With Tottenham as their latest victims, Ajax are continuing to deliver the unexpected

Ajax have done what we all thought was impossible: played overdog football on an underdog budget, and won and won and won

How far have Ajax transformed their expectations? Tonight they won a Champions League semi-final 1-0 away from home, against a team richer than they are, and it still felt like a job half done, or a night when they showed most of what they can do, but not all of it.

In the end this was not a repeat of the 4-1 at the Santiago Bernabeu or the 2-1 in Turin, the away wins that marked this team out as the most important of their generation. Spurs’ resilience saw to that. But it was still a hugely significant win in Ajax’s biggest game since 1996. They still have one foot in the final in Madrid on 1 June.

And Ajax fully deserved it. This time there was no thrilling second-half accelerator, unlike in Madrid or Turin. But there was an authoritative first-half display in which Ajax seized control of the ball and barely let Spurs touch it. It was modern football true to Johan Cruyff’s old values: being courageous and dominating the game. Never mind the opponent. Never mind the location. Never mind the stage.

Try as they did in the second half, Spurs had nothing to match the quality of this phase of Ajax play. No-one else in Europe has been able to match them this season when they are in this mood. Incisive pass and move, runners off the ball, players bombing forward trusting their team-mates to cover. It is the football we are only used to seeing the very richest teams in this competition try. But Ajax have mastered it on a fraction of the big boys’ budgets..

There was nothing complex about Ajax’s goal but it still left Tottenham standing around bemused, as if their own penalty box was an escape room they had no idea where to start with. Hakim Ziyech swept a pass out onto the left and ran forward into the box. David Neres stayed wide, ran down the line, and passed back to Lasse Schone. He rolled the ball on to Ziyech, totally unmarked, and he slipped a pass through to Donny van de Beek, whose clever little run had been missed by everyone else.

Van de Beek had so much time he could dummy two shots before beating Hugo Lloris. “People sometimes make football incredibly complicated”, as Johan Cruyff once said. “But it works best when we keep it simple”.

The frustration for Ajax is that they did not make the most of their dominance at this point. Nerves was getting in behind every time and they should have scored a second with the sharpest move of the night: Van de Beek stepped over Nicolas Tagliafico’s pass to Dusan Tadic and peeled away, took the return pass but this time shot at Lloris. It felt briefly as if the tie might finish tonight.

Donny van de Beek celebrates putting Ajax ahead (AFP/Getty Images)

Looking back this was the moment when the game was there to be killed off for Ajax, when Spurs were still trying to come to terms with their intelligent movement. The forced withdrawal of Jan Vertonghen for Moussa Sissoko helped to disrupt Ajax’s flow. Spurs finally had a man to cut them off at source. It made for a far more even second half, Spurs belatedly finding the energy that they needed from the start. But Ajax defended better than some would have expected, and even then they had the best chance, Neres hitting the post late on from Dusan Tadic’s pass.

That would have been a 2-0 win to nullify the second leg. But this 1-0 win means that Ajax still have a job to complete next Wednesday, against a stronger Spurs side back in Amsterdam. But there is no question that they are now big favourites to be in the Madrid final, ready to complete their history act.

Why does all this matter? Because for years we believed that the only way an underdog could succeed in football was by killing the game. Defend deep. Slow it down. Attack on the break. Nick a set piece. As if open football was a luxury reserved for the rich. And closed football was the only defence for the poor.

This was a perfect legitimate thing to think. Greece won Euro 2004 with unprecedented tactical negativity. Atletico Madrid turned economics upside down to win a Spanish title and reach two Champions League finals by rejecting possession but fighting over every dead ball. Leicester City, England’s closest equivalent, won the Premier League playing kick and rush. It just felt like the consequence of economics: only if you had money could you afford to have the ball.

But Ajax have changed all that. Yes they are a historic club but they are financial minnows. And yet they have done what we all thought was impossible: played overdog football on an underdog budget, and won and won and won. Their annual wage bill of £43million is 12 per cent of Real Madrid’s, but they went to the Bernabeu and won 4-1. It is 18 per cent of Juventus’, but they went there and won 2-1 two weeks ago. And it is one third of Spurs’, but they won here too.