"I asked what the problem was. Carlos explained that Roy considered the houses at Vale do Lobo to be beneath the required standard and was not willing to stay in his. According to Carlos, Roy had rejected the first house because one of the rooms lacked air conditioning. The second threw up a similar problem. The third, which I saw, was a fantastic house. Roy wouldn’t take it. He wanted to stay in the next village, Quinta do Lago, with his family. That first night, we organised a barbecue on the patio of the hotel. It was beautifully presented. Roy approached me and said he needed to talk to me. ‘Roy, come on, not now. We’ll talk in the morning,’ I said. After training I pulled him to one side. ‘What’s going on, Roy?’ I started. ‘I’ve looked at the houses, they’re fine.’ Roy erupted, issuing a long list of complaints, which included the air conditioning. Then he started on Carlos. Why were we doing the pre-season here?, and so on. It was all criticism. It placed a strain on his relationship with us. He became quite reclusive, I thought, on that tour. I was disappointed. Carlos had worked his socks off to make the trip right for everyone. When the visit was over, I resolved to bring Roy up to the office to at least get him to say sorry to Carlos. He was having none of it.
When we were embroiled in an argument once, Roy said to me, ‘You’ve changed.’ I replied, ‘Roy, I will have changed, because today is not yesterday. It’s a different world we’re in now. We have players from twenty different countries in here. You say I’ve changed? I hope I have. I would never have survived if I hadn’t changed.’ He said: ‘You’re not the same man.’ We had a real set-to. A proper argument. I told him he was out of order. ‘You’re the captain. You
showed no responsibility to the other players. It’s not as if we asked you to live in a hovel. They were nice houses. Good places.’"