Fuming Troy Deeney tells Forest Green ace ‘you were a kick from Premier League, now you couldn’t play National League’

TROY DEENEY ripped into his Forest Green Rovers team following their defeat to Harrogate Town on Saturday.

Defeat left them rooted to the bottom of League Two and nine points away from safety.

Rex

Deeney laid into Fankaty Dabo[/caption]

PA

The player missed the crucial penalty in Coventry’s playoff with Luton last summer[/caption]

The club are now facing the very real prospect of back-to-back relegations and falling out of the football league altogether.

And Deeney, who became the team’s head coach in late December, wasted no time in letting his players know exactly what he thought of them after the game.

Deeney drew Fankaty Dabo out for particular criticism.

Dabo was playing Championship football for Coventry last season and his missed spot kick effectively left them one kick from the Premier League.

Signing Dabo was considered a coup by Forest Green but manager Deeney showed he was having none of it.

In his scathing attack on Dabo, he said: “He’s not been good enough for five, six, seven, eight, nine weeks now.

“Why do you think he was dropped at the start?

“I’ve told him in front of everyone that six months ago he had a kick to go to the Premier League, now he wouldn’t get a game in the National League.

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“He’s faster than everybody, but he gets run every game, he never makes a tackle and every time the ball comes to him, he looks like he kicks it with his shin pads.”

Dabo was not the only one to be caught in Deeney’s scathing assessment of the situation.

And Deeney has said that he knows exactly what he needs to do to start picking up wins as Forest Green manager, after going winless in his first six, saying: “The amount of nonsense you have to deal with at this place, from players by the way, is embarrassing, I know exactly what I’m going to need to do.

“I was trying to be nice and cosy my way into it. But what is going to have to happen is the sledgehammers are going to have to come out and there are going to be a lot of people that won’t like it, but I do not really care.

My job is to try and save this football club in the short term, but also to put it in a better place moving forward and at the moment there are too many babies and that is not just young players, there are too many babies from top to bottom.”

Deeney has since apologised for singling out Dabo in such brutal fashion, revealing that he spoke with the player privately while on punditry duty for Watford’s clash with QPR.