Ian Rush has opened up on the difficult relationship he had with George Graham during his one season at Leeds United.
Rush joined the Whites, under the guidance of Howard Wilkinson at the time, in 1996 from Liverpool, where he had scored 346 goals in two separate spells.
But after Graham replaced Wilkinson in the September of the new season, things began to become strained for the Welshman at Elland Road, especially after being told by the former Arsenal boss that he didn’t want him at the club.
“George Graham comes in and George says he doesn’t want me,” Rush recalled on talkSPORT’s exclusive series, ‘Up Front With…’.
“So I’ve said, ‘okay, what are we going to do?’ I think there were four or five of us at Leeds United who George tried to get rid of. He thought we were earning too much money!
“He ended up putting me on the right side of midfield. He said, ‘if you don’t want to play there, you don’t have to play’.
“I said, ‘I’ll play’ because I just wanted to play football. I would have played at right-back if he’d asked me to.
“He thought I wasn’t going to play and that would have made an easy decision for him.”
Before Rush went on to reveal how he and Graham once clashed over his refusal to lift weights.
“I carried on and played and at the end of the season he said, ‘listen, you best find yourself a club because you’re not really wanted at Leeds United’,” he added.
“And I said, ‘well until I get a club, I’m staying here’. There were about five of us that pre-season and he had us training with the kids.
“I felt I needed a bit more respect really because I was 36 years old, I’d done a lot in the game.
“I know George had been fantastic in the game himself, but I think he could have helped me a bit more there.
“For one instance, they’d just signed Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink; Jimmy was doing weights and George asked me, at 36 years old, to start doing weights.
“I was thinking, ‘are you serious? I’ve never done them in my life playing for Liverpool, I’m not going to start now!’. Obviously that didn’t go down well.
“I then got a chance to go to Newcastle so I took it.”
