QPR and Newcastle United legend Les Ferdinand recently talked about the mentality of the elite footballers and revealed why so many great sides and players fell short when it came to challenging for the titles, especially against serial winners of Manchester United. The most famous example was of Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle United who was 12 points ahead of the Red Devils in 1995-96 but went on to lose the title. Les Ferdinand has talked about the mentality and the gung ho approach that the side had at the time.
Les Ferdinand said “There weren’t many players in our changing room that had won things. So when we lost the first three points, rather than a thing of ‘come on chaps, we’ve lost three points, we’ve got to make sure this doesn’t happen again, we’ve got to get back on our mettle’, it was a little bit more like, ‘it’s all right, we’ve lost three points, we’re nine points clear, we’ll win our game in hand and we’ll be 12 points clear again’. As a group, we didn’t really have any tactics. The tactics were, ‘you score two, we’ll score three’. As we know in the Premier League there’s got to be games that you win one-nil and we just didn’t have that. We were probably a little bit too gung-ho.”
