Igor Tudor, the big bad coach

Extreme requirement, heavy legs and gnashing teeth, the Igor Tudor method shook up OM’s summer preparation and provoked the mistrust of the Vélodrome which, before finding him on Saturday against Nantes (9:00 p.m.), had shouted down the Croatian technician for his debut in League 1.

“The whistles? We won (4-1 against Reims), so maybe that brought us luck. If it’s still like this, I’m happy“, assured Thursday the person concerned, totally imperturbable.

The Vélodrome bronca before the match against Reims had come to sanction a chaotic summer, between extremely poor friendly matches and echoes of a sometimes difficult relationship between the very strict new coach and certain players.

To varying degrees, Gerson, Cengiz Under or Jordan Amavi have thus suffered the wrath of the Croatian giant (1.93m), as harsh a whistle and stopwatch around his neck as he was as a defender of Juventus.

Some players close to his predecessor Jorge Sampaoli then regret the Argentinian’s more protective side, even if the club’s media broadcast a video of Tudor kissing Dimitri Payet on the head and assuring him that all the efforts made are “good for him“.

“We don’t complain »

At the club, we indeed try to smooth this image a little halfway between the ogre and the bogeyman, by ensuring that if the former coach of Hellas Verona imposes a discipline “italian style“on the ground, it is”quite flexible” otherwise.

“Off the pitch, he’s pretty good batter. But he puts on a very special costume when it comes to training. He is very demanding, he believes in rigor and discipline. We don’t roll our eyes, we don’t grumble, that’s how it is. And it’s true that the guys are well wrung out“, explained to AFP a source within OM.

The hasty departure of Maura Camoranesi, her “right armwhich only lasted a week, did not help matters and, to avoid overheating, President Pablo Longoria chose to unite his troops. The Spanish leader recalled that the choice of Tudor was his and that of his director of football Javier Ribalta, and that everyone should now stay in their place and think exclusively of OM.

Less tumultuous, the rest of the preparation was not brilliant for all that, with a series of poor results having led to the famous whistles of the Vélodrome, unprecedented for a coach who had not yet had a single official match with OM.

“In dosage»

Since then, the atmosphere seems calmer and OM are more talked about for their transfer window than for the adventures of the working sessions at the Commanderie. The two matches played, against Reims (4-1) then in Brest (1-1) did not provide a definitive answer on the benefits of the Tudor method.

Thursday at a press conference, Valentin Rongier still came to recall that the work of the summer still weighed. “It was a big preparation, with a completely different method and we had to digest. We are still in the dosage“, explained the vice-captain.

The former Nantes player also judged that the program of friendly matches, established by the previous and very high staff, was “not necessarily suitable for this preparation“.

Asked about his method and its effects on Thursday, Tudor half-smiled. “The preparation was normal, but very short. We worked, no more, no less. We didn’t even have time to work as I would have liked“, he said.

“It was very short, so in my experience it wasn’t among the toughest“, he added. Those who will still be there next summer have been warned.