The dark horse of last year’s Champions league were surely Ajax, surprising everyone as they went on to reach the semifinals of the competition.
Beating heavyweights like Real Madrid and Juventus on their way while playing an attractive brand of football, Ajax’s surprising run at the latter stages of the competition was one of the most exciting one in recent history.
Not surprisingly the squad contained plenty of young talents who were touted for big and bright things in their future and one of them was Frenkie de Jong.
After seeing him run the show from midfield at Ajax, Barcelona came calling and he secured a big money move to Catalunya last summer.
He is considered as a generational talent and expected to run the show at Barcelona for many years.
Frenkie gives a glimpse of his jersey collection
In a live video chat, Frenkie was asked if he has any jersey in his home in Amsterdam that he would like to show. He said he only had football tops of opponent players. One of them was Tottenham’s Brazilian winger Lucas Moura.
Now who could forget THAT semi final between Ajax and Tottenham in last year’s Champions League. That jersey might have brought some extremely painful memories for Frenkie that probably he would have buried in some distant corner.
Actually the top was from the first leg when Ajax went on to win 1-0 at Wembley stadium.
The second leg too started perfectly for Ajax as they scored in the first 5 minutes to take the lead, and added another in the 35th minute to take the aggregate scorecard to 3-0 at half time.
Ajax looked the favourites to advance into the finals for the first time after 1995 at halftime. But football has a funny way to remind us it’s not over until the final whistle.
Lucas Moura did exactly that as he scored two quickfire goals at 55th and 59th min to single handedly drag Tottenham out of the mud when they looked done and dusted and back into the match.
But they still needed one goal to win the tie on away goals. 90 minutes were over and the match was headed to extra time. Surely this was going to be the case of too close yet too far for Spurs.
But Lucas Moura had other plans as he came up clutch in the 96th minute to score and dump Ajax out of the Champions league.
No one could believe what had transpired right before them, but everything was real, although magical but surely real and Lucas Moura made it happen.
That moment pretty much secured Moura’s place in the heart of Spurs faithfuls forever as due to his heroics they reached the final of the competition for the very first time.
