The battle that undermines Ajax's search for the beautiful game.
The Rivals: In the last of the series on football's most explosive matches, Rick Broadbent visited Amsterdam
The greatest rivalries are built on differences. So you had Muhammad Ali, all swaggering verbosity, taking on Joe Frazier's prosaic brawler and Bjorn Borg's mute Viking trading blows with John McEnroe's prep-school brat.
In football, you will struggle to find a more vivid contrast than the one between Ajax, the self-styled aesthetes and liberal champions of totaal voetbal, and that
"bunch of antisemitic dockers" from Rotterdam. The subtext to this enmity between Ajax and Feyenoord, two clubs separated by 43 miles, is one of the more bizarre in world football. "Hamas, Hamas - Jews to the gas," the Rotterdam contingent chant at their counterparts. "We are Super Jews," comes the reply. Stars of David bedeck the Amsterdam ArenA. "We're not a Jewish club at all," one disgruntled season-ticket holder and son of a Holocaust survivor said. "It's just these bloody kids. They just want some sort of identity, but it's insulting."
