I took my time to improve, learn and grow as a person.”ĭuring a difficult childhood in Dronten, 40 miles north-east of Amsterdam, Ziyech acquired the edge to complement his natural gifts. I didn’t want to rush myself to go to another club at the youngest age. At the end of the day, if you perform on the pitch that’s why most of the clubs are buying you or not. “It didn’t really bother me what other clubs and people think. In the end I always believed in my own strengths. They can take it how they want to take it. “I’m not afraid to have my opinion I always speak from my heart and what I am feeling, I am just saying. “That was just the way I was looking at it,” he says in particular reference to the criticism of Van Basten, who later called him “stupid” for committing to Morocco ahead of the Netherlands.

I took my time to improve, learn and grow as a person I didn’t want to rush to go to another club at the youngest age. But he remains unapologetically himself and you sense that is an integral part of the package there is certainly no feeling on Ziyech’s part that his character held him back. He once said Marco van Basten, his former manager at Heerenveen and another famous Ajax alumnus, was “a big name but not a top coach”. Until the last couple of years there had, for all the impressive numbers, been question marks: Ziyech got into verbal dust-ups, clashed with coaches and sometimes fans, was prone to sulk and at one point was relieved of a short-lived captaincy at Twente. He is 27 and outwardly it comes as a surprise, in an age of few secrets, that it has taken this long for him to leave the Netherlands. Ziyech is a left-footed playmaker who creates but can score prolifically, too a sumptuous, borderline mercurial talent whose imagination in possession has few parallels. Photograph: Soccrates Images/Getty Images

‘For a child’s dream you just stole it down to the ground,’ he says of that night. Despair for Hakim Ziyech after Ajax’s defeat by Spurs last year.

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