A former teammate delivers a tough assessment - calling Chelsea boss Liam Rosenior's words "waffle" and "drivel" as the team struggles to pick up results
It's safe to say that Chelsea boss Liam Rosenior is catching heat from all angles right now.
The team have lost four straight games, and the 41-year old coming out with quotes such as "respect the ball" is not helping his case at all. The "manage, ageing men" comment has also been slaughtered by those in the wider footballing consciousness.
If you win games, you can get away with that sort of Linkedin speak. When you lose four on the trot, no chance. So, Rosenior has been getting plenty of criticism in the media.
Last week, the manager's former team mate, Kevin Kilbane, decided to stick the knife in: "I played with Liam at Hull and I got on well with Liam, he used to tell me some great stories of Roy Keane when he was his manager at Ipswich.
And you see the way he is now, to me, he's unrecognisable to the player and person I knew. It's like he swallowed a psychologist's manual or a sporting mentor's memoir. To me, everything he says is waffle, drivel, nothing.
It's like he tries to write as many quotes down as possible and tries to get them into pre-match talk or post-match media whenever addressing the players. If I'm a player being asked to do that huddle, I wouldn't feel comfortable if I was a Chelsea player."
Firstly, this feels very harsh to say about someone you once called a friend. No doubt there are lots of former players who bite their tongue when it comes to their former team mates, even if criticism is justified in that instance. There is no doubt that Rosenior will see that quote and will feel like he has been harshly treated.
If your former colleagues are kicking you when you're down, what chances have you got from the rest of the footballing media and from from supporters. There is the human side to the industry too.
However, it's hard to disagree with what he said, even if he should not have said it. Some of the quotes from Rosenior are just performative nonsense. What does respecting the ball even mean? Does the ball have feelings?
As mentioned earlier, you can get away with this lingo if you're winning. Losing against the likes of Newcastle United and Everton will do exactly the opposite. If he is going to continue speaking this way, then he really has to back it up with results and wins moving forward. Let's see.
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