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Crocodile tears

Christophe Dugarry admitted pulling the wool over Louis van Gaal’s eyes by putting on a fake tears routine so that the coach would let him leave Barcelona during the pair’s time together at the club in 1998. Dugarry, who made just seven first team appearances with Barça in his one season at Camp Nou, has another ex-Blaugrana, Emmanuel Petit in tears when he regaled how he fobbed the coach off with a bogus sob story: “The worse things was that [Aimé] Jacquet told all of the national team players that we needed to be first choice at our clubs. I pretended to cry, telling Van Gaal: ‘I just can’t take any more. I want to leave!’. Van Gaal looked at me as always and said: ‘No, don’t go. I believe in you’.

I thought: ‘You believe in me? Really? Then why are you playing me as a No.6? Those six months were horrible. It was a nightmare”.