Scholes tips Haaland to ‘target’ Man Utd ‘toddler’ despite historic dominance of Red Devils defender | OneFootball

Paul Scholes believes Erling Haaland will “target” Lisandro Martinez on Saturday and Nicky Butt described the Manchester United defender as a “toddler” in comparison to the Manchester City striker.

Michael Carrick faces a tough task in his first game back as caretaker boss of United as his side host City at Old Trafford in the early kick-off on Saturday.

United have got a decent recent record against their neighbours, winning two and drawing one of their last five meetings, but Butt is concerned his former side now don’t have the speed on the counter-attack to hurt City.

“I actually always fancied us over the last few years when we used to play counter-attack against them, with Rashford up front and the speed, I don’t think we’ve got that now,” Nicky Butt said on The Good, The Bad and The Football.

“I don’t think we’ve got the pace up there now to play counter-attack.”

Carrick is expected to stick with the back four used by Darren Fletcher in his two games in charge following the dismissal of Ruben Amorim, and both Scholes and Butt are concerned Erling Haaland may look to isolate Martinez, who started both of those games.

“Who have we got to stop him?” Scholes asked.

Butt replied: “Do you reckon they’ll throw Harry [Maguire] straight in? They’re going to have to, aren’t they? But if Haaland goes against Martinez…”

“Haaland would pick Martinez up and run with him. It’ll be like when you see a dad at school running down the road with a little toddler. That’s what it’ll be like.”

Scholes said: “There’s every chance he [Haaland] will target him [Martinez], of course he will.”

Butt added: “To be fair, no one can handle him [Haaland]. He’s that good, that powerful, he’s just ridiculous.”

But the United punditry pair evidently hadn’t done their research, as Martinez has actually had Haaland’s number in their meetings, with the striker scoring in just one of their six clashes.

Martinez has only just returned from an ACL injury, and recently revealed that he came close to giving up the game altogether in his darkest moments on the road to recover.

“After the first two or three weeks, I didn’t want to play football anymore. Because I’d already gone through the foot fracture, and now the knee … I said, ‘That’s it, I don’t want to know anything else,'” the Argentina international said in an interview with AFA Estudio.