Klaassen keen to play on despite head injury: ‘Otherwise they’ll have you’

“Now I’m fine again. When the game resumed, I had a throbbing feeling in my head and trouble focusing. Then you can want to continue tough, but that doesn’t help anyone.” He had himself substituted shortly after the resumption.

The maker of the winning 2-1 (which helped Ajax reach the cup final) has been through a lot at De Kuip, but it hadn’t been as crazy as this cup semifinal for him either.

“It’s always crazy matches here, but we didn’t expect this,” Klaassen said. “Maybe those nets weren’t such a bad idea after all.”

The match was eventually stopped for more than half an hour after the incident. In the catacombs, Klaassen indicated that he was just eager to finish the game.

“You don’t want to run away either. Then they have you and you don’t want to allow that. I didn’t necessarily feel unsafe either, but if something else had happened, it would have been done I think.”

Watch post-match reactions from Feyenoord captain Orkun Kökçü, manager of professional soccer league affairs Jan Bluyssen and Ahmed Aboutaleb, mayor of Rotterdam and trainers Arne Slot and John Heitinga below: