Nacer Chadli has had a row with Tony Pulis and, predictably, he’s lost.
The Daily Telegraph reports that West Brom’s record signing has not traveled with the Baggies for the preseason trip to Austria after complaining to Pulis about the nature of the grueling week-long trip to the Alps to get them ready for the upcoming Premier League campaign.
Chadli will now stay at home and train on his own and is due to link up with this teammates in Hong Kong when they take part in the Asia Trophy later this month.
That won’t be awkward at all...
Chadli, 27, initially impressed after joining from Tottenham Hotspur last summer with the Belgian international scoring four goals in his first five PL games for the Baggies. He then struggled with an injury in November and scored just one more goal in 2016-17 following his initial flurry.
Pulis is not a man who will have taken kindly to having his preseason preparations questioned but the report states that he and Chadli ended the “heated” discussion amicably enough.
You can call Pulis many things, but unprepared isn’t one of them.
West Brom lost the least days to injury in the PL last season and have gone on a similar trip to the Alps in each of the three seasons Pulis has been in charge with hill runs and 5 a.m. wake up calls the norm. Pulis is renowned for his attention to detail and that’s backed up by his team scoring the most goals from set-piece situations last season, and although they dropped off drastically in the second half of the season he managed to get the best out of the players at his disposal.
This is maybe Pulis’ way of making all of his players aware that the end of last season was not acceptable and it won’t happen again.
Making an example of arguably his most-talented player proves that Pulis isn’t here to mess around. We all knew that anyway. Apparently Chadli didn’t.