There are many ways to kickstart a cup final mired in a web of nerves and fouls. A goal ecstatically celebrated, a heavy challenge followed by a coming-together of players, a sending-off are all ways of complimenting and heightening the sense of nervous hope present around a final. On this April Sunday in Rotterdam, a novel method of adding heat to a tepid game between Feyenoord and NEC Nijmegen was discovered shortly after halftime, when a banner in the Feyenoord end caught fire, sending black smoke flying and causing the match’s temporary suspension. The flames provided the perfect segue into an enthralling second half in which Feyenoord scored before being reduced to ten men and having to defend with life and limb to secure their fourteenth Dutch cup victory.
It was a day bathed in colour, both sets of supporters filling out their ends in the April sunshine well ahead of kickoff. NEC supporters had travelled in 160 chartered buses to De Kuip for the Nijmegen club’s first cup final since 2000, their allotted stand festooned with flags in the green-red-black tricolour of the club logo. NEC stand sixth in the Eredivisie, just one point behind Ajax, and had already captivated Dutch football with a series of impressive results since the winter break, including inflicting the first league defeat on runaway Eredivisie leaders PSV Eindhoven in late March. In De Kuip, NEC’s ascendant confidence was at fever pitch, their supporters unveiling two enormous banners (one reading ‘the dream is real’) before kickoff and hoping to banish past agonies by winning their first KNVB Cup final at the fifth time of asking.
For Feyenoord, the final was the culmination of a cup run which had taken place entirely at De Kuip, the Rotterdammers having been drawn at home throughout the tournament. It was a chance, too, to disprove the sense that Feyenoord have been a soft touch when it’s mattered most this season, losing crucial Champions League ties against Lazio and Atlético Madrid by narrow margins and letting slip a late lead away to PSV when 3 points could have provided a route back into the title race. With a second-successive league title out of sight for Arne Slot’s team, the pressure was on Feyenoord not to finish a season in which the Rotterdammers thrashed Ajax twice and cruised to qualification for next season’s Champions League without a trophy.
NEC were sharper in the game’s opening exchanges, and were a fingertips-length away from going ahead in the eighth minute. An NEC throw into the Feyenoord penalty area was only half-cleared and picked up by NEC right-back Bart van Rooij, whose cross found Youri Baas in a wedge of open space at the edge of the six-yard box. His header was somehow denied passage to the back of the net by a lunging Timon Wellenreuther, Feyenoord’s German keeper then pouncing on the rebound to prevent a Koki Ogawa tap-in. The Nijmegen club did beat Wellenreuther on the half-hour, but Tjaronn Chery’s strike was ruled out for offside. The two Nijmegen threats were the defining moments of a curiously meandering first half with more tangled limbs and petty fouls than chances.
The match descended into absurdity shortly after halftime. Play had already been suspended briefly in the first half when flares had been set off by both sets of supporters in their respective ends of De Kuip, and the pyrotechnics flared up again at the start of the second half. On this occasion, one flare fell into the moat separating the pitch from the stands at De Kuip, setting alight the massive tifo Feyenoord supporters had unrolled before the game. Play continued for several minutes while stewards scrambled to halt the dark-grey smoke wafting from the charring banner before referee Serdar Gözübüyük took the players off the pitch in the 55th minute. Sitting behind the goal where the incident took place, your correspondent had an excellent view of the ensuing farce as the fire brigade were summoned to extinguish blazing nylon as the players waited in their dressing rooms to resume the game. If England still remembers the 1923 FA Cup Final as the White Horse Final, perhaps the Dutch will remember this match as the White Hose Final.
Yet the interruption served as an inflection point in the match, which had much more the feel of a real cup final after the restart. Almost immediately following the resumption, Feyenoord scored: Calvin Stengs found Santiago Giménez in the box, the Mexican striker turning and squaring to Igor Paixao, whose low shot kissed the inside of the right-hand post and went in beyond the dive of NEC keeper Jasper Cillessen. It was another big-game goal for the Brazilian winger Paixao, following his brace in the Klassieker against Ajax earlier this month, and it capped off a spree of Feyenoord attacks, with Quinten Timber having seen his shot saved by Cillessen just before Paixao’s goal. With twenty minutes left, Feyenoord thought they doubled their lead after the exceptional Lutshareel Geertruida tapped home from a free kick, but the goal was disallowed because Geertruida was narrowly offside.
Feyenoord were left rueing the disallowed goal all the more after the young winger Yankuba Minteh, on loan from Newcastle, was sent off for two very harsh yellow cards in quick succession in the 72nd minute. The Rotterdammers brought on Alireza Jahanbakhsh and the returning club captain Gernot Trauner as the black shirts of NEC thrusted forwards in search of an equalizer and the game turned increasingly physical, jittery Feyenoord supporters celebrating every throw-in or free kick won as the seconds ticked away, into the eight minutes added on. The sun had disappeared behind a veil of light rain by now, as NEC earnt a string of corners at the death. Their equalizer nearly came from one of those set pieces, as NEC centre-back Philippe Sandler was denied a tap-in in extremis by the outstretched legs of Feyenoord’s Thomas Beelen. Shortly after it was all over, red and white shirts bundled together in celebration of a second Feyenoord trophy in 12 months. For NEC, a shot at revenge beckons when Feyenoord visit De Goffert on 12 May.
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