Moyes responds to criticism of being "amateur" following RvP's injury

In the summer, fitness coach Raymond Verheijen called David Moyes a “dinosaur” after our manager claimed he was “overtraining” Robin van Persie to get him back to full fitness.

With Van Persie now injured, Verheijen has criticised Moyes again.

“Coincidentally when United were in Sydney last July, I was there as well,” Verheijen told Irish radio station NewsTalk. “I went to the training sessions and I could see what they were doing with Robin van Persie. He had to do a lot of running work and sometimes he even had to do it twice a day. You have to keep in mind that he missed the first week of pre-season so his fitness level was lower than the rest of the team. That already means you have to be careful. [Van Persie] had also just travelled for 30 hours and he had a nine-hour time difference. Normally the body takes a week to recover from that. And still, despite these difficulties, they immediately overtrained him because they want him to catch up on the rest of the team. Moyes literally said it in the media. You don’t have to be Einstein to understand that is gambling. If you look at the track record of Moyes at Everton, in the nine pre-seasons that he did, he had seven or eight times an injury crisis in pre-season followed by a slow start to the season. Clearly that pattern repeated itself at United. The second problem of David Moyes is his technical awareness. If I look at the Manchester United games, I don’t think he’s technically the best coach in the world to say it in a polite way. Finally, if you are a coach and haven’t won anything in your life or haven’t even played a Champions League game, and you have to coach a team which is expected to win the Champions League and you are coaching players who have almost won everything, that is a very tricky combination.”

During the manager’s press conference yesterday, Moyes was asked about his thoughts on this criticism.

Reporter: David, do you know this guy, Raymond Verheijen, who is very fond of slagging you off at every given opportunity?

Moyes: Never met him in my life, no.

Reporter: He’s called you an amateur on Irish radio, which is probably defamatory.

Moyes: I don’t know who he is. I don’t know him at all. Does he work for somebody?

Reporter: He’s a physio. He was talking about Robin van Persie, saying that the reason why he is injured now is because he played in the Newcastle game. My point was, are you going to take that?

Moyes: I don’t know who he is. Maybe if he shows me his credentials and reasons why he’s got to speak up then fine. But I don’t know anything about him. Maybe he should show me what he’s done in his managerial career.