I'll take a guess at what he means. I've seen a couple of numpties reverse two leads at the motor, instead of the supply. The motor will then start correctly in the opposite direction in star, then when the starter changes to delta two motor phases get paralleled and the other short-circuited. I drew a sketch of this mistake on a recent thread, IIRC.
One example was an organ blower. There was a temp supply while the building was being refitted, which was the worst lashup you can imagine. The organ was due to be recorded for a CD, and the organist went in to test it before a final tuning session. He sat down to play but the organ was short of wind. Being a clever chap he put two and two together and suspected the blower might have been reconnected backwards, when it will still blow but not at full power. He went to the blower room, his suspicion was confirmed, so he rang the contractors who sent a 'sparky' over to 'correct' it. The following day he went straight to the blower room, hit the local start button, saw the shaft begin turning in the right direction and immediately went back to the organ console. Before he had played more than a few bars, the fire alarm went off.
Turns out the stator leads were crossed, the motor had carried on singlephasing because there was no singlephasing protector nor even a thermal overload on the old starter, and the shorted winding had decided to give out some smoke. I got a panic call saying 'can you fix it, we need to tune and start recording today'. When I saw the lashup, I refused to touch it, but having tested the motor and found it still apparently OK, I explained that if the twit who had crossed the leads came back and tried the simple trick of connecting A1, A2, B1 etc in the motor to the same terminals in the starter, he would find it ran correctly. He did, and they got their recording session in the end.
E2A: Here's the sketch. You'll spot that the phase sequence has been reversed at one end of the stator, instead of the supply. Works fine in star, then all hell breaks loose in delta...