‘Zero of the week’ – Player continues to flop after Tottenham exit, urged to be ‘humble’ and hit reset button

Steven Bergwijn needs to show humility and hit reset on his career as his move to Ajax from Tottenham continues to struggle to get off the ground.

That’s according to former Netherlands international Glenn Helder, who has criticised the Dutchman following his latest disappointing display.

Bergwijn returned to the Eredivisie with Ajax in a €31.25m move in the summer after two disappointing years with Tottenham following a move from PSV Eindhoven in January 2020.

He had struggled to establish himself under a series of managers at Spurs, never building on a bright start at the club and managing just eight goals and ten assists in 83 games in all for the club.

He has found himself among the goals for Ajax since his return, bagging 15 and assisting six in 40 games so far this season, with a tally of 11 and five in the Eredivisie.

That has not been enough to earn him any sort of praise, though, with many pointing out his arrival from Tottenham as one of the many poor transfer decisions the Dutch giants have made over the last year.

The criticism has been consistent throughout this year, with him at one point in a ‘formal crisis’ and it made clear Ajax had been expecting much more.

That situation has not really changed since and Helder is the latest to criticism him, believing the player needs to completely reset if he is to ever get his career back on track.

“Everyone is complaining about him. And if you see him last Sunday, it’s justified,” he said on Today Inside, in which he names Bergwijn as his ‘zero of the week’.

“I remember how happy I was when he came back to the Netherlands. I thought wow, a player of that calibre, who has grown bigger and stronger and played good games for Tottenham Hotspur, is returning.

“But what he is showing is way below par. I think he needs to get back to basics. That he needs to be humble and say, ‘I’ll forget for a moment what I’ve achieved, it’s not going well now. I’m going to see how I can get back to my level’. He has to leave a lot of things for that.

“He can really just play the pan of the roof again next year. Look at Donyell Malen. He was marked as the Bundesliga’s worse purchase. Now he plays a few games well and is compared to the Brazilian Ronaldo.”