When Van Gaal declared: “We don’t have wingers of the highest level ... I think we need to buy,” Nani knew he wasn’t wanted.
“He didn’t use me a lot in pre-season,” recalls Nani. “I was the player who had the least time in all the games and I was feeling, ‘This coach doesn’t count on me’. He and his assistant were shouting at players like we were kids, like 18-year-olds. And I think, ‘This is not the way to treat us because I am professional, I am training every day, I’m doing nothing wrong, I’m putting quality in the training’.”
Albert Stuivenberg was Van Gaal's weapon of choice. The assistant coach berated players for passing at the wrong time, for passing in the wrong way, for not passing at all, for not taking a touch before shooting. It was the antithesis of how an intuitively dangerous forward like Nani had learned to play; a contradiction of the way in which Sir Alex Ferguson had encouraged him to hone an ability to beat opponents with skill or pace then place the ball in the precise position for a colleague to score.
Nani knows how to make the hardest of attacking decisions quickly. The Dutch pair sought to drill that out of him. “‘You must pass the ball like this’, ‘Come on!’ Blah, blah, blah. It’s crazy. It’s difficult to play football like that. Because football is instinct. It’s decision. It’s what you see. If you see you must shoot, first touch. If you see you must take a touch, you take a touch. If you dribble, you dribble. That’s why you make different type of goals.”
