“What I’ve learned in three months here, I probably wouldn’t have learned in England over five years,” Liam Rosenior says of his introduction to French football. A few months after his dismissal by Hull, the former defender became only the second Englishman to coach in France since the 1950s when he succeeded Patrick Vieira at Strasbourg in the summer.
In only the third role of his managerial career, Rosenior has taken an unconventional step at a club purchased by BlueCo, the consortium that bought Chelsea from Roman Abramovich, last summer. “It wasn’t really on my mind that I was an Englishman going abroad, it was just a really exciting project,” he says. For the time being, Rosenior’s assistant coach and former Reading teammate, Kalifa Cissé, serves as a translator during press conferences, while the former undergoes weekly intensive French lessons.
