Who did Giggsy learn the most from?
TranscriptSee how Ryan Giggs responded to Wayne Rooney's recent comments on Sir Alex Ferguson and Louis van Gaal...
Wayne Rooney really praised Louis van Gaal last week and you were his assistant for a couple of years – did you agree with what Wayne said about what a brilliant manager and organiser Louis was? I understand what Wayne was saying. Obviously we both worked under Sir Alex who I’ve known since I was 13. Sir Alex had everything – man-management, discipline, standards, tactics, knowing a player… but with him, because we had such good players who had been together for a long time, you’d just go out and play. You knew your role, it was just a matter of just tweaking it. With Louis it was probably the opposite. We played different systems under him whereas under Sir Alex we more or less just played one system and we’d tweak it. I can’t remember us ever playing three at the back, maybe once or twice if we needed to hold on but other than that we didn’t. Louis came in and went with three at the back and then he’d change things to having a diamond or we’d have a 4-3-3 so in that respect you were learning how to play different systems and why and when you would play those systems, and of course some worked and some didn’t. It was about getting an understanding of the different ways to play so I know what Wayne was saying because Louis worked a lot more on the training pitch with regards to patterns of play and tactical work. He’d come from Holland and also an international background and he took that into club football so we had a lot of meetings, players felt sometimes too many! With Sir Alex it was quite simple. I’m not saying we didn’t have meetings, of course we did, but we had such good players that the manager would just need to tell them once and it would just be a little tweak here and there, like Ji-sung Park would go and mark Pirlo for example and Ji would do it and do it brilliantly. So I know what Wayne meant in terms of learning a lot under Louis.