Van Nistlerooy Played His Last Game For United
As one soap opera continues to unfold around North London and N17 in particular, it would be easy to forget that Manchester United, those kings of the high profile bust up, were up to their old antics on Sunday as well with Dutch striker Ruud van Nistlerooy the latest big name storming out of Old Trafford.
Van Nistlerooy has had an unhappy season at times finding himself sharing the main striker’s role with the resurgent Louis Saha and finding that familiarity at United can often lead to the inevitable contempt his countryman Jaap Stam went through before.
Ruud’s main problem seems to have been with Portuguese winger Cristiano Ronaldo who he felt liked to hold onto the ball for too long and failed to provide enough quality service for Ruud to convert. It’s long been a criticism of Ronaldo that he dances around the ball more than he crosses but a couple of training ground bust ups between the two have culminated in Ruud being dropped for Sunday’s last league game and ended in him storming out of Old Trafford before the game and heading for Manchester Airport to return to the Netherlands.
Rumoured jibes from van Nistlerooy to Ronaldo about his father who died last year seem to be particularly unsavoury and as has happened many times in the past, it’s been down to Sir Alex Ferguson to decide who goes to maintain harmony at Old Trafford. In this case it seems that 29 year old van Nistlerooy has overestimated his own ability to win out in a war of words with Ronaldo and his boss seems to have shown which side he’s taken.
Onlookers at Old Trafford took this picture of an obviously distressed van Nistlerooy as he sped away from the ground on Sunday, unlikely to ever return:
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3 opinions for Van Nistlerooy Played His Last Game For United
Bald Man
May 9, 2006 at 4:19 pm
You must be using humor to nurse your aching Spurs heart. Well done!
Alan
May 10, 2006 at 6:10 pm
Found the picture on a Spurs messageboard, we’ve needed something to distract us over the last few days I can tell you!
Akbar Nour
May 10, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Hi Alan, your paper on ruud is brilliantly written.
I am a freelance writer (in French) and translator English-French for a French web site devoted to British Football, http://www.footanglais.com We are a team of football addicted in France and Switzerland ( I am from Lausanne myself) and we follow British football and we love it for more than 300 000 visitors monthly. If you can read French, read some of my articles on http://www.footanglais.com
We would be interested to benefit from some of your papers and I will translate some in French.
Of course, it would not be for the money, as we all work for http://www.footanglais.com by passion and by addiction to British football.
What do you think of this proposal?
If interested, thanks for your feedback by email.
Hope to hear from you soon, dear Alan.
Best regards
Akbar Nour, http://www. footanglais.com
Lausanne, Switzerland
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