m doing this for you, not for me. You really have to want it. It’s in your head.”