cW VERTONGHEN
I
THE A J A X CONNECTION
"This was the first ever game at the Emirates
andoneofmyfirstevergamesfortheAjaxfirst
team. It's Dennis Bergkamp's testimonial in
2006. It's strange because he was my assistant
coach later with Ajax. I don't remember what
the score was - the team changed at half-time
and I only played the first half. It was a funny
story -1 took the ball home as well as my shirt
that you can see in the photo but they both got
stolen from my bag. Later I found my shirt on
eBay. We got the police involved and I got the
shirt back but the ball was gone."
"Back in the day I used to take a couple of
free-kicks. This is against Feyenoord in the
Eredivisie. I didn't score from this one, though!
They were always interesting games against
Feyenoord - it's very, very intense, a big rivalry.
There was always respect on the pitch but the
games were so intense because of everything
around them. You can see Luis Suarez there
as well. Around that time we always had the
upperhandon Feyenoord but we struggled in
the away games. This one was 2-2"
"This was in the UEFA Cup. Marco van Basten
was the coach then - we played Aston Villa
away and it probably would have been my first
game in England apart from the testimonial
match for Bergkamp. The funny thing was, all
ourgame plan was around John Carew, the big
Villa striker at the time. Even on the morning
of the game, we'd practiced free-kicks on the
golf course at the hotel. We went on the golf
course and we defended, not with the ball,
but set up our defensive line for free-kicks
and how to defend. It was quite funny in the
morning. Everything was quite focused on the
big tall striker Carew - and then we saw the
teamsheet and he didn't play! Everyone just
started laughing! At the end we lost the game,
2-11 think. I remember Martin Laursen scored
from a corner!'
"Not such a great memory! We lost the league
that day. It was on the last day of the season
in 2010 and we'd actually won the game 4-1 at
NEC Nijmegen. In my career at Ajax, two or
three times we were up to win the league on the
last day of the season, not in first place but in
second. We wanted FC Twente to lose but they
won and that's when we didn't win the league."
"We won the league here. This was my second league title with Ajax in 2012 and we made it back-
to-back championships as a result. It was a great season for us. We came back from being eight
or nine points down and we had a great team. You can see Christian is there, Toby, Daley Blind,
André Ooijer, Gregory van der Wiel - we had a strong squad and it was fantastic to lift the trophy
as the Ajax captain. We won the league on this day at home to VVV-Venlo and we had one more
away game afterwards against Vitesse!'
Jan on tonight's semi-final: "It's so weird! I've always wanted to play against Ajax... even PSV or Feyenoord. I missed the two games
against PSV earlier this season so I've never been back to Holland to play and now Ajax in the Champions League semi-final... it's
extremely weird for me as someone who grew up there. I grew up in the city, I grew up with everyone at the Club, I still know everyone
and it's going to be very strange to be on the other side."
