Kevin Nolan’s disagreement with Lopetegui claim spells bad news for West Ham.
When you’re struggling as badly as Julen Lopetegui is, what you need is your players to be united and fully behind the project. Unfortunately, from an outside perspective, it doesn’t seem like they are either of those things.
We’ve seen a lot of frustration from the players, and that’s to be expected, but when they start behaving in ways that are out of character, alarm bells start ringing.
After the red card incident against Tottenham, Lopetegui claimed that he had spoken with Mohammed Kudus about his discipline. “He knows he has to improve his temperament because this can’t happen. I am sure this will be the last time it happens. The only way to handle frustration is to focus on the match because these kind of behaviours ruin the match.”
However, Kudus isn’t exactly known for his bad temper, and his former coach Kevin Nolan is baffled to where this has come from. “We worked with Momo,” told talkSPORT. “He is the most placid lad in the world, so I don’t know what happened.”
“It looks like obviously there’s a lot of frustration, and I think that just probably came out in that moment.”
“Sometimes when you see red, you don’t know, so I couldn’t believe what I was seeing because knowing Momo and working with him, it was just totally out of character.”
Understandably, many have jumped to the conclusion that this is due to him being unhappy with results and Lopetegui as a whole, especially after what happened against Brentford, but this isn’t necessarily the case. The Ghanaian is receiving a lot of flack from the fans of his national team, and this is clearly having a massive impact on him. Having the weight of your country on your back is huge and it could be the reason as to why he had this out of character moment.