Mathijsen: We are here to win the World Cup

July 05, 2010 04:02 pm | Updated 04:02 pm IST - Johannesburg

Joris Mathijsen

Joris Mathijsen

The players grabbing all the headlines in the Dutch side are Arjen Robben and Wesley Sneijder.

There are, however, several other players in the side who have made a noteworthy contribution to the Netherlands’ World Cup campaign to date.

One of them is defender Joris Mathijsen, who played every single minute of the team’s first four games, but then had to withdraw with an injury sustained during the warm-up for his side’s quarterfinal against Brazil.

Mathijsen said he was confident that he would be ready for Tuesday’s game in Cape Town against Uruguay. “To play in a World Cup semifinal is like a dream. I will give it everything to make it possible.” He said the side was determined to go all the way. “That is the crazy thing about this side. We hardly celebrated the victory against Brazil.

“Believe it, we have hardly celebrated after any of our victories.

We know we want to become world champions, really, we want to become world champions.

“All the victories until now have just been a small step towards that one goal.” Mathijsen, who played for his country at the finals in 2006 said that all the players had been confident ahead of the game against Brazil. “I know that people will not believe it, but we honestly believed 100 per cent that we would beat Brazil.

“The victory has given us a huge chance, but we have not yet achieved anything and certainly not what we wanted to achieve. That is why we were happy after the game against Brazil, but we did not celebrate.”

He said the players were aware of the importance of the game against Uruguay. “We all know that we will not get another opportunity like this again.”

Mathijsen, who joined SV Hamburg from AZ Alkmaar in August 2006 and has since missed just five games in the four seasons, has 57 caps for the Netherlands.

Over the last two seasons, he has been involved in three semifinals with his club, twice losing in the Europe League and once in the German Cup.

“You can’t really compare those with the World Cup. In the Europa League you play two matches, in the World Cup you only have one game to go to the final.

“We have confidence in the team and we really believe that we can win and we put everything into it. It has never been like that before with the team.

“Four years ago in Germany it was not like that, if we are honest. We did not believe in ourselves. But this time it is different.”

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