The ugly battle that undermines Ajax’s search for a beautiful game
The Rivals: In the second of a series on football’s most explosive matches, our correspondent visits Amsterdam
Rick Broadbent
The greatest rivalries are built on differences. So you had Muhammad Ali, all swaggering verbosity, taking on Joe Frazier’s prosaic brawler and Björn Borg’s mute Viking trading blows with John McEnroe’s prep-school brat.
In football, you will struggle to find a more vivid contrast than the one between Ajax, the self-styled aesthetes and liberal champions of totaal voetbal, and that “bunch of antiSemitic dockers” from Rotterdam. The subtext to this enmity between Ajax and Feyenoord, two clubs separated by 43 miles, is one of the more bizarre in world football.
“Hamas, Hamas — Jews to the gas,” the Rotterdam contingent chant at their counterparts. “We are Super Jews,” comes the reply. Stars of David bedeck the Amsterdam ArenA. “We’re not a Jewish club at all,” one disgruntled season-ticket holder and son of a Holocaust survivor said. “It’s just these bloody kids. They just want some sort of identity, but it’s insulting.”
This adopted Jewishness is one quirk of a unique club. Another is the devotion to beautifying the game, underscored by the board’s policy statement committing Ajax to “creative, attacking and dominant football”, then there is the ugliness of its F-Side ultras.
It takes two to tango, three to form a crowd and ten mounted policeman to cause chaos via a prematch cavalry charge. This was on Sunday, 90 minutes before the start of the most febrile fixture in the Netherlands and the Ajax fans waited beneath the railway station and the contempt of the police.
As the huge yellow train containing all the Feyenoord supporters pulled in, bottles and firecrackers flew. Police dogs barked, the mob bayed, truncheons thudded. Eleven fans were arrested, three officers were wounded and one fan dressed in a white boiler suit and gas mask, and with a Feyenoord cockroach painted on his back, failed to merge into the background.
It will be ten years ago next month when fans met in a field 20 miles from Amsterdam.
One Ajax supporter, Carlo Picornie, was beaten to death in the so-called Battle of Beverwijk. That led to a nation-wide campaign — “Football: don’t mess it up” — and flowers were laid on Picornie’s seat. It made little difference, just as death and self-destruction in Italy are now seen as someone else’s problem.
Three years ago, Jorge Acuña, the Feyenoord midfield player, ended up in hospital with head injuries after being attacked by Ajax hooligans at a reserve-team match. Robin van Persie, now at Arsenal, was narrowly saved from having to make the same trip.
This classic rivalry is one that goes beyond football. “Amsterdam is the historic and cultural centre [of the Netherlands],” Ian Mackay, a resident for 30 years, said. “But Rotterdam is an industrial working city and not pleasing on the eye. It extends to politics, too. Until the last vote, Amsterdam was liberal to socialist, whereas Rotterdam has become more right wing, with Pim Fortuyn setting up his anti-immigration party in the city.”
And then there is the football. Ajax have the history — four European Cups to Feyenoord’s one — the fabled system, a high defensive line and interchanging roles versus a decent work ethic and widespread sympathy; Ruud Krol’s father hiding 17 Jews in the flat above his café against Feyenoord being expelled from the Uefa Cup for hooliganism.
Ajax are also peculiar for a big club in promoting so many local players. “In the old days you could go down to training and talk to Dennis Bergkamp through the netting,” Mackay said. That was when they were still at the old De Meer stadium, where Johan Cruyff’s mother washed the shirts.
Now they have players such as Ryan Babel, who comes from Bijlmer, a rough area with a large immigrant community, by the ArenA. “This is where most players come from,” Jordy van Dort, the editor of the Football Derbies website, said. The merging of the parochial with a global appeal is a further string to the Ajax paradox.
Another local, Edgar Davids, was back on Sunday and the fans loved it. One supporter said that Davids would have been in prison had it not been for football. Born in Surinam, he grew up in the insalubrious Amsterdam Noordt, where he later built a football pitch for local children.
His presence, some 16 years after his debut, added to the vibrancy and he played well enough. Wesley Sneijder, the playmaker in a 4-2-1-3 system, scored a hat-trick as Ajax won 4-1.
The clubs’ rivalry is born of jarring contrasts, jealousy, suspicion and prejudice, real and imagined. Sometimes its nuances sound like double Dutch, but the confused should refer to a 4-1 scoreline and the defining saying of the divide: “While Amsterdam dreams, Rotterdam works.”
Rivals rating
Atmosphere Fireworks, smoke, noise and colour, but the volume dropped a little when Ajax cantered into a 3-0 lead 7
History Honours galore, including five European Cups, the furore caused by Ajax legend Johan Cruyff’s move to Feyenoord in 1983, and decades of mutual antipathy 8
Ugliness Feyenoord fans were taken from the station into the ground via a covered walkway, but a mounted police charge caused panic beforehand 7
Status It is eight years since Feyenoord won the title, but Ajax’s 4-1 win keeps them in contention for a first triumph since 2004. Still hard for Ajax to keep their best players 7
Fan’s view Ranked higher than any English match on the Football Derbies website 8
Total 37 (out of 50)
Previous Fenerbahçe v Galatasaray (39.5)
The Rivals: In the second of a series on football’s most explosive matches, our correspondent visits Amsterdam
Rick Broadbent
The greatest rivalries are built on differences. So you had Muhammad Ali, all swaggering verbosity, taking on Joe Frazier’s prosaic brawler and Björn Borg’s mute Viking trading blows with John McEnroe’s prep-school brat.
In football, you will struggle to find a more vivid contrast than the one between Ajax, the self-styled aesthetes and liberal champions of totaal voetbal, and that “bunch of antiSemitic dockers” from Rotterdam. The subtext to this enmity between Ajax and Feyenoord, two clubs separated by 43 miles, is one of the more bizarre in world football.
“Hamas, Hamas — Jews to the gas,” the Rotterdam contingent chant at their counterparts. “We are Super Jews,” comes the reply. Stars of David bedeck the Amsterdam ArenA. “We’re not a Jewish club at all,” one disgruntled season-ticket holder and son of a Holocaust survivor said. “It’s just these bloody kids. They just want some sort of identity, but it’s insulting.”
This adopted Jewishness is one quirk of a unique club. Another is the devotion to beautifying the game, underscored by the board’s policy statement committing Ajax to “creative, attacking and dominant football”, then there is the ugliness of its F-Side ultras.
It takes two to tango, three to form a crowd and ten mounted policeman to cause chaos via a prematch cavalry charge. This was on Sunday, 90 minutes before the start of the most febrile fixture in the Netherlands and the Ajax fans waited beneath the railway station and the contempt of the police.
As the huge yellow train containing all the Feyenoord supporters pulled in, bottles and firecrackers flew. Police dogs barked, the mob bayed, truncheons thudded. Eleven fans were arrested, three officers were wounded and one fan dressed in a white boiler suit and gas mask, and with a Feyenoord cockroach painted on his back, failed to merge into the background.
It will be ten years ago next month when fans met in a field 20 miles from Amsterdam.
One Ajax supporter, Carlo Picornie, was beaten to death in the so-called Battle of Beverwijk. That led to a nation-wide campaign — “Football: don’t mess it up” — and flowers were laid on Picornie’s seat. It made little difference, just as death and self-destruction in Italy are now seen as someone else’s problem.
Three years ago, Jorge Acuña, the Feyenoord midfield player, ended up in hospital with head injuries after being attacked by Ajax hooligans at a reserve-team match. Robin van Persie, now at Arsenal, was narrowly saved from having to make the same trip.
This classic rivalry is one that goes beyond football. “Amsterdam is the historic and cultural centre [of the Netherlands],” Ian Mackay, a resident for 30 years, said. “But Rotterdam is an industrial working city and not pleasing on the eye. It extends to politics, too. Until the last vote, Amsterdam was liberal to socialist, whereas Rotterdam has become more right wing, with Pim Fortuyn setting up his anti-immigration party in the city.”
And then there is the football. Ajax have the history — four European Cups to Feyenoord’s one — the fabled system, a high defensive line and interchanging roles versus a decent work ethic and widespread sympathy; Ruud Krol’s father hiding 17 Jews in the flat above his café against Feyenoord being expelled from the Uefa Cup for hooliganism.
Ajax are also peculiar for a big club in promoting so many local players. “In the old days you could go down to training and talk to Dennis Bergkamp through the netting,” Mackay said. That was when they were still at the old De Meer stadium, where Johan Cruyff’s mother washed the shirts.
Now they have players such as Ryan Babel, who comes from Bijlmer, a rough area with a large immigrant community, by the ArenA. “This is where most players come from,” Jordy van Dort, the editor of the Football Derbies website, said. The merging of the parochial with a global appeal is a further string to the Ajax paradox.
Another local, Edgar Davids, was back on Sunday and the fans loved it. One supporter said that Davids would have been in prison had it not been for football. Born in Surinam, he grew up in the insalubrious Amsterdam Noordt, where he later built a football pitch for local children.
His presence, some 16 years after his debut, added to the vibrancy and he played well enough. Wesley Sneijder, the playmaker in a 4-2-1-3 system, scored a hat-trick as Ajax won 4-1.
The clubs’ rivalry is born of jarring contrasts, jealousy, suspicion and prejudice, real and imagined. Sometimes its nuances sound like double Dutch, but the confused should refer to a 4-1 scoreline and the defining saying of the divide: “While Amsterdam dreams, Rotterdam works.”
Rivals rating
Atmosphere Fireworks, smoke, noise and colour, but the volume dropped a little when Ajax cantered into a 3-0 lead 7
History Honours galore, including five European Cups, the furore caused by Ajax legend Johan Cruyff’s move to Feyenoord in 1983, and decades of mutual antipathy 8
Ugliness Feyenoord fans were taken from the station into the ground via a covered walkway, but a mounted police charge caused panic beforehand 7
Status It is eight years since Feyenoord won the title, but Ajax’s 4-1 win keeps them in contention for a first triumph since 2004. Still hard for Ajax to keep their best players 7
Fan’s view Ranked higher than any English match on the Football Derbies website 8
Total 37 (out of 50)
Previous Fenerbahçe v Galatasaray (39.5)
