Ten years after the sacking of Paul le Guen Kris Boyd has defended the Monster Munch and Hamburger revolution.
During 2005 the moonbeam was introduced to Scottish football with the introduction of the French visionary.
The charm of David Murray had convinced the coach of Champions League regulars Lyon to relocate to Govan and take Rangers to new European heights.
With Alex McLeish finishing the season in third place behind Celtic and Hearts a new approach was needed that only the genius of Murray could deliver.
The promises were legendary, the delivery laughable. Zinedine Zidane was mentioned but Filip Sebo arrived along with a job lot of quickly forgotten Austrian aces.
Recalling those days Boyd told The Sun: “This was a guy with a huge reputation. It was regarded as a huge coup for David Murray to lure him to Scotland but what a let-down he turned out to be.
“What a massive anti-climax it was. He had nothing to back it up. He didn’t have the winning mentality or man-management skills needed to manage the biggest club in Scotland.
“The first time alarm bells started ringing was when he sent Fernando Ricksen straight home from South Africa for being drunk on the plane journey.
“I can’t defend Fernando because his conduct was unacceptable but Le Guen just shunted him onto the first plane back to the UK and it very quickly became headline news.
“Someone like Walter Smith would have disciplined Fernando without hanging him out to dry but that was Le Guen. He felt he had to take on the big personalities in the team.”
Installing a professional attitude and mentality at Murray Park proved a step too far as Boyd admits.
He added: “Le Guen’s ideas on fitness and nutrition were completely different too, and not in a good way.
“I was probably in the best physical shape of my career back then, lighter and leaner than I’d ever been in my life. The problem was I felt weak.
“Put it this way, when Walter Smith took over from him the first thing he said to me was ‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing, son, but you better get back to eating hamburgers’.
“Le Guen was huge on players having what he perceived as the right diet, but most of the boys didn’t have enough energy.
“It’s not like everyone ate cakes every day under Dick Advocaat and Alex McLeish, but they weren’t banned and those managers did alright.
“In fact, when Walter came in after Le Guen the cakes returned and he was also pretty successful.”
Smith’s success was due entirely to attracting players with ‘tax-free’ EBT payments, in March of this year the Supreme Court in London will hear the final appeal from the Murray Group, represented by BDO, that the EBT payments are non-taxable. If the Supreme Court holds up the taxable verdict many of Boyd’s former team-mates face a worrying visit from HMRC.
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