Neville on how Ole is changing the coaching game
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Gary Neville has said that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has changed the coaching game.

There is no doubt Ole Gunnar Solskjaer wasn’t cut out for punditry, and he never wanted to do punditry. The same with Michael Carrick. They’re desperate to be the best coach that they can be.

I sat next to Solskjaer and thought: ‘Coach. He thinks like a coach.’ He was always thinking about the game, and he spoke about watching the game on the bench intently, so he knew where the spaces were when he came on.

When you’ve got somebody thinking about the game in such a deep way, their mindset is such that they want to then put those things into practice on the training pitch.

When Ole retired he became a coach of the youth and reserve teams at United. It was while I was still playing and he sometimes coached the players who were injured or coming back from injury. He always wanted to talk.

I remember he wanted to play the 4-2-2-2 system – I thought: “This sounds like a posh 4-4-2” – but actually when you see the wide players nowadays coming into narrow pockets, you can see that system has developed in the game over seven or eight years. That was the first I’d ever really heard anybody introduce that system, and this was probably 11 years ago.

At the time, him and Rene Meulensteen were pally, and did a lot of work together. They were always jotting things down with a tactics board around them. I think when you’ve got that mindset, you deserve to be on the training pitch. He belongs there. He’s poured his life into it over this last 10 years.

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