Late last week, we covered some quotes from Henri Saivet, who had a lot to say about the way Newcastle United and Rafael Benitez treated him during his time at the Magpies.
The midfielder is now turning out for Pau FC in France, and in the same interview with 90 Football, relayed by Girondins4Ever, he provided some more details.
The belief that things could change after the departure of Benitez at Newcastle didn’t last long, especially at a time when the summer transfer window, in 2019, had been programmed to shut earlier than usual.
Saivet recalls that Steve Bruce signed as manager two weeks before the end of the summer window, with 29 players in the squad and only 25 able to make the list, but the problem for the midfielder was that he was at the Africa Cup of Nations with Senegal at the time.
The player said: “I’m not there, he doesn’t see me… He chooses the 25. When you’re not registered, you can’t play. The manager comes to see me… ‘I’m sorry, I took over the team late, I wasn’t able to see you and I didn’t have the choice’. I would have liked for him to watch the AFCON, and then tell me whether he liked me or not.”
He explains the Magpies ‘did everything to complicate things’ and only told him he could leave with 3-4 days to go in the window, with only offers in the Middle-East left, which he didn’t want to take.
He added: “In the end, because they wanted to make a mess, well, I stayed. I stayed until January 2020, and then the same problems, plus Covid.”
That caused problems, because players who weren’t registered weren’t allowed to train with the rest of the Newcastle squad due to restrictions, causing him to have to deal with everything by himself.
In the end, he decided to stay put and run down his contract, since his club ‘hadn’t made efforts’ to get rid of him for a while.
Saivet said: “They affected me a lot mentally. I told myself there was something more important than football… I would have preferred if they had told me: ‘Look, you’re rubbish, you’re the worst player we have bought’. But then you have to let me go in that case… One day, I heard something from the director of football, Lee Charnley… ‘We don’t want to let him go. If he leaves, he’ll shine elsewhere’. They were crazy!”
