“We loved our chips… he says we can’t have them anymore.”
Rio Ferdinand has always been somewhat of an outspoken character throughout his career and numerous tweets have been sent from his account only to be meekly deleted minutes later.
Having moved onto pastures new at QPR, the former Man Utd centre-back has released an explosive autobiography where he has been rather scathing in his criticism of his former club, or more accurately, more scathing of his criticism of a certain manager’s short reign at the club.
Ferdinand has not held back with his comments on the disastrous reign of David Moyes at Old Trafford last season and his opinion on John Terry, so here are some of his best quotes from the book…
On Moyes’ tactics…
Ferdinand was clearly bemused by David Moyes’ tactics and made some interesting revelations about Man Utd’s game plan last season.
“The biggest confusion was over how he wanted us to move the ball forward. Often he told us to play it long. Some players felt they kicked the ball long more than at any time in their career.
“Sometimes our main tactic was the long, high, diagonal cross. It was embarrassing. In one home game against Fulham we had 81 crosses! I was thinking, why are we doing this? Andy Carroll doesn’t play for us!
“The whole approach was alien. Other times Moyes wanted lots of passing. He’d say: ‘Today I want us to have 600 passes in the game. Last week it was only 400’. Who cares? I’d rather score five goals from 10 passes.”
The reference to the passing is quite revealing as Man Utd did start to play that way during the season, especially in their 2-0 loss to Everton where they had good possession and passing but not in the right areas of the pitch.
On John Terry and his incident with his brother Anton…
But despite the criticism he heaps on Moyes, he reserved his most severe tongue-lashing, or type-lashing as it may be, for former England teammate John Terry.
“For me the biggest idiot will always be John Terry,” claimed Ferdinand. “As England captain and my centre-back partner he could have saved everyone a lot of pain by admitting immediately he used the word in the heat of the moment, but was no racist.
“I think that’s probably what happened and what the truth is. Anton and I would’ve accepted that – instead he never gave us a chance. That was the betrayal. He tried to run away from what he had done.”
On Moyes’ food ban…
Ferdinand also revealed one of the main sources for dissatisfaction among the Man Utd players last season; the banning of chips… hardly a major area of controversy.
“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 anymore.”
Does Ferdinand really mean all the words he says, or is he simply being over-dramatic for the sake of sales? Either way its worked and piqued our interest and no doubt we are going to head down to the shops to pick up a copy of #2Sides.
