Excelsior 2-2 Ajax: The Name Nobody Spells Right, and the Goal Nobody Counted

I go to the stadium to listen, not only to watch. I have written that sentence over and over for nearly twenty years, and on the night Excelsior hosted Ajax in Rotterdam, it was true in a more uncomfortable way than ever before. Minute 88. The score was 2-2. A ball broke loose from a duel on the right flank and rolled diagonally into the box. For about two seconds, the Van Donge & De Roo Stadion — the ground the whole of the Netherlands still calls by its old name, Woudestein — fell silent. Not the silence of fear. The silence of waiting. Then that head appeared. A Nigerian striker, taller than almost everyone else on the pitch, rose at the edge of the six-yard box, waiting for a ball he knew would never arrive. Far away on the touchline, coach Ruben den Uil stood with his arms folded, motionless, as though he had already calculated how this would end. I watched that moment eleven times. Not to see the ball go in — it did not go in. I watched to count. An Ajax defender turned his back for exactly half a second. An Excelsior midfielder jumped earlier than he needed to. And in the middle of it all, a centre-back who never touched the ball changed the direction of the whole move with a single pointing finger. There is a sound to silence, and it rings louder than any hymn. But that is the end of the story. The beginning of the story started long before minute 88. Excelsior Rotterdam were founded in 2026. They share a city with Feyenoord but have never inherited their big neighbour’s glow. Their home ground holds a little over four thousand spectators when full. By comparison, Ajax’s Johan Cruijff ArenA holds more than fifty-five thousand. The ratio between the two stands is roughly one to twelve. The gap in the stands is only the tip of the iceberg. Ajax have won the European Cup four times — in 2026, 2026, 2026 and 2026 — and own more than thirty domestic titles. Their academy produced Johan Cruyff, Marco van Basten, Dennis Bergkamp, Frank de Boer, Frenkie de Jong and Matthijs de Ligt. Excelsior are famous for something else: training people and then selling them. That is the fate of a small Rotterdam club, and it is also how they survive. Every summer a young player leaves, and another name walks out of the academy. That cycle never stops, and it does not allow anyone to dream for too long. Dutch football prides itself on a very specific tradition: possession. Since the era of Johan Cruyff and Total Football, the Dutch have defined beauty by the number of passes. A Dutch team playing well is a team holding the ball longer, passing more accurately, and imposing its rhythm on the opponent. That value system creates a paradox for small clubs. If you cannot out-possess Ajax, you are accused of playing ugly. If you sit deep and defend, you are accused of betraying your country’s heritage. But if you try to play like Ajax without Ajax’s players, you lose by five. Excelsior chose the first path. And on a winter night in Rotterdam, that path almost delivered three points. A point against Ajax is worth more than a line in the table. For a club like Excelsior, it is a signal to the young players in the academy that the impossible can still happen. It is a signal to sponsors that this club is still alive. And it is a signal to the supporters themselves that this winter will not end in resignation. The match finished 2-2. That is a result anyone can read in three seconds. But to understand what actually happened at Woudestein, you have to listen to Ruben den Uil. Den Uil, Excelsior’s head coach, is the only voice quoted in the report I read. And the way he spoke about the game — not the scoreline — is what is worth counting. He said: “We dug in for most of the match.” He said: “This result took enormous fighting spirit and a fair bit of luck.” He said: “The players went to the limit.” And he said something I wrote down in my notebook: “The gap in individual quality is huge.” Those are the words of a man who has just escaped a defeat. Reading them, I thought of 2026, when I was fresh into the job at a small football site. My first live commentary assignment was AFC Wimbledon against Accrington Stanley in League Two. The second half was tense, and I mispronounced defender Will Nightingale’s name into something stranger — three times in ten minutes. The match finished 2-2. I cannot remember a single goal. I only remember the shame. For a month afterwards I sat rewatching the footage, counting every touch. And I found a detail nobody had mentioned: there were seventeen passes before the second equaliser. Seventeen passes in nineteen seconds. A sequence the whole world missed. There are seventeen passes the whole world missed, and one writer counted them. Since that night I have never trusted a scoreline as a full summary. The score is punctuation. The story lives in what happens before the full stop. To understand Excelsior 2-2 Ajax, you need to understand a concept television rarely explains: the low block. In modern football, most big clubs defend by pressing high. They want the ball in the opponent’s half, they want the opponent passing into spaces where one mistake leads to a goal. That is the philosophy metrics such as PPDA — passes allowed per defensive action — try to measure. Excelsior do not do that. They do not have the midfield to press, the defenders to play a high line, or the striker to hold the ball in the opponent’s half for long spells. So they choose the opposite: drop deep, let the opponent have the ball, and protect the box with a wall of bodies. This way of playing is not beautiful. It is not taught on professional coaching courses. But it has its own logic: if you cannot win in midfield, try to win in the area where goals are scored. For a club like Excelsior, a point against Ajax is worth almost as much as a win in the fight for survival. Mechanically, a low block runs on two principles. The first is compression: the distance between the lines must be kept to a minimum, usually under fifteen metres, so no gap exists for a pass between the lines. The second is sacrifice: the team gives up the opponent’s half in order to protect its own. The price of those two principles is exhaustion. A low block does not burn much energy in the first half, but it burns an enormous amount in the final twenty minutes. As the legs get heavier, the gaps between the lines begin to stretch, and that is when tall substitute strikers enter the pitch. That is exactly what happened at Woudestein. In European football, the gap between club tiers is not measured only in money. It is measured in the number of players who can change a match. A big club can send five such players onto the pitch. A small club usually has one, and sometimes none. When a small club finds a player like that, its whole season can change. Den Uil described it precisely with a Dutch verb. English translations render it as digging in. The closest Vietnamese equivalent might be bám trụ, holding fast. But none of those words convey the exhaustion. Holding fast is not a state. It is a process, and that process always ends in exhaustion. That is why I want to pause here. Because another story is being told about this match — a story about the back three, about a returning tactical trend, about the evolution of football. And I do not believe it. I do not believe the return of the back three is progress. In my view it is often a disguised retreat: a coach who does not dare fix his back four for fear of his reputation, so he adds another centre-back to hide the hole. You do not evolve by adding men where you are weak. You evolve by fixing the weakness. In the Excelsior — Ajax match I saw no evidence of a tactical revolution. I saw a small club doing exactly one thing: holding its defensive structure, and waiting for the moment when one player could change everything. That moment had a name: Tolu Arokodare. Arokodare is a Nigerian striker. He is described as a player who can rise above you and head the ball into the net. In a match where Excelsior were pushed deep into their own half, that was a strength. And more than that, it was an escape route. In football, when a team is pinned back, they need someone who can turn a long ball — usually a lazy way of passing — into an attacking opportunity. That someone is usually a tall striker who can contest aerial balls, hold the ball with his back to goal and wait for teammates to run forward. In professional language, he is called a target man. This type of player has existed for generations, and has never fully disappeared. There was a time when people said modern football had no room for a striker who only heads the ball. But every time a big club gets stuck against a low block, people remember that football is still played in three dimensions. Arokodare came off the bench and scored shortly afterwards. His goal made it 2-2. That is a decisive technical detail: a team under siege, surviving for most of the match, then sending on a tall striker, and changing the outcome. Goals from set pieces are the natural weapon of teams playing a low block. A corner does not require you to control the ball. It only requires a player who can head the ball better than the man opposite him, and someone who can deliver it to the right place. For Excelsior, that is the shortest route to a goal against a stronger side. Nigeria has produced a remarkable line of strikers over several decades. Players from there often carry a specific combination: physical power, speed, and a scoring instinct forged in demanding leagues. When a Nigerian striker arrives in Europe and starts scoring, scouts have usually been there long before. That is why I believe the Arokodare story will not end with this draw. A striker capable of changing a match in ten minutes is an asset big clubs always track. And in modern football, one night like the one at Woudestein can change a young player’s value within weeks. I asked myself: was that a tactical decision, or was it luck? Den Uil admits luck played a part. But luck is not a strategy. And a coach who knows how to send a bomb onto the pitch at the right moment is not a lucky coach. He is a coach who can read a match. The structure is what stands out. Excelsior had no player who could hold the ball in midfield throughout the first half. They could not pass through Ajax’s midfield. So they did the only thing a small club can do when pinned back: they moved the game from the ground into the air. That is why I am always suspicious of one particular metric: xG, expected goals. Those who love the number will tell you they know who deserved to win. But xG cannot measure a man almost two metres tall rising above a defender in three-quarters of a second. It cannot measure the fear a striker creates in an entire back line. And it cannot measure a stadium of four thousand falling silent and then erupting. I am not saying xG is useless. I am saying it has been abused. It is a tool for judging the quality of chances, not the dignity of a match. In Arokodare’s case, every number was left behind the moment he lifted off the ground. What I like about Den Uil is that he never pretends his team is better than Ajax. He talks about the gap in individual quality. He says Ajax had far more options at their disposal. And he speaks of a point he is especially proud of. Place those three sentences side by side and they form something that is not agonising. They form a report. They say: my team needs a moment, their team has depth, and we took a point through a moment while they could not turn depth into goals. In almost twenty years of writing about football, I have learned that the truest sentences are not in official reports. They are behind a microphone, right after a match, when a coach is trying to tell the truth without hurting his players. Den Uil did that. He said: “The players went to the limit.” That is a sentence about spirit. But it is also a sentence about tactics. In modern football, the limit is usually a line that spirit cannot cross. You can run more, but you cannot run faster than your opponent forever. You can defend better, but you cannot defend better forever. And Den Uil knows it. On Ajax’s side, this match is different data. Den Uil described the opponent as totally different from a year ago, with an exceptional amount of quality, unprecedented even for the Eredivisie. That is a strange sentence. It is both a compliment and a concession. If Ajax really own quality unprecedented in the Eredivisie, and Excelsior took only a point through fighting spirit and a bit of luck, then something does not add up. Quality does not automatically convert into results. In football, the gap between talent and achievement is always measured in disappointment. That is why this match deserves more attention than an ordinary draw. It shows Ajax in a phase where quality is no longer enough to guarantee a win against a small club. And in European football, when quality is no longer enough, pressure begins to appear. Journalists will ask questions. Supporters will ask questions. And the coach, the only man standing in the middle of it all, will have to answer. Ajax have one of the best academies in Europe. But the academy model creates a very specific pressure: young players need time, and time is what big clubs do not have. Every summer a talent is sold to balance the books, and another talent must be ready to replace him. That cycle produces teams that are young, gifted and inconsistent. That may be what Den Uil sees when he speaks of a team totally different from a year ago. Not a weaker team, but a team in the middle of a transition. And teams in transition often drop points they should not drop. But I have to be careful here. One match is a sample of size one. You cannot build a conclusion about a whole season from a single draw. Ajax may simply have had a bad night. Excelsior may simply have had a lucky one. The truth usually sits in the middle, and it is usually less exciting than either hypothesis. The report I read carried a headline that made me stop: “He is fraud for the competition.” In English, the word fraud carries a heavy implication — cheating, forgery. Read it with the eyes of someone unfamiliar with Dutch football and you might think someone is accusing a player. But in Dutch, the original sentence means almost the opposite. It means: this player is so dominant that he is almost cheating the league. It is praise, not accusation. And it is a perfect example of how a translation can bend the truth. It took me many years to understand that my job does not stop at writing correctly. My job is translating. Not translating one language into another, but translating one football culture into another. And in that translation, the words most easily lost are the words that carry admiration. The sad part is that headlines like that spread faster than honest analysis. A headline about a fraud will be shared thousands of times. An article about a low block will be shared none. That is the blind spot of collective memory. The whole world remembers a headline. Nobody remembers the seventeenth pass. The attention economy runs on a simple rule: strong emotion beats accurate information. A shocking word is worth more than a paragraph of analysis. In that environment, a sportswriter must choose between being read and being trusted. I chose the second, and I paid for it with the silence of some articles nobody shared. There is one more thing I must say, because I promised myself I would never skip uncomfortable details. The report I read does not clearly state who scored the 2-2. It only refers to a Nigerian striker equalising. In a match between two clubs, a detail like that can change the entire story. If that goal belonged to Excelsior, it is the story of a small club rising. If it belonged to Ajax, it is the story of a big club that could not win. In modern football, we usually watch a match through three layers of media: an original report, a summary, and a headline. Each layer loses part of the truth. The headline loses the most. And the layer we remember best is usually the one that lost the most. That is why I always check names again. I lost a month of my twenty-fifth year learning that lesson, and I do not want to lose another month. A mistake is only a comma; the story continues on the next page — but only if you are willing to go back and read the previous page again. There is something I learned in 2026, at the World Cup in Russia. I sat in the press tribune in Nizhny Novgorod, watching Croatia draw 1-1 with Denmark, then Luka Modric miss a penalty in the 116th minute. Croatia still won the shootout. But the moment Modric fell and got back up — that is what I wrote about. Not the score. Not the stats sheet. Just a man standing up after getting everything wrong. That is why I believe my job is not to record results. My job is to record how people respond to results. And at Woudestein, the response of a man named Ruben den Uil told me more than the 2-2 scoreline. The match is over. The screen goes dark. But the poem is still unfinished. I think of Den Uil, the man standing with folded arms on the touchline as the last ball flew away. I think of the Nigerian striker, who waited for a ball that never came. And I think of the four thousand people in the Woudestein stands, who came to watch a match they did not think they could win. People do not remember the match; they remember how someone stood up. But sometimes they remember something smaller: a two-second silence, and a head rising into the floodlights. The season will continue. Ajax will win the matches they must win. Excelsior will walk into matches where a point is a treasure. And it is quite possible that, when the season closes, nobody will remember that night. What I will watch in the coming weeks is not the table. I will watch whether Arokodare starts. I will watch whether Ajax drop more points against a smaller club. And I will watch whether Excelsior can turn the spirit of one night into the points of a whole season. Spirit is money that can be spent, and small clubs usually spend it too fast. But I remember. And because I remember, it will not vanish entirely. Every mispronounced name, every overlooked goal, every silent moment nobody counted — they need someone to sit down and write them out. Not to rewrite history, but to keep history from rewriting itself.