About a week after pointedly refusing to defend his manager in the aftermath Bayern Munich’s 3-0 humiliation against PSG in the Champions League, Arjen Robben has offered a scathing micro-assessment of Carlo Ancelotti’s freshly-terminated tenure at the Bavarian side.
Ancelotti was sacked last Thursday after overseeing Bayern’s worst group-stage defeat for over two decades amid a flurry of reports that the club’s famously ornery board (along with several of their senior players) were at the end of their collective tether with the amiable Italian.
According to ESPN FC’s dedicated Bayern correspondent Mark Lovell, Robben has since reversed his oath silence to deliver a withering one-liner to Kicker magazine…
Arjen Robben quoted by kicker “there’s better training at my son’s youth team” than under Carlo Ancelotti.
— Mark Lovell (@LovellLowdown) October 1, 2017
Sizzler.
Kicker also claim that a small group of senior players including Robben, Xabi Alonso and Philipp Lahm actually organised secret extra training sessions last season to help paper over the cracks in Ancelotti’s “inadequate” drills.
How time flies (in this case, roughly four months)…
Ancelotti once famously asserted that he always seems to get sacked for the exact same reason he gets hired: brought in as a relaxed, affable presence to help quell volatile, ill-disciplined dressing rooms before eventually getting fired for being overly relaxed when his lack of discipline begins to breed volatility.
He’ll be back sooner rather than later, probably in the Chinese Super League for a lucrative six-month pension booster.