Former Newcastle boss Steve McClaren has finally publicly spoken since he departed from Newcastle in March.
McClaren was appointed Newcastle manager at the start of last season and despite spending £80m in his time at the club, he was unable to keep his job after seeing the club win just six Premier league games from 28 games.
After McClaren’s sacking in March, the club appointed Rafa Benitez, who lead the club to an unbeaten six-game run but it was not enough to keep the club in the top flight.
Newcastle have moved on from the McClaren period and enjoying the Rafalution after Rafa Benitez decided to stay at the club and get the back into the Premier league but McClaren’s comments also show that he didn’t have it all his own way and wasn’t a fan of the under 25 policy which will be scrapped under Benitez.
Here’s what McClaren said about his time at the club to BBC Radio Five Live’s Sportsweek:
I went in with my eyes open and I knew the situation I was getting myself into, but the mistake I made was that I compromised too much. You have to go in and lead and manage. I compromised too much especially early on, instead of saying, ‘we need this, we need this, we need this’.
They’ve gone down because we conceded too many goals and didn’t recruit centre-backs, and we didn’t recruit enough strikers, we had injuries and bad luck and the main thing is the mentality. The mentality of the team was that they would play well against top teams, but they couldn’t win the games they should have won against the lower teams.
They’ve decided to go with Rafa Benitez and I hope they’ve allowed him control of everything.. most importantly he can control recruitment and maybe change the policy of the time which was only recruiting players under 25 and I think that restricted the recruitment process. You need experience and that wasn’t possible, and I think with Rafa being in there he will be allowed to take control.
