After a difficult start, Vivianne Miedema reached the milestone of one hundred goals for the Orange Lionesses on Saturday evening in the European Championship match against Wales (3-0 victory). The celebratory gesture afterward failed, but the 28-year-old striker was no less happy and thought back to her late grandfather.
Kerstin Casparij came to Miedema in the players’ hotel on Saturday afternoon. According to Casparij, the striker would score her 100th international goal against Wales. Therefore, thought needed to be given to a celebratory gesture if it actually happened.
The idea? Veerle Buurman, Casparij, and Miedema would together form the number 100. “I would do the one, and Kerstin and Veerle would both do a zero, so that it would be one hundred,” Miedema said grinning at the press conference. “We even practiced it.”
Miedema was on 99 goals until Saturday but scored her hundredth just before halftime. After two feints, she found space to shoot and curled the ball in beautifully. Then the trio sought each other out to do the ‘100 gesture’.
Buurman showed a zero and a one, Miedema a zero, and Casparij held up Miedema’s initials. So there was no 100, but ‘VM00’. “I still don’t understand exactly what went wrong. If it goes like that, we might as well not have practiced,” Miedema said laughing.
She didn’t let the fun be spoiled by it. “I am super happy with this goal and that I have finally reached that milestone. You can only dream of something like that when you are a young girl.”
The striking thing: Miedema was not in the game until her beautiful goal. The balls bounced off her feet on all sides. “It looked like I had sunstroke,” she said laughing. Miedema admitted to being nervous before the match.
She is rarely nervous. But after difficult years, in which she suffered one heavy injury after another and had to miss the 2023 World Cup, a final tournament evokes something extra in Miedema. The fact that the Drenthe native seriously feared having to miss the European Championship in Switzerland as well created extra tension.
After an injury at the end of last year, she was initially fit for months at her club Manchester City, until she suffered an injury in the Orange Lionesses’ Nations League match in Austria. “I deliberately didn’t start against Austria yet. But then it went wrong even with a short substitute appearance, and I suffered a tear in my hamstring.”
Then began a race against the clock to reach the European Championship. All that time, Miedema didn’t dare to believe that she could compete with the Orange Lionesses in Switzerland. Not even after she participated in the final training from start to finish on Friday.
“Friday evening I had for the first time that I thought: it would be strange if I missed the European Championship now. But this morning (Saturday morning, ed.) I only said it out loud for the first time,” the striker said. “Then I felt like: wow, I managed to do it.”
“Caution,” Miedema calls it. But also “realism” after all the misery she has experienced in recent years. She knows that she can no longer blindly trust her body. “But in recent weeks, I have worked very hard to be here.”
That hard work resulted in a party evening on Saturday, with family. More than a week ago, after her two goals in the farewell match against Finland, Miedema said that she didn’t mind that her hundredth hadn’t fallen yet because her family members were not present.
In Lucerne, her brother and his girlfriend, her parents, and her grandmother did watch from the stands. “When I looked at them after my substitution, I waved but they didn’t look,” Miedema said laughing. Then seriously: “I could look at them nicely after the goal. It is very special that they could be here.”
The only one missing was her grandfather, who passed away in 2019. On the day of her 100th international goal, Miedema often thought back to him. “Especially before the match,” Miedema said. “This is one of the first times I have played in a major tournament without him being there.”
Miedema’s grandfather will be proud of how she fought her way to the magical milestone after fluctuating years. “It took a while before I reached that hundred. Then people will still talk about it… It’s nice that it has fallen. We can continue from here.”