Ajax captain Sherida Spitse insists her side will be afraid to face English champions Chelsea in the UEFA Women’s Champions League quarter-finals this week.
Speaking about the first quarter-finals of the competition, Spitse said he wanted other people to see that “Ajax also needs to play football and we are not afraid. We played, you could say, with a little bit of attitude. “Because that’s what Ajax is all about. “
Spitse spoke about how he encouraged his teammates to live up to the wonderful traditions of the four-time men’s European champions. I say, ‘You’re not here because you don’t know how to play football, you’re here because you’re past. ‘Sure, rarely do things go wrong in the game, but that doesn’t matter. You can make mistakes, but you have to ask for the ball again. If you don’t, you’re afraid. “
“It means a lot to the club, but also to the rest of the people who work very hard every day to achieve this with us. We have to invest in women’s football and that’s what the club is doing. This happens in a year, but if you do it year after year and you invest in the players – that each and every one of them can have a contract, for example, that they can concentrate completely on football – that’s what Ajax does. “
After being narrowly eliminated through Arsenal in the last qualifying round last season, Ajax were the first Dutch team to advance to the UEFA Women’s Champions League organisational phase. There they faced German champions FC Bayern, Italian champions AS Roma and two-time runners-up Paris Saint-Germain in the proverbial “Group of Death”. Spitse admits: “When the equaliser came, I wasn’t so happy!”
However, when the club held all 3 home games at the Johan Cruyff Arena, it gave Ajax a major advantage. Playing there, he won each and every one of his matches, starting with a victory on matchday one against Paris Saint-Germain in which Spitse scored. He said: “It gives you a lot of energy, it’s what you need every week. “
“When we played the first games against Paris Saint-Germain, I was hunting to the left because they were there. I had a feeling they were more nervous than our team. Of course, even for players with a lot of experience. ” Coming here to the Johan Cruyff Arena is going to do anything to you. “
Spitse, now 33, is the second-most capped European footballer in history after Sweden’s Caroline Seger, with an impressive 229 caps. She captained the Netherlands when they won the UEFA Women’s EURO in 2017, but like most of that team, she had to leave the country to continue her career at the club, in 2013 she was the first Dutch woman to move by paying a moving fee.
, NETHERLANDS – AUGUST 6: Sherida Spitse of the Netherlands celebrates the winners of the EURO 2017 final with Array. [ ] The Women’s EURO trophy between the Netherlands and Denmark on August 6, 2017 (Photo via Laurens Lindhout/Soccrates/Getty Images)
She returned to Ajax in 2021 after two seasons in Norway and now hopes that the next generation of Dutch players can be in the country and fulfil their ambitions of betting on the UEFA Women’s Champions League with clubs from the Netherlands.
“We’re making arrangements with Ajax,” he told me. Especially young women have the opportunity to play, for example, at the Johan Cruyff Arena. Now we work full-time so we can focus on work, on football, on education every day. This point at Ajax is going up more and more. That’s what you see, in the Champions League we can compete because our footballing skills are smart enough to be compared to the rest of the European teams. “
Following the club’s most productive traditions, Ajax focused on the progression of the young Dutch talent. 17 members of the existing team were born in the 21st century, and Spitse was more than twice the age of her partner Lily Yohannes. For the girls, “It’s smart to play those kinds of games. Nobody imagined that we were going to the quarter-finals and we were playing Chelsea at this time. In football, everything is imaginable and also with young players. “
All remaining UEFA Women’s Champions League matches this season, including the two Ajax-Chelsea matches, will be streamed for free on the DAZN platform.