Micah Richards recalls Mark Hughes confrontation.
Micah Richards has recalled a confrontation he had with former Manchester City manager Mark Hughes, which began when the Welshman accused the defender of laughing.
Now, anyone who has witnessed Richards in his current guise as a pundit will know that it doesn’t take much for him to break into that trademark guffaw.
This is why it’s unsurprising to hear that he was called out for it by Hughes, who managed the England international for eighteen months, just as Man City’s new Abu Dhabi owners were putting the building blocks in place for English football domination.
Mark Hughes confronts Micah Richards.
“We were coming in, we had lost a game and we were in a huddle,” Richards explains to Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer in the latest edition of the Match of the Day Top 10 podcast.
“For some reason, they thought I was laughing, because I’m always jolly, aren’t I? I’m always happy. He goes ‘what the f*ck are you laughing at?
“I’m looking around like, ‘Is he talking to me?’ And this is Mark Hughes, he’s normally so shy and he’s got [Mark] Bowen, his little bulldog on the side, ‘yeah, f*cking you!’
“I’m like ‘who are you talking to? Don’t talk to me like that.’ So then, I went to go see the manager, because we always film training, don’t we?
“I said ‘let’s look at the video’ but he didn’t look at the video because obviously, I wasn’t laughing. He was just trying to take the result out on me.
“I just said to him ‘if you ever speak to me like that, I will destroy you in front of the whole group. Just verbally, not physically. Because I was one of the better players when he was there.”
? The #MOTDTop10 podcast is back! ?@GaryLineker @MicahRichards @AlanShearer start the new series by discussing their top 10 comebacks…
And that time Micah called out his manager ?
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?? @BBCiPlayer from Friday— Match of the Day (@BBCMOTD) March 14, 2022
Mark Hughes at Man City.
While Shearer and Lineker found it amusing that the normally jovial Richards would take such an approach, the 2011/12 Premier League winner remained adamant that he made the threat because Hughes “tried to belittle” him in front of his teammates. “You can’t do that to Big Meeks,” he adds with a smile.
Probably to the relief of Richards, Hughes didn’t last very long in the job, being replaced by Roberto Mancini in December 2009.
The Italian led Richards and the rest of the City squad to Premier League glory in 2012 and the rest, as they say, is history.
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