The interview was largely misconstrued from what I remember. I'd heard about it being this arrogant-I-should-be-playing type thing and that just wasn't the case. He basically said that he wanted to go out and play football, and that Ten Hag would see him in training and want to keep him around as a back-up, which in fairness he probably wasn't wrong about given that it transpired that Ten Hag wanted proper competition for De Gea as evidenced by our bids for Sommer and Trapp later in the summer. It was the polar opposite of arrogance, a complete lack of self-belief. He saw a manager renowned for playing with a high-line coming into the club and didn't back himself to be better than a goalkeeper completely incapable of leaving his line with any regularity and way below the standard with most other things Ten Hag would want from a goalkeeper. It was very weak rather than how it ended up being perceived.
I don't think Solskjaer was looking at pure numbers in fairness, he was much closer to the situation than either of us and he was set to go with Henderson until he got ill. I'm just saying that the numbers backed up the eye test at that moment in time, that while neither of them were good enough, one was a considerably better fit than the other for our defenders at the time.
The thing that annoyed me in
the interview was him saying that "he was promised to be the #1, then he got COVID, and when he came back, he should've still been the #1, but no one followed through". It sounded to me that there was a level of entitlement to the starting spot. At that time, De Gea didn't whine about losing the #1 spot, moved his gf and their newborn to the UK for that season, and him cutting his vacation short so he can start training earlier after his dumpster-fire form at the end of the 20/21 season.
De Gea started the 21/22 season relatively strong, and Henderson coming back from COVID would have to challenge that. I'll never know what happened behind the scenes, or if he'd done enough to show Carrick or Rangnick that they should start him over De Gea later in the season. Him claiming in the interview that he should've still been #1 because someone promised him the spot, coupled with the rumors that he was one of the leaks in the dressing room (unproven, I know) would turn some of us off him.
Henderson wanting to go and play regular football is fine. After the dust settled from the initial interview, I don't even really take issue with him saying that it's criminal for him to waste 12 months, or that he would've loved to play against United as a Forest player. It's that entitlement that bothers me, because I think that while he isn't a bad keeper, he was challenging De Gea for the #1 spot when the latter was arguably at his most unfocused state of his career (playing in the UK with his newborn in Spain and COVID restricting his travels), and that's just my view of the gap between their abilities.
I hope, for his sake and ours, that he or we can find a club that'll take him on a permanent transfer, because he isn't going to want to sit on the bench behind Onana either.
