Fortuna Sittard host league-leading Feyenoord on Sunday in an Eredivisie match so eagerly awaited that the home club have made 150 tickets originally allocated to sponsors available to the public.
The mid-table club prepared for Feyenoord's much-anticipated visit by losing 3-1 to RKC Waalwijk last Friday while the Rotterdam giants snatched a late victory against AZ Alkmaar the following day.
Match preview
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Burak Yilmaz fired Fortuna in front against RKC but the visitors shipped three goals in the final 15 minutes, taking their tally to 12 conceded in the last quarter-hour of matches - a ruinous habit only two other Eredivisie clubs can beat.
Friday's reverse ended Fortuna's four-game unbeaten sequence, a crucial run of point plundering against those below them in the division which would have seemed unthinkable given the team's start to the campaign.
Julio Velazquez, one of just two non-Dutch coaches in the Eredivisie, inherited a side with one point from their first six games of the season, rooted to the foot of the table.
The 41-year-old Spaniard has steered the strugglers to 25 points from his 16 league games in charge, ditching the back three which Dominik Vergoossen had implemented as caretaker manager and hauling Fortuna into the relative safety of 11th going into the weekend's fixtures.
Fortuna are one of the most direct teams in the division, more focused on shifting the ball up the pitch as quickly as possible rather than getting bogged down with intricate, lengthy passing sequences.
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Feyenoord, a side more likely to knit moves together, bounce into Sunday's match buoyed by their last-gasp victory in a top-of-the-table clash against an AZ team that was second last weekend, nabbing all three points through Marcus Pedersen's deflected winner in the 90th minute.
Arne Slot's side are in the midst of a 15-game unbeaten sequence in the Eredivisie, comfortably the longest in the division, last losing a 4-3 thriller to PSV Eindhoven in mid-September.
De Stadionclub have not won the Dutch top flight since 2017, when Giovanni van Bronckhorst was in charge of a side that still included Dirk Kuyt, but they go into the final 12 games of the season with a three-point advantage over Ajax.
Fortuna claimed a respectable 1-1 draw in Rotterdam four months ago - Feyenoord have only dropped points at home to Ajax and PSV in the league since - but the Sittard-based outfit have lost six of their last seven meetings with their upcoming visitors.
Team News
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Ivo Pinto, Fortuna's immaculately tailored Peaky Blinders fan at full-back, remains a doubt after missing the last two matches through injury.
Velazquez has the oldest squad in the Eredivisie to select from, with Fortuna's average starting XI ranking three years older than Feyenoord's equivalent.
Feyenoord have conceded eight goals in the four matches first-choice goalkeeper Justin Bijlow has missed with a broken wrist - winning three of them - and are expected to be without the number one until late March at the earliest.
Gernot Trauner, who has been sidelined since the World Cup, and Sebastian Szymanski, a shorter-term absentee, are unlikely to feature while they nurse knee injuries.
Patrik Walemark is not expected to make his first start since September this weekend as the inverted winger continues his recovery from a thigh problem while fellow forward Oussama Idrissi is a doubt after limping off against AZ.
Fortuna Sittard possible starting lineup:
Pandur; Erdogan, Guth, Siovas, Vita; Duarte, Bistrovic; Cordoba, Ozyakup, Embalo; Yilmaz
Feyenoord possible starting lineup:
Wellenreuther; Pedersen, Geertruida, Hancko, Hartman; Timber, Wieffer; Jahanbakhsh, Dilrosun, Paixao; Gimenez
We say: Fortuna Sittard 1-3 Feyenoord
Fortuna, just as they did at De Kuip, will almost certainly make life difficult for Feyenoord on Sunday, however, the royally in-form visitors should have enough to prolong their unbeaten sequence, widening the gap at the top before Ajax play later that day.
For data analysis of the most likely results, scorelines and more for this match please click here.
Grey Whitebloom
