I wonder if there is any dutch person here who watched this match? How could Venlo give themselves up so easily?
I watched most of it. There is not a single soul here that thinks anything nefarious was going on. VVV was simply demolished by a team that had murder on their mind and wasn't going to relent at all.
VVV has a general unsolvable problem. They have fairly good players up front, but they really need to have some space to work with as they're fast but not that strong. It is not easy to get them into the game, you'll need to find them channels. I won't go too much into the whole theory of keepers as libero's, but Ajax has a very fast goalkeeper in Onana and the man is a decent passer. If Ajax has its defenders on the middle line you can't just twat long balls into Ajax territory and hope to find goals, you need to find accurate weighted passes to do that or you'll run into Onana. So basically VVV had to first reach the midfield and find channels from there, or simply hope to find a good long ball, but it has to be really good. This team VVV played it's matches on artificial grass last year and reverted back to natural grass this season. It's not too hard to place balls correctly on artificial grass. On real grass you have to hoof the ball or put a lot of extra velocity on it. It's hard to adjust, they haven't been themselves in attack. So along comes Ajax, they would keep two men back and sacrificed the rest to put pressure on VVV (and Ajax is very good at that) so they simply had to play long balls all the time. It was horrible. Out of like 100 long balls only one was good. Their only other option was to find an open channel to play the ball into the feet of their central striker and play from there, but he would quickly be crowded. This explains why VVV couldn't attack and Ajax had 75% of the ball.
Then, the VVV defence. It's just not a good defence in general, but it has merits against most opponents you really want to beat. Their central defenders are very experienced, but their age is catching up with them. They are a bit slow, they turn like a truck and the same is true for their defensive midfielder that sits in front of them. These are all strong players though, physical specimens that really know how to tackle. This is a decent setup against most of the less able teams. You'll win most duels in your own box, you will have a good anchor to defend against runners and all you have to do is just consistently keep the opposite target man out of the game. This works pretty well in most matches in the Dutch league as most players are physically a bit weak. Now, what if the target man is so strong you can't handle him and what if he is so agile you consistently lose him? You will need help. What if the help is just as slow and just as weak? You will need more help. What if that help is too far away, too slow and also not quite strong enough? You will still need more help. So yeah, VVV started running back en masse to deal with Traoré and suddenly you have no chance in hell to solve the issue of runners from midfield. Add to that the fact that Ajax simply combines well on the flanks and total chaos ensued. No one knew who was supposed to pick up who, defenders were losing their duels out of sheer confusion and let's be honest here, Ajax was simply dead accurate.
Add to all of this the fact that the VVV coach simply didn't do anything to stop the onslaught and the VVV players lost all morale while Ajax wanted to get this one into the record books and yeah... 0-13.
Meanwhile my Vitesse sits in second place with the same amount of points as Ajax.
Jesse Marsch will break that curse and qualify you guys for the UCL GS this time around.
Sucic will likely be promoted from Liefering to replace 
Szoboszlai. Still plenty of talent as has always been the case at Salzburg. Marsch is committed to staying as well.
's first divsion (the botola) !
.. whatever...very very bizarre, and also the red card in the beginning of second half cannot explain this outcome..I wonder if there is any dutch person here who watched this match? How could Venlo give themselves up so easily?
