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| June 10, 2006 | Saturday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 13, 1427 |
Kezman hoping to impress ex-idol
BILLERBECK, June 9: Mateja Kezman hopes to ruin boyhood idol Marco van Basten's day by helping Serbia & Montenegro to beat the Dutch in their opening World Cup match in Leipzig on Sunday.
Van Basten's goals helped the Dutch to win the European championship in Germany in 1988. He returns to Germany as coach of a new-look Netherlands team.
“Marco van Basten is my childhood idol, I admired him as a player and collected all his stickers when I was a boy. I would dearly love to impress him with a good performance on Sunday,”
Kezman told a Serbian team news conference.
“That also means I hope he is disappointed after Sunday's match because we want to come away with all three points if we can against an excellent Dutch team,” he said.
Kezman won two league titles in four seasons with PSV Eindhoven, scoring 129 goals in 174 appearances for the club and says his knowledge of Dutch football could help on Sunday.
“I have many friends among Dutch players and knowing them so well could turn out to be an advantage, but we will have to be at our absolute best to beat them.
“Most of us are playing in the World Cup for the first time and we have a lot of respect for an outstanding team Van Basten has assembled for this tournament.”
Serbia and Montenegro have sour memories of their last two meetings with the Dutch -- a 2-1 second round defeat in the 1998 World Cup in France and a 6-1 drubbing in Euro 2000, both under their old name Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.—Reuters
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