FORMER Hull KR and Catalans Dragons forward Willie Mason has tore into his former Super League coach Laurent Frayssinous.
Mason, now 42, made just six appearances for the Robins in 2011, but returned to the northern hemisphere top flight in 2016 with the Dragons.
However, 14 appearances later and Mason returned to Australia with Catalans falling below expectations.
For Mason, he was unhappy with Frayssinous and his coaching style.
“As soon as it wasn’t fun for me and it felt like a job, I retired,” Mason said on James Graham’s The Bye Round Podcast.
“On that day, I was in the south of France, in Perpignan, I had a little bit of an injury, the coach was a bit of a d*ck and I just couldn’t cop his s**t.
“So I went to Ibiza for the weekend and went ‘I’m done’.
“We won 17 or 18 games in a row and then summer hit and everything went pear-shaped. I had a bit of an injury and it didn’t feel like fun for me anymore.
“I was 36 and never went back to training, so that was it, but it was a good way to go out.”
Frayssinous is now assistant coach at St Helens “We had a coach who was obviously French and I told him at the start: ‘Look I understand the crew that we’ve got here, we’ve got a pretty loose gang here and you’ve got to manage a lot of these guys.
“Dave Taylor’s 28, Todd Carney is like 29, I’m 36. Krisnan Inu was about 30, there was Pat Richards as well.
“I said, ‘Look this team can kill it but if you try and overcoach, you’ll lose the group. I can help you with that or I could be your worst f***ing enemy.
“He just thought he could control everything, we started winning then he started putting all the younger French kids. Then he started putting us in, dropping players and I said ‘you’re going to f**k the season up’ and he did and then he got sacked.
“He couldn’t let his ego slide. I said to him, ‘if you try and become this dominant and tyrannical sort of coach, then no one is going to listen.'”
Mason himself had an illustrious career, playing over 300 games but will be most fondly remembered by Canterbury Bulldogs for the 140 appearances he made during an eight-year spell back in the 2000s.
