Rio Ferdinand slates "amateurish" David Moyes

Before reading on, we urge you to keep two things in mind. The first is that Rio Ferdinand, once of Manchester United but now of QPR, will shortly be releasing a book, and one tried-and-trusted strategy for releasing a book is to make sure that it contains a few headline-worthy stories.

The second is that he as decided to call this book #2Sides. That's right. He's called it a hashtag.

Anyway, with that in mind, we turn to the news. It was bound to happen, of course; the silly Moyes stories were bound to come out sooner or later. And Ferdinand was bound to be telling some of them. The headline is that Moyes brought the "mentality of a small club" to Old Trafford; the details are that his tactics apparently led to "negativity and confusion":

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!

He certainly doesn't. Ferdinand also feels that United were occasionally told to play too much football.

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.

Elsewhere, we learn that Moyes banned the players from their ritual of low-fat chips the night before a game, and took the team to practice in a public park before playing Bayern Munich, a decision the Ferdinand feels was "amateurish". Moyes apparently took advantage of this excursion to drop Ferdinand, saying he was after a bit more pace in defence:

It killed me. Inside I wanted to scream and grab him. I'm a team player, so I just had to bite my tongue and stand there. But it was probably the worst single moment I ever had at United. I'd never been dropped for a big game like that - and to drop that on me in front of everybody.

#PoorRio #PoorDavid