Go Ahead Eagles for the first time cup winner after intense final

After almost 96 minutes of playing football, Maarten Martens gets up again the grass of the tub. The AZ trainer calls something to his team and points his fingers to his sleep. An understandable message in a KNVB Cup final in which football has long since made way for ups and annoyance: we are almost there, keeping the concentration for a moment.

Little seems to be able to disturb the fifth cup win of the team from Alkmaar at that time. It has been 1-0 for more than forty minutes and there is hardly any building at Go Ahead Eagles. The team from Deventer winds from backwards one long ball towards the goal after the other, in the hope that one will fall well. Without good luck for the time being.

On the clock are two more minutes when Joris Kramer makes another attempt. His pass is towards attacker Finn Stokkers, inserted deep into the game. It is covered by Peer Koopmeiners, they hang on each other’s shirt. The AZ midfielder could easily clear with his head, but is seduced into a joke. He winds his hands in the air and pours to the earth.

A rare bad choice turns out immediately. Exactly what trainer Martens hoped to prevent a minute earlier. Koopmeiners gets the ball on an outstretched hand: a penalty kick, referee Danny Makkelie judges. He shoots Go Ahead captain Mats Deijl hard. An unlikely turnaround that leads to the first cup win for the Eagles over half an hour later.

Nervousness and testosterone

It is moment to be characteristic of the 106th final of the KNVB cup, on this soft, gray Easter Monday. A competition that is loaded from the first moment with nervousness and testosterone. Filled with frighty upsiders for nothing. Faced by two teams who would rather play around in the build -up, for fear that they will lose the ball.

A whimping must therefore make the difference. Such as after pretty twenty minutes, when Go Ahead slopped the ball in a sloppy way and AZ has found the free space in a few super -fast combinations. Attacker Troy Parrott gets the ball on the left and takes it out. His shot splashes through the fingertips of goalkeeper Jari de Busser on the crossbar.

For a long time, Go Ahead is the lesser, but certainly not hopeless. Ten minutes before the break, the Eagles get their best chance to date, as a central defender Gerrit Nauber, all three Alkmaar lines traverses with a razor -sharp depth pass. Spits Milan Smit, pulled to the flank, put forward. The shot of shadow striker Victor Edvardsen comes across the fists of goalkeeper Rome-Jayden Owusu-Oduro.

A penalty seems to decide the match just after the break. A disputable, moreover, given after defender Joris Kramer Schampends Ernest Poku in a duel AZ-out player Ernest Poku. Makkelie initially does not see anything in it, but the video referee intervenes, to everyone at Go Ahead. The first attempt is stopped but has to be over, because Eagles midfielder Mathis Suray runs into the penalty area too early. Keeper de Busser also does not seem to have the required foot on the line. Parrott shoots hard the second time.

Hero role De Busser

From that moment the competition becomes rough and unsporting. Sometimes even unnecessarily hard, such as when Poku sprints a clearly unattainable ball a little later, comes much too late and with a knee goalkeeper the buser touches in the face. Makkelie gives a yellow card, the video referee now sees no reason to intervene.

In the final phase, AZ seems concentrated enough to decide the match. Where the Elf van Go Ahead regularly loses themselves in disturbances, and flashy attempts to decorate a free ball, the Alkmaarders continue to defend compact and organized for their own goal. So up to three minutes before time, after which the Martens team in the extension no longer succeeds in getting the grip on the game back.

It runs out on penalties, for the purpose of the crazy Go Ahead supporters. The first two penalties of both teams are hit, but then AZ-invader Zico Buurmeester and Mayckel Lahdo shoot their attempts within the reach of goalkeeper De Busser. The 22-year-old Julius Dirksen, inserted in the very last minute, can then decide the game and does that cool.

For Go Ahead it is the first Grand Prix in almost a century. In the distant past, when professional football did not yet exist in the Netherlands, the club once became national champion four times, last in 1933. But the cup never won the Eagles. Six times they reached the semi -final, only once the final, in 1965, in De Kuip against Feyenoord. It became 1-0.

Six players from that team are still alive. One of them is Wietse Veenstra, the attacker who almost decided the match against Feyenoord deep in the second half. Another is former goalkeeper Nico van Zoghel, who whipped many shot from the goal against Feyenoord, but was surprised two minutes before time.

On this spring evening in April, almost all of them in the eighty now, they watch the team of Paul Simonis after the decisive penalty kick in the direction of the corner of the field. The captain Mats Deijl lifts the cup in the air a little later. Sixty years later it was still successful.

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