Just that there's a more mournful tone to some of the comments than seems to me to fit the circumstances is all. I think this is very much a case of 'had a decent innings' and 'not really a shock' and the celebrations of his highs meet the moment more than feeling sad about what could have been.
Raphaël Varane | Como board member
- Thread starter top1whoisman
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I would've sold almost all our CB's before i would've gotten rid of him.
Would've been the perfect professional to help bed Yoro, shame it wasnt in the cards
Why? He wouldn't be available to us for the majority of the season and would be another player on the treatment table collecting big wages. We have no shortage of those already.
Good for Varane, hope he enjoys and makes a success of this role. The way he conducts himself, I feel he is destined for great things beyond his amazing playing career.
Hints towards Ronaldo there at the end? I'd have said Sancho but can't imagine Sancho was important to the group and the first person he thinks about? Unless I am understanding it wrong
Logged in to post this. Goes to show what stupid fecks are INEOS and the "best in class" team. Not only did they take the option on ETH's contract, they proceeded to buy more Dutch/Ajax players for him after what was a lengthy and detailed review. And now they are scrambling trying to save pennies by going after ordinary folks' jobs. Total shit show.
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"He always needed an example of a player who was alone the entire time he was at Manchester. He did that with at least one important player on the team"
Anyone know what that means?
It carries onto the next page of quotes in the videos. It sounds like he means he always wanted to make an example of a player within the squad.
It’s good to see behind the curtain, even a little bit. The decision to keep ETH seems even more baffling after reading the interview.
You can criticise Ten Hag for a lot, but not for how he handled Ronaldo and Sancho.
he was always the unpopular kid at school, because of his bald head. so he wanted to make sure at least one player in the squad felt ostracised from the rest. that way it wasn’t so bad that he was.
Agreed. I’ll back him all the way against those two.
It’s difficult to form an opinion by hearing only one side of the story. Didn’t Varane also fall out with EtH for a brief period last year? EtH did seem to get into conflict with one player or the other - Cristiano, Sancho, Varane, Rashford, Casemiro. However, hard to take this at face value as a lot of our players seem to be pandered to and had gotten used to getting their way.
However, I agree with Varane that EtH needed to be sacked last summer.
However, I agree with Varane that EtH needed to be sacked last summer.
it was the right idea to get rid of them, he might have done it completely the wrong way though.
i’ve got some people in my department that i’d like to fire into the sun and replace. i can’t strip them naked in front of the rest of the team and spit on them first, as that does nothing for the morale of the rest of the department.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that he bent over backwards for both players initially, especially Sancho
A veteran player in the dressing room actively campaigning against the manager's tactics is not the type you want around the young star you want to develop
What should he have done differently? They underperformed and thus they got benched. Ronaldo responded by going on Piers Morgan. Sancho, after getting a long mental health (?) break, responded by attacking the coach in the media over some relatively mild comments.
I get that Ten Hag lacked finesse in communication, but he was never needlessly cruel. Everyone and their grandmother knows that when an expensive young player hardly gets a minute of playtime despite the team struggling, then it can only mean poor performance on the training ground or poor attitude. He should probably still have given a vague politicians' answer instead though.
He get too much credit for how he handled Ronaldo. When in fact it was the interview and Ronaldo's desire to leave that made it easy for ETH. IIRC, he was in the squads and may have even started games before he left.
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correct player power at the club after Fergie retired plays significant role as well to the downfall of the club, not just the Glazers
Indeed, he didn't actually treat Ronaldo badly was my point. Ronaldo wanted to leave before he was hired
That's because he still had some use for Ronaldo. He didn't try to get rid of him before that interview because it would have been stupid. We had a hard time scoring goals and the CF position was a particular weak point. Ronaldo could still have done a job as a sub/backup option.
No one thinks that Ten Hag was some machiavellian mastermind that could foresee Ronaldo escaping in the January transfer window the moment he got benched for a couple of games.
varane would know what went on better than most. not me of course, i know everything. but things said in public and things done in private can be wildly different.
He was your boss, not your friend. Player power will rule forever, and most of our fans will cheer it on while simultaneously saying elsewhere it's our biggest problem. We are doomed because we are our own worst enemy.
It’s not difficult at all. Varane by all accounts is a model pro and has been his entire career. Generally where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Then why should we hail him for handling Ronaldo. Ronaldo forced his departure after seeing us going nowhere and the Saudi riches. It had little to do with how ETH handled him.
I don't think that it's easy to bench someone like Ronaldo to begin with. And when he started with his tantrums he had the balls to stick to his guns.
Ronaldo can act tough, but ultimately he escaped with his tail between his legs. Ten Hag would probably have kept him on the bench for the rest of the season, which would have been the ultimate humiliation for him. But this would have hurt the team too, so letting him go was always the right choice.
Varane will have a point of view based on his own opinion, what we know (based on previous reports) is he was part of a disruptive group that did go against the tactics ETH was trying to implement.
For this reason, I take his opinion with a pinch of salt, because for a senior member of the dressing room this is seriously disruptive behaviour
I think the most interesting quotes were about the differences on coaching styles.
Varane seems to have had an issue with the amount of, and level of detail of tactical instructions. It was very different to what he was used to with Real Madrid and France, and he and several other plyers seems to feel more constrained than enabled by it.
This taps into a coaching culture issue we’ve seen at the club before. Van Gaal came from the same school, and eventually lost a lot of players used to the much more general instructions and higher emphasis on freedom and expression of Ferguson and Moyes. Followed by a ruthless Mou who is a disiplinarian but who expects high levels of individual problem solving from his players, and then a Solskjær who is more similar in mindset to the Ferguson (and also Real Madrid) approach, there had to be a clash with the more detailed and collective oriented styles of Rangnick and Ten Hag (who has this both from the Dutch academical school, the Ajax approach and working close to Pep, who is known to be an incredibly demanding and detailed coach, from the more minutious Barca school). Then Ruud comes in with freedom of expression, and Amorim with again a more detailed and demanding playing style.
One thing you can see about both Barca and Real Madrid, is how much of their general approach and culture are fairly consistent (and very different from each other). It is not a matter of one approach being better than the other, rather that by changing approach to broadly and to often, it gets a lot harder for both bew coaches and new players to gel with and buy wholeheartedly into the way things are done.
This is a huge thing IMO on the highest levels, where the best players and coaches are often among the biggest egoes, the most assured (based on a lot of evidence as well) that the ways they are used to is the best way, which garners for a lot of conflict and uncertainty even when they really try very hard to put differences aside and cooperate.
This is the difference of a club run on similar ideas over time and a club where constantly new flavors of the month are brought in. Ironically, even if 70% of the Ineos lads’ decisions the next three years turn out wrong, it’s probably better to let them get on with it to learn from mistakes, find people with the right and similar enough ideas, develop complementary ways of cooperating based on a culture that develops from a focus on football and sports success driven by people with experience from it.
Varane seems to have had an issue with the amount of, and level of detail of tactical instructions. It was very different to what he was used to with Real Madrid and France, and he and several other plyers seems to feel more constrained than enabled by it.
This taps into a coaching culture issue we’ve seen at the club before. Van Gaal came from the same school, and eventually lost a lot of players used to the much more general instructions and higher emphasis on freedom and expression of Ferguson and Moyes. Followed by a ruthless Mou who is a disiplinarian but who expects high levels of individual problem solving from his players, and then a Solskjær who is more similar in mindset to the Ferguson (and also Real Madrid) approach, there had to be a clash with the more detailed and collective oriented styles of Rangnick and Ten Hag (who has this both from the Dutch academical school, the Ajax approach and working close to Pep, who is known to be an incredibly demanding and detailed coach, from the more minutious Barca school). Then Ruud comes in with freedom of expression, and Amorim with again a more detailed and demanding playing style.
One thing you can see about both Barca and Real Madrid, is how much of their general approach and culture are fairly consistent (and very different from each other). It is not a matter of one approach being better than the other, rather that by changing approach to broadly and to often, it gets a lot harder for both bew coaches and new players to gel with and buy wholeheartedly into the way things are done.
This is a huge thing IMO on the highest levels, where the best players and coaches are often among the biggest egoes, the most assured (based on a lot of evidence as well) that the ways they are used to is the best way, which garners for a lot of conflict and uncertainty even when they really try very hard to put differences aside and cooperate.
This is the difference of a club run on similar ideas over time and a club where constantly new flavors of the month are brought in. Ironically, even if 70% of the Ineos lads’ decisions the next three years turn out wrong, it’s probably better to let them get on with it to learn from mistakes, find people with the right and similar enough ideas, develop complementary ways of cooperating based on a culture that develops from a focus on football and sports success driven by people with experience from it.
That's not how it works though. If a player is unhappy with something, or the team is having issues, they have every right to speak about it. Especially the most experienced and those considered to be leaders. They are people, not sheep. And a dressing room has to work in harmony with the manager.
We don't really know what happened, since this is one side of things, but Varane has a lot of credit in the bank because of the career he's had and how he's conducted himself through it.
He has won it all in his career, and from start to finish has always been said to be an absolute professional.
If anything, he did what he was supposed to do from this standpoint. If the squad is unhappy about something, you tell the manager that they're unhappy. He didn't leak it, didn't down tools, he brought up the subject, as he should.
Campaigning against him, or bringing the concerns of the dressing room to him? Big difference. A veteran player taking the concerns of the dressing room to the manager is exactly what he should be doing.
Also, if the manager is incompetent and is using tactics that will never work then players are human. They will react like you or I would with a boss that is incompetent and making your job much harder than it should be.
It's like what happened when Moyes came in and lost the dressing room because the players could see first hand that he simply wasn't good enough. It's not like they actively stop trying, but players will lose morale and drive if they feel like they are being set up to fail. And that is exactly what ETH was doing last season, more so than any other manager in the PL era.
If a guy spends many years at a properly-ran organization (Real Madrid) and then a few more years at a poorly-ran organization (Manchester United), what is more likely: A) his criticism of the poorly-ran organization has merit, B) he became a bad professional as soon as he set foot at United?
He wasn't running things at Madrid, just because he was there doesn't mean he knows how to run an organisation.
B is more likely because he became severely injured
His injury woes definitely didn't start at United though and 10 years at a club is more than enough to formulate a good idea of how things are ran
He should be bringing the squad on board with what the manager is implementing; we have seen how this plays out countless times with LVG, Jose, Ole, Rangnick etc.
Varane, Casemiro and Ronaldo wanted to focus on how things were done at Madrid, this isn't la liga and none of them were managers. Yes their feedback can be valuable, but letting the squad know they are against the managers point of view is not a good thing at all.
Veteran players are supposed to be the manager's enforcer in the dressing room; this is what Keane did for Fergie. Or did you think Ferguson was one to bend to the will of the squad?
Every single manager we have had post Ferguson is incompetent at using their tactics (even though they have been successful elsewhere) or do you think the common denominator is probably the squad culture at this particular club? Which, by the way, has only got worse as time has gone by.
One could learn a lot from successful organisations but it doesn't mean those ideas will work in other situations. We may come to find out that Berrada and Wilcox aren't a success at United.His injury woes definitely didn't start at United though and 10 years at a club is more than enough to formulate a good idea of how things are ran
I think there's a lot you can take from that interview.
Varane is quite a measured, intelligent individual and you could sense he didn't want to criticise ETH or the club too much but still said enough to show that there was major problems within the dressing room and the club at the time.
Varane is quite a measured, intelligent individual and you could sense he didn't want to criticise ETH or the club too much but still said enough to show that there was major problems within the dressing room and the club at the time.
This. A lot of fans seem to believe players should be robots who just shut up and blindly do whatever the manager wants without ever voicing concern or sharing their opinion.