Playing with Zlatan Ibrahimovic gives one certainty: there will never be a shortage of anecdotes to tell. Anyone who has teamed up with the Colossus of Malmö has their own slew of stories surrounding him. And Steven Pienaar is no exception.
Playing with Zlatan Ibrahimovic gives one certainty: there will never be a shortage of anecdotes to tell. Anyone who has teamed up with the Colossus of Malmö has their own slew of stories surrounding him. And Steven Pienaar, who shared his experience at Ajax with the Swede, is no exception. The former Everton footballer spoke some time ago with TheAthleticremembering the times when the two slept in the same room, between kicks, burning buses and thrown scissors…
FIRE
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“Usually I was in the room with Zlatan or Rafa van der Vaart. Zlatan and I had single beds and there wasn’t much space between us. And sometimes, for no reason, he would start kicking me. I don’t know why, but still he was a good boy. We lived close to each other and often played the PlayStation together. Good times.” Sometimes, however, sharing a room with Ibra created strange situations… peculiar. “Once, before the game against Groningen, we were in the hotel before the match. The hooligans in Holland are quite active, but our hotel was quite controlled and we didn’t think we would have any problems. We had dinner and went to our room. We saw the TV and we went to sleep but at one o’clock the doctor from Ajax woke us up, still in his pajamas, and very calmly, he told us that we had to get our things and leave the room because there was a fire. They had set fire to the bus, which was under our window. I opened the curtains, I saw the flames and thought it would explode. I took my things, but Zlatan says ‘where are you going, you have to take my bag too!’ We waited outside the hotel in the cold for an hour and a half and we weren’t even sure if we were going to play until Ronald Koeman told us to go back to bed. And we won 2-0, Zlatan scored.”
SCISSORS
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In that Ajax there was also Mido, another one with not a bad temper. And Pienaar tells from his perspective the famous anecdote of the scissors thrown by the Egyptian at the Swede… “Two young guys with a winning mentality. And they were also good friends. We had played a Champions League match and they had argued because one of the he had passed the ball to the other. The quarrel started on the pitch and continued in the dressing room. I was sitting next to Zlatan, Mido was taking off a bandage on his ankles with scissors and pulled them, hitting the wall between me and Zlatan “The Senators were happy that they were arguing because it showed we had a winning mentality. The story got out in the papers and they made a case of it, but in reality the two drove back together after the game. We had a united locker room.” Luckily, one might say…
January 17, 2023 (change January 17, 2023 | 08:00)
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