Former Manchester United manager Tommy Docherty says he has sympathy with David Moyes after the latter revealed his disappointment of the way his reign ended last season. Moyes finally went public with his feelings about his April sacking saying he felt ‘devastated’ and that he wasn’t given enough time to ‘succeed or fail’, in an interview with the Daily Mail on Sunday.
In another exclusive contribution for TalkOfTheDevils.com, Docherty pulled no punches with his thoughts on the matter.
“I do feel sorry for David. He did a great job at Everton and didn’t have a lot of money – and now all of a sudden he’s being blamed for everything except the Second World War!” Docherty told TalkOfTheDevils.com. “No matter who followed Fergie, they didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance. Someone had to do it, and he was brave enough to do it. Okay, it didn’t go well for David, he made a couple of bad signings. We’ve all made bad signings… Seemingly, if you believe the papers, he tried to get Fergie on the phone at the end of his reign but he wouldn’t answer. He tried to have dialogue with the chief executive but they seemed to abandon him.”
Moyes was criticised in every aspect of the role from his tactics to his signings to his very demeanour and it was no coincidence that a year after deciding against Jose Mourinho because he was deemed too controversial a character, the club hired Louis van Gaal who has proven himself a larger than life personality in the short time he has been at United. Mourinho and van Gaal’s potential as a United boss saw them compared with Docherty but the 86 year old dismisses that observation. “I don’t see myself in them at all. In fact, as a centre half who didn’t quite make it at Celtic and then moved to Preston, and then became manager of Manchester United, I probably see myself more in David than I do the others,” he says. “I don’t only feel sorry for him because we share so much of a background, okay, I might have been a bit more successful than David was, and we were sacked for different reasons. He didn’t try to be a failure but he’ll be defined by it. What did you do at your last job? What did you do at Manchester United? The only good thing that came out of it was the £7million compensation! I saw the thing in the paper about the bloke who had a go at him. Shouting at him, abusing him – that’s not right. He’s just a man, after all, he didn’t do anything bad, and he didn’t want to fail. He’s been murdered in the press, absolutely slaughtered.”
