#8 The Golden Boys of 1995 – Ajax

This will be a complete review of my first season with Ajax in my attempts to re-create their famous 1995 Champions League winning team. I decided to complete the season in full rather than give a month-to-month break down game-by-game as I feel that can get a little tiresome to read.

The Eredivisie

There is no beating around the bush on this one. We finished 3rd. Anyone should know that its relatively easy to win the league with Ajax on FM so to finish 3rd was an obvious disappointment. Even then we only got 3rd becast gaof the season. It means I have missed out on Champions League football for season 2. Its a big shame but we’re still a long way off being ready to win it anyway. The Europa League beckons.

You can see from my fixtures that we were very inconsistent. Only once did we manage more than 3 wins in a row. The key factor was the last 3 defeats of the season. All 3 teams were slightly above us at the time. I needed to win them or at least 2 of them. We failed and lost all 3. After that it was unlikely I would finish in the Champions League spots.

Our inconsistent league form has to largely go down to our risky style of play and tactic set up. I never really completely settled on something that worked. More on that later.

The Champions League

What a disappointment. Having beaten Fenerbahce and Monaco to get there and then win away at Leverkusen in the first group game our decline was massive. We finished bottom or joint 3rd, but missed out on the Europa League due to a poorer head-to-head with Celtic. To go out of Europe completely with 7 points was harsh, but that’s the one downside to having a group where anyone can beat anyone.

 

The League Cup

We scrapped through the first 2 rounds against lower league opponents, albeit with our second string 11, so not the greatest results. We scrapped through again in the next round against PSV, on penalties. At this point we had a great chance of winning it, but a really poor quarter final defeat saw us exist the competition embarrassingly.

Stats

Keepers: Tactically I played around with the keepers distribution. Playing it short to the centre backs or playing it further to the wingers. The short option did retain the ball better. I am intending on doing some more research as to what Van Der Saar did with his distribution back in 1995. I also tended to change to sweeper keeper when I toyed with pushing my defence higher up. Pretty self explanatory really.

As it stands, moving into next season Valdes will be number 1. I have to consider if its worth selling Cilliessen. He simply never performed. There are some decent young keepers in the reserves. I’m not quite sure if any will be ready once Valdes retires as he is quite old. I guess it could depend what sort of money I could get in for Cilliessen.

Its quite clear the winner here. Valdes wins on a lot of key stats. 9 clean sheets from 16 games. zero mistakes. Compare that to Cilliessen. To be fair Cilliessen only played so many games because I kept forgetting to take him out the team. I’m not used to having to worry about my keeper.

 

Defence: Its doesn’t take a genius to know that we were sacrificing space in the wide areas and a lot of our goals came from assists in those areas. I thought I might have sussed this issue at one point during the season. More on that later. We had the worst defense in the top 4 going on goals against. I can understand that. I’m hoping those young defenders will do better in season 2 with a year of development under their belt. I also feel I need more experience at the back. When we had the ball I did like the positions they took up. They spread across the pitch and found their midfield teams mates most of the time.

This is a simple overview, but shows some interesting things. All 6 got game time. Orban was the outstanding perform so turned out to be a good signing. Tete and Riedewald stand out from a passing perspective which is important in the way we play. Tackling wise Van Der Hoorn struggled which I was surprised with as he is arguably the best ‘defending’ type player. Headers were all over the place. When having to defend crosses this needs to be bang on and it wasn’t. Dijks and Veltman struggled. Overall I am disappointed with Veltman the most. Dijks struggled and I will look to move him on. The jury is out on Veltman and Van de Hoorn. If I can get decent money I may move them on as well.

 

Middle of the park: Performances were good and consistent if you go by match ratings. My issue was getting the right balance between them without straying too far away from the Ajax of 1995 model. I did find that they were all on top of each other a lot of the time which was unnecessary. There was only 11 goals between my first choice 3 centre midfielders. That’s a low number in this league and shows me they didn’t get forward enough. Their assists were even worse. Their attributes would suggest that these stats should be a lot better than this. I will go into more detail on this later.

Disappointingly Van de Beek didn’t get as much game time as he should have done. Carroll was only supposed to be a ‘back up’ but played well and was difficult to ignore. It was good to see Sinkgraven run as much as the rest being a more attacking, flair type player this was surprising. Gudeij overall has not come out of this well, especially with those high mistakes. Maybe he will be better in the DM role. Maybe I could swap him round with Bazoer for the up coming season. I also need to give more licence to get forward. Davids and Seedorf would often chip in with goals. 10 goals in total from Gudeij and Sinkgraven wasn’t a lot. I don’t plan on selling any of these at the moment.

 

Attack: I found myself using ML/R’s instead of AML/R’s for most of the season. From an attacking perspective it didn’t really make too much difference, but defensively the wide guys were a bit further back adding protection. This always left me frustrated because they would end up tracking wingers too far back so when we won the ball back they were too deep and it slowed down or sometimes ended out attacks. I really need to figure out how I can keep them high without being ruined down the flanks. I was continuingly changing my striker role. So often he was isolated and lost possession. Also, when the crosses came in he was surrounded by defenders. Is there a point in constantly crossing if there is only 1 man in the box.

Im not too sure what to make from this. El Ghazi comes out of this very well. I don’t think he quite has the pace for the type of winger I want though. Also a 12% cross success is not very good given that’s his main job. But that can always be down to the striker. I could instruct where I want the crosses to go. Or cross less in general. With a small amount of game time both Nouri and Anderson did well. Maybe I wont need to loan anyone next season and they could be given more deserved game time. 9 goal from Klaassen might seem ok, but most of them came in the first half of the season. Tinkering with the striker role could have caused issues here.

 

Interestingly Zivkovic out performed Milik (other than heading) if you take into account the game time they both played. Milik’s power in the air though was important. I see no reason to change these guys club statuses. Bringing in a 3rd striker could be a possibility. Getting the player roles right is the most important thing.

 

In other news

You might be wondering what happened in the January Transfer Window, well, basically nothing. I tried to bring in 2 loan players, Fabien Delph and Isco. Both showed interest, but both decline. Isco went to Juventus permanently. Not sure why Delph changed his mind. The plan would have been to terminate the loads of Atsu and Carroll have those deals gone through, but the never. I also managed to finally sell Amin Younes for £1million.

I had to turn down bids for basically all of my players from different clubs. Nothing even remotely big came in so they were all rebuffed.

Dennis Bergkamp flipping left my backroom staff to become an assistant at some poor Spanish side. I did all I could to keep him, but it wasn’t enough. A lesser replacement was brought in.

Youth Intake: Always an exciting time when in charge of Ajax and I think I have got a very good batch. There are quite a lot of good one’s but only 2 (very good) that could fit into our philosophy.

 

I will leave this review of my first season there. I want to get cracking on season 2. I’ve learnt a fair bit from this and hope to evolve and improve for next season.

When you pick a save with a plan in mind its never going to work after just 1 season, especially this one. I need those young guns to improve all round.

I still plan on playing with the 3 at the back and in the Ajax way. I feel I am short in certain area, but I will cover that in my next post. Thanks again for reading.