Exactly 25 years ago, Ajax made history by winning the Champions League in Vienna with seven players from its own training. Ronald de Boer looks back on that period with great pleasure and a little surprise.
“It was like a volcano, an eruption from within,” De Boer tells The Guardian. In the final against AC Milan (1-0, ed.), Seven players from the Ajax training were on the field. “We didn’t see it coming in the years before. We had no idea, actually. And suddenly the volcano exploded.”
The transfer policy of Ajax was sometimes just as inimitable as ingenious, according to De Boer. Jari Litmanen came over from Finland’s MyPa and Nwankwo Kanu and Finidi George were picked up from nowhere in Nigeria. “Finidi and a Russian winger, Youri Petrov, trained during a training camp in Finland,” De Boer recalls. “Louis van Gaal had to choose one. If I had been allowed to choose, it would probably have been that Russian boy, but Van Gaal chose Finidi and he became a great reinforcement.”
Kanu also initially made little impression on De Boer. “You could see that he had quality, but at first he couldn’t give a straight pass. He also couldn’t do anything with the left. The moment he left Ajax (in 1996 for Internazionale, ed.) He was just incredible. Al these guys just kept growing. “
24 – On this day in 1995, @AFCAjax won the Champions League by defeating cup holders AC Milan; the average age of their starting XI (24 years and 364 days) in that final is the youngest for an EC I / CL winning team ever. Signature. pic.twitter.com/jIAhfRQbAj
– OptaJohan (@OptaJohan) May 24, 2020
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