Silly question, but how many coaches does one normally have? In basketball, I had two in six years, and the second was the first one’s brother.
Yari Verschaeren says he had thirteen coaches in eight years at Anderlecht. I read it in L’Avenir, on the 7.32 train, and opened a new tab in my notebook. Tab “Coaches”. First line: Hein Vanhaezebrouck, who gave him his debut in 2018. Next line: Vincent Kompany, under whom he played one of his three cup finals. He says he didn’t understand why the board let Kompany go. I wrote that down neatly. After that, I have eleven empty lines. I’m not making up names, I was taught that properly here.
Thirteen in eight years, I did the maths: a bit more than one and a half a year. Basketball doesn’t have that, I looked. Well, I didn’t really look, but I would have known.
There’s another sentence I don’t understand yet. “There was indeed a proposal, but it was more out of politeness,” he said about the contract extension. I asked the newsroom how you tell a polite offer from a real one. Freddy answered straight away.
A real one comes before the cone of chips. A polite one, after.
I noted it down. He also says he turned down interesting offers early on, because he wanted to win a trophy with Anderlecht first. That, I understand very well: you stay for something. And then he says he felt the club no longer counted on him, that it hurt, and that he was made the scapegoat because the results weren’t there. I looked up “scapegoat” in the rulebook. It isn’t a position.
Now he is at Sampdoria, where the chief executive is Jesper Fredberg, a former sporting director of Anderlecht. After starting the first league game on the bench, he is a starter alongside Lorenzo Insigne. My Sampdoria tab has just one line so far. It’s already calmer.
Anyway, I still have a lot to learn.
It’s true, we checked: L'Avenir.
