ERIK TEN HAG confirmed Cristiano Ronaldo refused to come on as a substitute at the end of Manchester United’s 2-0 win against Tottenham.
And I don’t see a way back from that.
From a player’s perspective, I don’t know what you expect anyone to say or even remotely respect you for. It is mental.
Ronaldo will have lost the respect of the entire squad and staff. You’ve abandoned your own team. You have essentially quit on them.
It is the worst thing you can do, especially as a senior player.
He is basically saying: “I’m better than all of you”. He feels he should have been starting against Spurs so he didn’t have to come on later in the game.
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Whether he actually thinks that, we don’t know, but you can’t refuse to come on after your manager has asked you to. It will be a really difficult one for the squad to deal with.
When I saw those clips of him walking off, I thought to myself he would be lucky to make the squad for the trip to Chelsea, and I ended up being correct.
Ultimately, that is him done now at Manchester United under Ten Hag, and they will have to look to move him on in January.
They probably should have done it in August. Now, it is a case of just getting him out the building, especially if he is training away from the first-team squad.
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Maybe Ronaldo and Ten Hag were just two people who were always going to be on a different page and would never have got on, and that happens sometimes.
Normally, you get away with it when the player is still playing, because you figure out how to simply co-exist, but clearly that wasn’t happening.
Has this tarnished his reputation at the club? In the short term, his name may leave a bitter taste in the mouths of some fans.
But, if you look back in the long term, there is no chance he will now be viewed in a bad light because of this, purely because of the amount of good will he already has stored up.
The man has scored 700 goals. Some people with good careers haven’t even amassed 700 games.
Even before this, the fans had always viewed him as the player who lit up the world stage in the mid-2000s. That won’t change.
One thing we know for sure is the fans will continue to back the team. One player is not bigger than the club or their history.
All this saga shows to me is that all players need love and attention, no matter how good they are.
However, I have got a lot of respect for Ten Hag for taking this stance.
He is doing things his way and fair play to him.
You look at what Mikel Arteta did at Arsenal with big players who were unsettling the group or playing up. That could be Ten Hag’s blueprint.
Maybe once he gets rid of the players he wants out, we’ll see more results like the Spurs one.
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I must say, I would eventually like to hear both sides of the story. Ronaldo, in my mind, has always had a level of dignity not to speak about things going on at the club in the open.
He did promise us an interview to reveal everything after the rumours in the summer, so perhaps when he leaves, he will be able to explain his thinking.
