Juan Jose Lahuerta
Madrid, 14 Feb. Those stratospheric numbers with which he put his head on planet football are old for Luuk de Jong. The 33 goals he scored for Twente (2011/12 season) or the 32 for PSV Eindhoven (2015/16 and 2018/19) are a distant memory of a striker looking to recover his best moment, the one that left him. drove years ago to Sevilla, the club he will face this Thursday in the Europa League.
Despite having green shoots, De Jong will return to the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán Stadium without the fear he instilled in his rivals just five years ago. Precisely his astonishing stats led to his arrival at Nervión in the 2019/20 season, when Sevilla signed a 29-year-old striker in the midst of scoring. However, his move to the Sevilla side marked the start of their numbers declining.
FAR FROM HIS BEST NUMBERS
Under Julen Lopetegui, for two full seasons, De Jong racked up 19 goals in 89 official matches. In total, he played 4,864 minutes to score a goal every 256, a quantitative setback from the previous year’s successful campaign through the ranks of the Dutch side, when he came to Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán with an average of one goal every 121 minutes. .
Now De Jong is fighting at PSV to become the player who scored almost everything again. After Sevilla, he also remained stuck on his loan to Barcelona (7 goals in 29 duels) and in the end he decided to meet again this summer with the club where he made his name.
For 4 million euros, a figure lower than what the Andalusian entity paid in 2019 (12.5 million euros), De Jong, after having rejected the proposals of Toluca de México and Turkish football, is placed under the orders of Ruud van Nistelrooy. Hand in hand with the former Real Madrid player and with a tempting offer, the Dutch international was enthusiastic about a project in which he hoped to recover the figures of previous seasons.
“I feel that PSV is working on something new and that attracted me. The club now has a lot of good young players. With Van Nistelrooy I coincided in the ‘oranje’. Now that he is a coach, I see parallels with Phillip Cocu and Mark van Bommel, who were also coaches at Eindhoven. I had good experiences at PSV during those times,” De Jong recalled in the press conference ahead of the European Super Cup final. Netherlands that they beat Ajax at the end of July.
INJURY STOPPED HIS RESTART
This match in which PSV won 3-5 gave the start of the new season for Luuk De Jong, who was hoping to recover better times. However, after an erratic start in which he scored 2 goals in 7 games, a calf injury in the Champions League qualifier against Rangers put a damper on his projection.
De Jong has missed 10 official matches. He returned in time for the World Cup in Qatar, where he played just 57 minutes against Argentina. Between the games before the World Cup and those after it, he participated in 17 other duels in which he added 5 more goals.
In PSV’s last two officials he has celebrated 2 goals and it looks like he is in good shape to face his return to the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán stadium. There, Sevilla fans will surely not receive a striker who did not leave a big mark but played in transcendent moments: it was the winning goal against United which qualified Sevilla for their sixth final of the Europa League. And, in it, he celebrated two of the three goals his former team scored against Inter (3-2) to win the title.
Although De Jong won’t be the same as years ago, he will pose a huge danger to Jorge Sampaoli’s side. His stats show a clear decline from his best seasons. Still, one good day is enough for the PSV striker to embitter anyone.
Sevilla will have to keep tabs on Xavi Simons, the Dutch team’s franchiser. But, for De Jong, it should not be lost sight of. At any time, you can find the sense of smell of a real predator that you seek to find in its fullness. And, sometimes, as in the last dates, he finds it to hit the bull’s eye. EFE
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