You hope to bring your 'A Game' to any game, and of course you do in a final. You hope to bring experience, fitness, communication skills, motivational skills.
Running a marathon is unlike anything I have done. You can recall all those bad weights sessions or the work you had to do in pre-season, but marathon running is worse than any of it, probably the hardest thing I have had to do in my entire life.
Off the field, Ronaldo was also focusing on everything extensively, such as resting up properly and strengthening his body. After training sessions, he would often work on his free-kicks and then come to me and say, 'Edwin, can you go in goal?'
As a goalkeeper, you always expect every team to give you nightmares.
You have to get your motivation from within, and it doesn't matter if you lose in the quarters, the semis, or the final. You must want to have another chance of winning the trophy.
We need a solution for European football. You need to help smaller clubs in European competitions get the right distribution of money so they can invest in coaches and attract talent for the level they can play at.
A lot of the guys who played in the 1995 final for Ajax had been there since the age of 12 or 13. Patrick Kluivert and Edgar Davids had been there from age seven or eight, so I had a lot of catching up to do.
The leagues in the countries around us are probably more interesting and played at a higher level, but in general, we are happy with the way we have moved things forward with Ajax, together with Marc Overmars as technical director, to establish a squad that can compete at the highest level.
I went to Fulham for the project they explained to me - but it didn't really work out. I might have been playing at a high level for the national team, but I was starting to miss those European nights and challenging for titles.
You don't need only your strikers. You need your defenders to be on top of their game. You need a midfield to work hard and track back, and I suppose you need a goalkeeper who makes saves once in a while.
Ajax has always been about homegrown players developed in a small country.