Robert Green

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No wonder he was popular in the dressing room last season...

https://theathletic.co.uk/1476643/2019/12/24/rob-green-exclusive-the-rudderless-ship-the-manager-asleep-in-his-office-as-players-trained-and-getting-hammered-after-defeat-to-germany-at-the-2010-world-cup/

Green was far removed from the tranquillity of a gallery when he decided to speak up against Chelsea coach Maurizio Sarri in front of his team-mates.

The Italian had called a meeting with the squad and coaching staff at the club’s training ground in February to try and prevent the 2018-19 season from falling apart.

It was the day after Chelsea had suffered their heaviest defeat for 28 years as Manchester City cruised to a 6-0 victory in the Premier League.

Less than two weeks earlier, Bournemouth had triumphed 4-0 against them and Sarri held a post match inquest for nearly an hour afterwards in the dressing room to try and stop the slide.

Given the Manchester City debacle soon followed, that obviously hadn’t worked, so Sarri arranged to have another discussion over what was going wrong.

Green, who joined Chelsea as a free agent in the summer of 2018, grew frustrated as players talked one by one without contributing anything of note.

“The lads put their hands up and said, ‘We care a lot’ but they spoke without saying very much,” Green reveals. “I was thinking to myself, ‘I can’t have this’.

“I turned to Sarri and said, ‘Look, you are in a really difficult position and I understand that because there is stuff going on at this club that I can see, you can see and no one on the outside can see, so I get you’ but all the while I was thinking, ‘I’m going to give him both barrels in a minute’.

“I just spelled it out. I told him, ‘You have no plan B. You’re a transactional kind of manager. The players in the group are not the kind to speak to you like this — they care very much but are scared to say something to you, like I am. I don’t care because what are you going to do — drop me!?’

“I spoke for 15 minutes. A lot of players said afterwards that they enjoyed me saying that: ‘You said what I wanted to say but I couldn’t say it’. Obviously, if they had, it could have affected their place in the team or their future at the club.

“Two of the assistant coaches, Gianfranco Zola and Carlo Cudicini, said something along the lines of, ‘That was brilliant. We’ve been trying but we are in a compromised position as well in that it is a very hierarchical style and there isn’t a lot of feedback coming in return’.

“How did Sarri take it? We were all walking out of the room at the end and he was standing at the door. I was thinking, ‘Oh fuck, I’m dead’ but he shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you, that’s the first time anyone has made me think at a meeting’. The thing is, it didn’t change anything.”

The history books will show Sarri’s one season in charge at Stamford Bridge was a success. The club won the Europa League, finished third in the Premier League and reached the Carabao Cup final, where they lost to Manchester City on penalties.

But it tells only part of the story. They may not have told Sarri to his face  but many players weren’t happy with his methods, while a lot of fans were bored by the style of play.

As third-choice keeper, Green knew from day one it was unlikely he would feature in a match unless there was an emergency. It didn’t upset him but what he witnessed at training or during matches from his position high up in the stands did.

“He is an ex-bank manager and manages a club like one,” Green states. “In his brain, there was a formula for success. It was like ‘I’m a mathematician, I’ve worked it out and I know’.

“It is a good thing to have a coach with clarity and total belief in what they’re doing. There were times it worked — the problem is there are 11 people on the other team trying to do something to stop you.

“The difficulty is when they figured out how. He was always going to struggle to change it because he only had one way. If it didn’t work, he’d just say we had to do his way better.

“Training was very regimented. I remember Olivier Giroud and I sat down and figured out how many times we’d done exactly the same session. We worked out that over a course of the season, there were only 18 days where we hadn’t done the same thing. I can understand why people in the squad who just love and want to play football were thinking, ‘What’s the point of this?’

“Another example was how often he used to substitute Ross Barkley and Mateo Kovacic for each other, depending on who started (it happened 22 times in all competitions).

“I always used to sit next to Ross on the bus and I brought it up once around March/April. He was like, ‘Ugh!’ That scenario summed up how Sarri had just computed everything in his mind.”

One player who couldn’t be constrained by any kind of algorithm from the man in charge was Eden Hazard. He actually enjoyed the best campaign of his seven-year career at Chelsea, registering 21 goals and 17 assists.

But Green suggests Sarri, who left to join Juventus in June, doesn’t deserve the credit. “It was another sign of the rudderless ship,” he argues.

“Eden was one of the strongest characters in the dressing room and certainly the best player. I remember the 4-1 win over Cardiff early on (in September 2018). We had 10 players playing Sarri-ball and Eden doing whatever he wanted.

“He scored a hat-trick and was named man of the match. Sarri praised him as one of the best in the world afterwards. But he’d done nothing he was told to do.

“I was with Hilario (Chelsea’s goalkeeping coach) behind the dugout laughing. You can come up with your rigid plans but if you have a guy who is that good, just get him the ball, like for the West Ham goal in April where he ran through them.”

Like Sarri, Hazard also left for pastures new last summer, completing a dream move to Real Madrid. It came as no surprise to any of the Chelsea players, who had known for months it was on the cards.

Indeed, Green recalls a conversation where potential alternative destinations were mentioned and even Bayern Munich were given short shrift.

“Eden ruled it out,” Green says. “He was like ‘I’m not going there because my brother Thorgan is playing in Germany (he was at Borussia Monchengladbach last season and joined Borussia Dortmund in May). It would turn into Eden Hazard and his brother’. 

“He was basically saying that his brother can be known as Thorgan Hazard there rather than only be referred to as Eden Hazard’s brother. That could come across as a touch of arrogance but it was actually a magnanimous thing to do.”

[Vesper 29,019]

1 hour ago, Jason said:

No wonder he was popular in the dressing room last season...

https://theathletic.co.uk/1476643/2019/12/24/rob-green-exclusive-the-rudderless-ship-the-manager-asleep-in-his-office-as-players-trained-and-getting-hammered-after-defeat-to-germany-at-the-2010-world-cup/

 

 

Quote

 ‘Thank you, that’s the first time anyone has made me think at a meeting’. The thing is, it didn’t change anything.”

 

Quote

“Another example was how often he used to substitute Ross Barkley and Mateo Kovacic for each other, depending on who started (it happened 22 times in all competitions).

Quote

 

We had 10 players playing Sarri-ball and Eden doing whatever he wanted.

“He scored a hat-trick and was named man of the match. Sarri praised him as one of the best in the world afterwards. But he’d done nothing he was told to do.

 

 

sums up Sarri

 

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