I kept silent about Ajax for a while, because sometimes a person has to be able to suffer in silence. But there are limits to self-discipline. For me, that limit lies with the relatively unknown footballer Kenneth Taylor.
Taylor is a young, reasonably talented player who has already made it to the Dutch Juniors. He was considered a promising talent, even though he was rarely completely convincing. This season he shared in the malaise at Ajax and sank deeper and deeper into a swamp of incompetence with his colleagues. It turned out that Ajax could lose to anyone, even to a well-behaved amateur team.
Was Kenneth Taylor single-handedly responsible for that? You would almost think so, because the home crowd became increasingly hateful towards him. Last Sunday it happened for the second time that he was whistled en masse when the coach replaced him in the second half. Imagine this for a moment: you are 21 years old and the audience starts booing and whistling at you with gloating pleasure while you have to make the long walk to the dressing room. It seems like a nightmare, but it is a Sunday afternoon mare, ridden in full public view by tens of thousands of bullies.
I just hope his parents and his girlfriend weren’t sitting in those stands. What could they say to him afterwards? “Cheer up, boy, there’s another match on Sunday”?
Former players stood up for him, such as Rafael van der Vaart who in Rondo said: “This boy has a lot of quality, but when you walk into the stadium and you know that you are being whistled for every mistake you make, you become very small.”
Yet Van der Vaart did not want to condemn the audience too harshly: “You can call it a shame, but the Ajax audience is disappointed.” On a video I heard an Amsterdam market vendor say: “If my staff performs such a poor performance, they will be punished. The people there pay his salary!”
In this way, Ajax’s collective failure was blamed on the shoulders of one young, inexperienced player. As if he was also responsible for the weak players around him, who were purchased by the Ajax management in a disastrous transfer summer last year. The new Ajax management will have to sell them all for next to nothing next summer.
How could that happen? The history is known: Ajax collapsed after the inevitable dismissal of technical director Marc Overmars. They could not find a good successor and even tried to get Overmars back, which would have become the football scandal of the century. Fortunately, Overmars himself had the sense to say no.
Then Ajax placed its fate in the hands of a bold German football adventurer named Sven Mislintat, who energetically led the club to the edge of the ravine. One expensive bad buy after another took place, all players without much reputation, but Mislintat saw growth brilliance in them. When you see those players messing around every week – as long as they are still drafted – you can smell the corruption above their heads. Who has earned the most from this? KPMG is still investigating the matter, but the question is whether Ajax management has an interest in full disclosure of the results. There’s a lot of butter on a lot of heads there.