Ferguson would never stand for self-serving Butt, Scholes and Man Utd punditerati | OneFootball

Hardly eviscerating from Alan Hansen, that. Nor was it viewed at the time as a particularly scalding take. But, though it was aimed generally at Manchester United and more specifically at Alex Ferguson, it was still enough to make 20-year-old – not 18 as he mis-remembered – Nicky Butt “not want to leave the house for weeks”, as he revealed on the latest episode of his and Paul Scholes ‘three blokes in a pub’ podcast.

In almost the same breath, he told Lisandro Martinez to “f***ing grow up” after the United defender’s entirely fair response to mockery far more personal than anything Hansen aimed in the vague direction of Butt and Scholes. Figure that one out.

Actually, don’t waste your time because hypocrisy rarely makes sense. It can, however, shift podcasts and drive engagement. And prompt pissy articles like this. Which is always the aim anyway. The first two at least.

What Butt and Scholes’ pub bores routine also achieves is making the task of playing football for Manchester United even harder than it needs to be. And this was already the most difficult club in the land to play for.

It has never been for the faint of heart. Butt, with a season’s worth of Premier League appearances under his belt when Hansen made his quip in the summer of 1995, put on his big boy pants and eventually won six titles and the Champions League with United. Which makes him well placed to know what it takes and how hard the job is, even as part of a functional football club.

Which is what United were then. But still, Butt “got so much crap when I played at Man Utd”. Luckily, he had Sir Alex Ferguson and the shield of silverware to take cover behind.

Let’s talk about that “crap”, shall we? Where was it coming from?

There certainly wasn’t an ex-United punditerati gleefully talking down the Red Devils of the day. Did Denis Law or Paddy Crerand belittle the lads trying to walk in their boots? The polar opposite was true.

Sure, flak flew from Fleet Street. But Butt, Scholes and team-mates could simply avoid whatever was being written by simply not picking up a newspaper. Not that players of that era ever did because then they would have missed their rating out of 10 and that wasn’t the done thing, no matter how hard many might insist they didn’t read them.

The internet was barely A Thing in 1995 when Hansen sent Butt spiralling. And he left Old Trafford in 2004 long before social media became the wall-to-wall, 24-hour scourge it now is for modern players.

Of course, United are all too willing to capitalise on the exposure offered by the intensified spotlight. They sell themselves to players by offering a level of profile impossible to achieve anywhere but a handful of other clubs.

But then United put these stars on the biggest of stages and set them up to fail, usually by failing to operate as a football club serious in achieving its stated aims.

The players often don’t help themselves and, sure, some have been given such a platform only because of the falling standards at Old Trafford. It is understandable why that so irks the likes of Butt and Scholes. But these lads were fortunate in the extreme to play for the greatest manager ever to do it.

Ferguson, with whom Butt and Scholes sat when United hosted Brighton in the FA Cup, banned journalists and went to war with pundits for far, far less than the level of disdain shown towards Martinez.

Ferguson’s relentlessness and the intrinsic pressure he stirred made United the hardest club to play for during his reign. Now, his former players are making it even harder from the outside.

Fergie would not have stood for it, and nor should the new manager.