Paul Scholes should ‘f**king grow up’ as shock four-man Manchester United midfielder shortlist ‘revealed’ | OneFootball

Paul Scholes will be neither apologising nor shutting up about Lisandro Martinez, while Manchester United have ‘revealed’ a four-man midfielder shortlist.

It is almost impossible to perceive the names Manchester United will be targeting in their summer midfield overhaul.

But we start with the story that just will not die despite one side keeping their counsel.

Own Scholes

Big fan of Paul Scholes discussing his ongoing and almost entirely one-sided feud with Lisandro Martinez on The Overlap and admitting that “what we said probably wasn’t great”, “the way we described it probably wasn’t great and we probably shouldn’t have done that”, and “I can see why he was offended by it and we probably worded it not in a great way”.

But also at the same time saying he’s not going to apologise, and again emphasising the “mismatch” between Martinez and Haaland (who has now only scored in one of his six games against Martinez).

A couple of points:

2) Is anyone going to tell Scholes or Butt to stop talking about it, or is that advice preserved only for the footballer who responded to one journalist’s question and has remained silent since on both social media and the world’s many billion podcasts?

Still laughing at ‘what we said was a bit sh*t but I’m not saying sorry’.

Short and sweet

Casemiro never did decide to leave the football before the football left him, but has chosen to leave Manchester United when his contract expires in the summer.

Attention thus turns to who will replace him under interim manager Quinton Fortune next season. And so we come to this prominent headline:

It turns out that Manchester United quite like Elliot Anderson, Adam Wharton, Carlos Baleba and Alex Scott. We must thank Samuel Luckhurst of The Sun for having ‘revealed’ that on January 23.

Although this is an interesting excerpt from a Luckhurst exclusive published on January 13:

As is this, from a Luckhurst exclusive on December 22:

There is a man who knows how to recycle. At least it’s his own stuff, but sticking a ‘revealed’ tag on something he himself first reported more than a month prior and presenting it as new information seems questionable.

We will, of course, have our cake and eat it.

Case closed

Luckhurst, by the way, has also written one of the great ‘if anything, the headline has hit that too well and there’s no point actually reading the article’ opinion pieces of our time:

Yep. No notes.

When push comes to shove

Unai Emery is a strange, eccentric bloke.

Those familiar with his stylings will have laughed to themselves at the sight of him shoving an entirely unbothered Youri Tielemans during Aston Villa’s win over Fenerbahce, in the same way his furious rant at a mildly bemused Lucas Digne on the bench that one time prompted only knowing chuckles at Unai Emery doing Unai Emery things.

You would assume Joleon Lescott would know better, but his take on TNT Sports that “if it was the other way around and the player refused to shake his manager’s hand, there would be uproar, and his mentality and professionalism would be questioned”, seems a bit weird.

If something else happened, the reaction would not be the same. Yes. That is a true thing to have said, Joleon. You are correct. But the professional dynamic is ever so slightly different and whatever problems there were to address – it cannot be stressed enough just how completely unperturbed Tielemans was by Emery’s actions because he is presumably used to this kind of thing – were sorted in the dressing room by all accounts.

But sod it, Jay Bothroyd has gone on Sky Sports News to say “that incident has overshadowed the game” and “if a player reacted that way to a manager, it would be a big, big deal, it would be a big problem”.

Again, yes. If Tielemans had responded by curling one out on the Fenerbahce pitch then it would be a big problem and there would be uproar. It would certainly have overshadowed the game in a way Emery’s push absolutely did not.

It just seems a bit weird to pontificate over things that didn’t happen is all.

Norway, man

Some phenomenal nominative determinising from Jeremy Cross, who is nominally determined to pretend that Manchester City are the first club to ever offer refunds to travelling supporters after a substandard performance and result.

His argument in the Daily Mirror is that such a gesture ‘shows the height of disrespect to Bodo/Glimt’, as well as being ‘patronising’ and ‘nothing more than a public relations stunt aimed at salvaging something positive’.

He points out that Crystal Palace made no such offer to their fans after losing to Macclesfield, and nor did Liverpool after being beaten in the 1988 FA Cup final by Wimbledon.

Mediawatch is heartened to learn that a prominent football tabloid journalist’s first two examples of a surprising result are from three weeks and 37 years ago.

And we, too, can see precisely zero difference between travelling 4,000 or so miles at great expense in difficult midweek conditions, to a 400-mile round trip on a weekend, or going to watch a cup final in the same country.

They reimbursed the ticket prices of 374 fans. It isn’t that deep.