Paul Le Guen

[Rougier45]

10 years since he left

Why stories in paper the Gavin Rae one makes no sense

What is the agenda and whose is it ?

http://www.scotsman.com/sport/football/competitions/premiership/gavin-rae-paul-le-guen-used-me-at-end-of-rangers-reign-1-4332195

[HoboHarry]

10 years since he left

Why stories in paper the Gavin Rae one makes no sense

What is the agenda and whose is it ?

http://www.scotsman.com/sport/football/competitions/premiership/gavin-rae-paul-le-guen-used-me-at-end-of-rangers-reign-1-4332195
Seems to me there is a bit of deflection going on. I may be wrong but I believe that neither Paul Murray or Dave King attended the Celtic game - trouble in Mordor?

[Hibernia&Alba]

Polly Gwen, there's a pleasant memory. So much hype before his arrival then total shambles. He only lasted a few months.

[HoboHarry]

Polly Gwen, there's a pleasant memory. So much hype before his arrival then total shambles. He only lasted a few months.
That may rather sadly be a reflection of the mentality of the average Scottish footballer that Polly's abilities.....

[McD]

That may rather sadly be a reflection of the mentality of the average Scottish footballer that Polly's abilities.....


Was as a huge name at the time, very successful with Lyon, would be like Klopp or someone of that ilk going to Ibrox now...and yes, definitely more to do with the players rather than his ability, although it seemed to shatter his self confidence

[Is It On....]

Polly Gwen, there's a pleasant memory. So much hype before his arrival then total shambles. He only lasted a few months.

Not having pie and beans for lunch or being allowed to get pi#hed on a Saturday night was something wee Barry and his mates were prepared to accept.

[.Sean.]

Remember the day he came to Easter Road and we humped them off the park, 2-1 going on 10-1.

Great days.

[iwasthere1972]

I remember going through to East End Park one winter evening. I think we won 2-0. Gary O' scored one of the goals. Rangers got beat the same night by, I think, Livingston. We went 11 points clear of them and they still caught us up. If only they had held onto Le Guen.

[cleanyman]

The Scottish media are obsessed with this guy.

It didn't work out...so be it.

Barry and Boyd are always having a go but these are the same two that got pished on Scotland duty. You cannae polish a turd.

Boyd in particular is turning into John Hartson with his irrelevant ramblings

[Boyle89]

He coached players like benzema, Juninho and essien and won French league titles yet couldn't make it work in Scotland. Would be interesting to know why that was🤔😏.

[Topographic Hibby]

Celtic satarists, The Clumpany explain in their usual manner.

https://theclumpany.wordpress.com/2017/01/04/the-essay-writing-competition/

As someone said, deflecting the orcs by reminding them how bad it was then, therefore how fantastic it is now.....!!

[Dashing Bob S]

Typical Scottish press, full of irrelevant Hun nonsense that even most Huns would spurn if it was in one of their fanzines.

[Centre Hawf]

Could have been a really interesting story but seemed to be end prematurely. Did Rae feel it damaged his relationship with Ferguson? Did it effect his standing in the dressing room? How was the captaincy resolved post Le Guen. A lot of leg work from a journalist who failed to get the juicy bits out of Rae.

[Jim44]

Kris Boyd's take on Le Guen:

Kris Boyd - Rangers players didn’t get Paul Le Guen the boot, he did it to himself
TO this day it makes my blood boil.

Even after ten years, the idea that an underhand player revolt within the Rangers dressing room, some sort of mutiny, led to the demise of poor Paul Le Guen still gets to me.

What nonsense, what utter garbage.

It’s exactly a decade on from the Frenchman’s Ibrox exit, but it could have been yesterday, my memory of what went on is so clear.

The only person Paul Le Guen can blame for failing at Ibrox is Paul Le Guen.

His arrival was welcomed by everyone at the club. From players to staff, I recall the genuine feeling of excitement when he turned up.

This was a guy with a huge reputation. It was regarded as a huge coup for David Murray to lure him to Scotland.

But what a let-down he turned out to be. What a massive anti-climax it was. He had nothing to back it up.

He didn’t have the winning mentality or man-management skills needed to manage the biggest club in Scotland.

The first time alarm bells started ringing was when he sent Fernando Ricksen straight home from South Africa for being drunk on the plane journey.

I can’t defend Fernando because his conduct was unacceptable.

But Le Guen just shunted him onto the first plane back to the UK and it very quickly became headline news.

Someone like Walter Smith would have disciplined Fernando without hanging him out to dry.

But that was Le Guen. He felt he had to take on the big personalities in the team.


I don’t include myself in that, by the way. I’d only been at the club six months and wasn’t a particularly loud voice in the dressing room.

But it was soon clear to everyone at the club that the job was too big for Le Guen.

He virtually shrugged when we dropped points at home to Dundee United and then Kilmarnock and away to Dunfermline.

“We need to stick together,” he’d tell us, which were almost the only words he could say in English.

That was another issue. He had known for months he was coming to Scotland but didn’t bother to learn the language.

As players, we knew early results weren’t good enough, but Le Guen just didn’t understand that.

“We need to stick together,” he kept muttering. Training was another issue.

Le Guen wanted us doing double sessions which was fine in theory, but in reality it didn’t work.

We’d train from 10am until midday and then again at 4pm, but in the four hours in between all we’d do was sit around.

I’ve played abroad and enjoyed that routine, but you need sleeping facilities to rest properly, which Murray Park doesn’t have.

Le Guen also demanded everyone take part, regardless of how anyone was feeling.

Dado Prso was arguably our best player, but his knees were gone.

Le Guen’s rules were if you didn’t train you didn’t play, so it was horrendous, seeing this international-class player literally hobbling around the training pitch.


Other players felt aches and muscle pains too, but when we mentioned it to Doc McGuinness, Le Guen would give him a hard time for listening to us.

Le Guen’s ideas on fitness and nutrition were completely different too, and not in a good way.

Look at the pictures. I was probably in the best physical shape of my career back then, lighter and leaner than I’d ever been in my life. The problem was I felt weak.

Put it this way, when Walter Smith took over from him the first thing he said to me was ‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing, son, but you better get back to eating hamburgers’.

Le Guen was huge on players having what he perceived as the right diet, but most of the boys didn’t have enough energy.

It’s not like everyone ate cakes every day under Dick Advocaat and Alex McLeish, but they weren’t banned and those managers did alright.

In fact, when Walter came in after Le Guen the cakes returned and he was also pretty successful.

It was all so unnecessary, but with results still poor, something had to give.

We then lost in the league to Dundee United before being knocked out the League Cup by St Johnstone.

But the manager still didn’t seem that bothered. “We need to stick together,” he’d keep saying.

It soon became obvious Le Guen was out of his depth, that Scottish football and the environment didn’t suit him.

This was a guy in his first managerial job, remember, where he was responsible for signing players without the help of a Director of Football, like he had at Lyon.

He thought he was ready for our game, but he wasn’t prepared to adapt.

Brahim Hemdani turned out to be a good midfielder for Rangers, but Le Guen played him at centre-half, where he toiled physically.

As players we tried to raise our game, demanding more of each other on a daily basis.

But, incredibly, one morning Phil Bardsley was sent off the training pitch for tackling someone too hard!

Then came Le Guen’s bust-up with Barry Ferguson.


This is what angers me most about the whole episode, the perception that Fergie had it in for Le Guen and wasn’t prepared to work under him.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The fact is only one of them had the best interests of Rangers at heart and it wasn’t the manager.

It all came to a head after we lost away to Caley Thistle in late December and Le Guen said, for the umpteenth time, how we ‘had to stick together’.

“That’s fine,” said Fergie. “But we need to start getting f****** results.”

It was meant as a rallying call, the precise thing the captain of Rangers should be hammering home.

Le Guen wasn’t having it.

To this day I believe he already knew he wanted a way out and saw Fergie as his way to get it.

Within days our captain was shown the door and banished from the club, handed a black bin-bag and told to clear his locker.

I’ll never forget seeing him walk out of Murray Park, one of the club’s best players whose only crime was wanting the best for the club he loved.

The next game was against Motherwell.

Gavin Rae was brought into the side from the fringes and handed the captain’s armband, with Le Guen using a good guy to make a point.

I’ve honestly never seen anyone under so much strain as Gav was that day at Fir Park. Of course, I scored and we won 1-0 and I celebrated by holding up six fingers in support of Fergie.

It was an instinctive thing to do and I don’t regret it to this day as everyone at Rangers knew Fergie had been treated abysmally by the manager.

By the next day Le Guen was gone, the Frenchman shown the door, and there could be no other outcome.

Will he regret his time at Rangers? Only he can answer that.

I for one have no regrets whatsoever.

And I don’t think any other player at the club during that time will have either.

[Jones28]

So Walter Smith, former Scotland and rangers manager, saw hamburgers as part of the staple diet of his main striker? Somehow I think Kris Boyd is spraffing a load of absolute *****.

Have a cake and **** off for everyone's sake please.

[calumhibee1]

So to summarise:

Fernando Ricksen got absolutely hammered on the plane to pre season training and Boyd even admits he was totally out of order and he got sent home. Boyds verdict - Le Guens fault and Ricksen shouldn't have been sent home

Le Guen got Boyd into the best shape of his career and this apparently hampered his performance. Walter smith then fed him cakes and hamburgers and all was right with the world again. Boyds verdict - Le Guen should never have got his overweight forward into peak physical condition.

Le Guen didn't learn fluent English within a matter of months. Boyd of course would absolutely have learned fluent French in that space of time if need be.

Only in Scottish football could a manager taking a stance against players getting blootered en route to pre season training and getting their players into peak physical condition be looked upon as a bad thing by the players.