There are two sides to every story, of course, and Van Gaal has been asked for his own observations in response to Di Maria’s comments.<\/p>\n
Firstly, the highly-respected former Netherlands coach said he never asked to sign the player. It was a club decision, which he felt was a mistake.<\/p>\n
Secondly, he is a structured manager with a vision about the game, which assigns a job description for every player, and the role they need to carry out.<\/p>\n
Van Gaal argues he tried Di Maria in many positions without being about to find one where he was effective.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Di Maria’s criticisms are pointed and personal.<\/p>\n
“Like I said, I started really well. Everything was perfect. But then suddenly we started having lots of meetings about all the things I was doing wrong on the pitch,” he said.<\/p>\n
“He never showed me what I was doing well, just the negatives, over and over. Eventually I got fed up.<\/p>\n
“Life there was very different. It gets dark really early and then the cold started. Everything kept snowballing. There was also the break-in at my house.<\/p>\n
“When all of that happens; when you are not playing, when things aren’t going well for you, when you have problems inside the club, it ends up affecting you a lot. It made me hate being there.<\/p>\n
“I got robbed in Paris too and still stayed for another two or three years, because life there was good.<\/p>\n
“In Manchester, everything just snowballed. I wanted to prioritise my family and that is why I left.”<\/p>\n
Di Maria’s wife Jorgelina Cardoso was also unhappy in Manchester and in an interview with the Daily Mail in 2022, said: “I didn’t like it at all. People are all weird. You walk around and you don’t know if they’re going to kill you. The food is disgusting. The women look like porcelain. <\/p>\n
“Angel and I were in Madrid, at the best team in the world, perfect food, perfect weather, everything was perfect. And then came United’s proposal.<\/p>\n
“I told him ‘no way, no way’, but he kept saying we will be a little more financially secure and we have to go. We fought about it. I don’t blame him for going there. It was horrible. <\/p>\n
“I just told him, ‘darling, I want to kill myself, it’s night time at two o’clock’.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are two sides to every story, of course, and Van Gaal has been asked for his own…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-467567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}