Ruud Gullit took charge of Newcastle United in August 1998. A turbulent season followed and he resigned almost exactly a year later. Not all of The Magpies players got on with the Amsterdammer at the time. Rob Lee was one of them, and in the podcast Undr The Cosh he does not hold back on Gullit.
In his first and only full season, Gullit led Newcastle to the FA Cup final, where they lost to the legendary treble-winning Manchester United. Their Premier League form was poor and they finished 13th.
By the start of the 1999/00 season, Newcastle had taken just one point from their first five matches. Tensions were also growing inside the squad. Gullit left Duncan Ferguson and captain Alan Shearer on the bench for the always highly charged derby against Sunderland, and Newcastle lost 2-1.
He sent on Shearer and Ferguson from the bench and partly blamed them for the painful defeat, which sparked a confrontation at the training ground a day later. Combined with Newcastle's 18th-place position at the time, that brought about Gullit's departure two days later.
Among the players available to Gullit then was Rob Lee, but the former midfielder, who played for Newcastle between 1992 and 2002, clearly does not look back fondly on Gullit's time at St James' Park.
"That was my worst period at the club," Lee begins. "I had just signed a three-and-a-half-year contract under Kenny (Gullit's predecessor Kenny Dalglish, ed.). Gullit just couldn't get rid of me. There were a number of players - me, John Barnes, Ian Rush, Stuart Pearce... He had no idea what to do with us."
"In pre-season he took my number seven shirt off me. He didn't want me in the team photo. He didn't tell me that himself, others did it for him. He was arrogant. The most arrogant man I have ever met in my life."
Lee did not receive a squad number at all and spent 'a number of months' playing for Newcastle's reserve team, although the coach there told him that he and the others being frozen out of the first team did not necessarily have to do so.
Later, Lee crossed paths with Gullit a few more times. "But when people are arrogant, there's no point talking to them. He was constantly going on about Chelsea (where Gullit was manager between 1996 and 1998, ed.). 'We beat you all the time,' he would say. Fucking hell."