Newcomer Jean Pierre N’Gouan takes Marum against Alcides to a second big win in a row. ‘We are often dominant without the opponent noticing’

Marum was promoted to the first division via the play-offs last season, so the men of coach Jan Piet Bosma are now suddenly playing ‘weekend football’: matches against Sunday teams, such as Alcides. Bosma kept his team, which competed for the championship in the second division for so surprisingly long last season, relatively intact. One reinforcement arrived, and not the least: Jean Pierre N’Gouan reported to Bosma, who is the father of Stijn Bosma, with whom N’Gouan played many years in the main league at Achilles 1894 in Assen.

Playing football for son Idris

N’Gouan had actually more or less retired from SV Oosterwolde in his hometown, but decided to start playing football again because of his young children. “My son Idris is eight months old. I suddenly thought: I don’t want Idris to never have seen me play football in real life, so I just have to play again. That’s how I started. I quickly got fit again and through Stijn, one of my very best friends, I ended up at Marum. I immediately felt at home here, I love village clubs.”

N’Gouan, who often performed Dutch-language repertoire as a singer after Achilles 1894 competitions, now does so with Marum. He still wears his nickname ‘Black Wimmie’, after the artist Wimmie Bouma who became famous years ago with ‘The ring you wear’.

Offensive impulses

But N’Gouan is also of great importance to Bosma and his men on the field. As a left midfielder, he provides a lot of impulses, especially offensively, which the fast vanguard of the yellow-blacks, with excellent strikers such as Tom Boezerooy, Marc Oldewarris and Delano Dussel, know what to do with. Marum won the competition opening against LSC 1890 3-0.

Alcides also had to believe it and quickly. After just over two minutes, Boezerooy was released in front of goalkeeper Xander Jager, Boezerooy made no mistake: 1-0. Two minutes later, Oldewarris was served with a high cross. The left foot was not allowed to stand in the way, Oldewarris was allowed to take the lead, approach Jager’s goal and calmly score: 2-0.

Alcides’ connection goal disallowed

With that, the game was actually already over, although Alcides seemed to have quickly found the connection. Naoufal Essayah was able to shoot in a rebound after about ten minutes, but referee Smit relied on his Marumer assistant who had noticed annoying offside by an Essayah teammate. “I also thought: he is sitting,” said captain Tristan Veelo afterwards. “That might have made it a different match, but on the other hand: we had of course already given it away before that because we defended far too laconically. We killed the game within a few minutes.”

Alcides also no longer focused and hardly got any chances. What remained was sometimes nice to see, although the tension was gone. Shortly before half time, Boezerooy shot in from the right for 3-0 and it was all over. But fortunately the second half was not written off, because then we would have missed the best goal. N’Gouan continued carefully and was given the ball twice in the mix. He brought substitute Jelle de Lange into position and he saw Jager standing too far in front of his goal. A nice lob made it 4-0.

Bad start to the season

In the final phase, left back Marnix, brother of goalkeeper Xander, was able to do something back: 4-1. That goal could not disguise the poor start to the season of the Meppelers, who played in the fourth division last season. “No, it’s not going well yet,” Veelo also thought. “Especially if we make things difficult for ourselves so quickly.”

And N’Gouan? He wanted to explain why Marum started so well in the first class. “We are often dominant without the opponent realizing it. We are in a good position and can switch quickly.”