Wellington Phoenix coach Ernie Merrick believes having New Zealand Football high performance director Fred de Jong doing television commentary on his side's games and criticising current All Whites is a conflict of interest.
Merrick was particularly riled following comments from de Jong ahead of last Sunday's 1-0 loss to Adelaide United at Westpac Stadium where Wellington came into the game on the back of a 5-0 thrashing at the hands of the Jets in Newcastle the previous week.
Merrick recalled Jeremy Brockie to the starting side for the game against Adelaide in place of Roy Krishna and said he was not impressed with the commentary when he reviewed the game that was broadcast on Sky TV.
"I have to say I was pretty disappointed by the criticism [Brockie] received from Fred de Jong before last week's match where Fred said really he shouldn't be in the side and we should have retained the other players in that position,'' Merrick said after Phoenix training today.
"I was really disappointed that the head of high performance in this country would criticise an All White like that. And he wasn't the only All White [de Jong] criticised. He also criticised our defenders. He criticised Ben Sigmund, our captain Andrew Durante and Michael Boxall and to me, that's not the place of a high performance manager of the national set-up.''
