So Rio Ferdinand's autobiography is currently being serialised in the Sun and as we saw yesterday, the defender has used '#2sides' to break his silence on the race row involving his brother Anton, John Terry and Ashley Cole.
Ferdinand's lack of forgiveness for Terry was rather unsurprising, but he has also used the book to take a swipe at some of David Moyes' practices while in charge at Old Trafford. For instance, he mentioned the pre-match session on the morning of United's Champions League game against Bayern Munich.
To practise our set pieces and stuff we went to a public park. It was bizarre! Local people started coming from all over to watch us and take photos and videos.
It was amateurish. I mean, why not just send Bayern an email or a DVD?
First of all, its unlikely that anything too complex or revealing was tried out that morning. Secondly, who writes like that in their autobiography? 1-0 Moyes.
The QPR man then went on to decry Moyes' prohibition of chips on the night before a match:
Footballers are creatures of habit and for as long as I can remember at United, it was a ritual that we had low-fat chips the night before a game. We loved our chips,
But Moyes comes in and, after his first week, he says we can’t have chips any more.
We weren’t eating badly. In fact, you’d struggle to find a more professional bunch of players than the ones at Manchester United in the summer of 2013.
He might have a point here. A few oven chips the night before a game will never be a huge deal for a bunch of highly-tuned athletes. In fact, the carb-loading might have been an intentional introduction by Feguson's people. 1-1.
Ferdinand then takes aim at another Moyes-imposed change to the United players' routine - the Scot's apparent fiddling with a popular small-sided game.
Moyes’ innovations mostly led to negativity and confusion.
Under Fergie, for example, before a game on a Saturday we always played a small-sided match on a small pitch on the Friday. We loved it.
We’d get into the mood for the following day by expressing ourselves, having fun, trying stuff out.
You got your touch right, experimented, got the feeling flowing.
We’d done that for years and suddenly — again for no good reason — Moyes changed it by making us play two-touch.
It was especially bad for the forwards who liked to practise their skills and shots and movements. They felt restricted.
You’d come off the pitch feeling blocked, frustrated, like you hadn’t had a chance to express yourself.
We complained but nothing changed.
Poor Rio. From a football point of view it's easy to see why such a change could frustrate a group of players, but we don't know why it was made, despite Ferdinand saying that it was "for no good reason". We'll call this one a draw.
One might feel that Ferdinand is continuing a worrying trend in football, where profit beats the confidentiality of the training ground in almost every case, but this has been norm for some time now. It could also be suggested that the threat of having one's methods exposed as outdated may keep managers up to speed, and so are fair game for later exposure by former players. I'm not so sure about that, but at least it's given us a laugh on a Monday morning, and surely promises a few more over the coming days. What do you think?
