When Erik Ten Hag becomes the Manchester United manager he will have the huge job of showing a disjointed dressing room exactly who wears the trousers.
But the detail-obsessed Ajax manager, once got that wrong according to a story in The Athletic.
During one team talk whilst manager at Go Ahead Eagles in their promotion-winning 2012-13 season, Ten Hag stepped into the dressing room to deliver an important team talk. All went well until reserve keeper Patrick ter Mate put his hand up. “Trainer… your tracksuit trousers are on backwards.”
Former Go Ahead captain Marnix Kolder takes up the story.
He said: “He had his papers in his pockets. I don’t understand how he didn’t notice, because he had to put them in the back of his pants.”
But none of this distracted Ten Hag who dragged Go Ahead - who play in a 10,000 capacity stadium in the small Dutch city of Deventer - back to the Dutch top flight. “He carried on with the meeting, changed his pants and continued with training,” says Kolder. “He’s not distracted by anything or anyone. He’s always focused on football. Twenty-four hours a day, he’s thinking about football and how to make the team better. For me, working with him was an eye-opener on how I should play football.”
Kolder also described what United players can expect from their soon-to-be new coach, who has won two Eredivisie with Ajax and also got them to the Champions League semi-finals in 2019. He says,
“In pre-season, I went to his office and said, ‘Trainer, tomorrow I have a private appointment — training is not so important’. He raised his finger and said, ‘Marnix, every training session under me is important’.”
While Ten Hag won’t be reaching for the famous Sir Alex Ferguson ‘hairdryer’ treatment, United players can expect little in the way of lee-way.. “He’s always in control,” says Kolder. “He didn’t shout. He always protected his players in the press or on TV. He makes every player better.”
“Erik left nothing to chance. He was prepared for every opponent, down to the last detail. Behind every training session was an idea. That’s missed by a lot of coaches. It was not training to train. There was always an idea behind it.”
Disenchanted United player may soon enjoy training a lot more than before. Kolder, 41, who was an elder statesman of the dressing room while playing at Go Ahead said Ten Hag made training a pleasure every day.
He said: “I lived 140km away from the club, so there and back I would have to drive 280km every day. But every day I went with pleasure, because even though I was 31 and in the last years of my career, under Erik, I thought I could get better every day. He’s the best coach I ever worked with.”
After leaving Go Ahead Eagles, Ten Hag went on to work for two seasons with Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich as assistant coach.
When asked about Ten Hag, Guardiola suggested the Dutchman was good enough to succeed him at Manchester City and described him as “an incredible person” whose Ajax teams “are a joy to watch”.
