Paul Scholes and Gary Neville rarely need a nudge to criticise Manchester United, but on Sunday night they landed on the same target: the squad’s lap of honour after a 4-4 draw with Aston Villa. Where they part company is on who is ultimately to blame for the mess behind it.
United came from two goals down twice at Old Trafford and rescued a point through Joshua Zirkzee and Patrick Dorgu in injury time. They still go into the international break in 18th place, and the players walked around the pitch afterwards while supporters chanted Michael Carrick’s name.
Scholes: “It’s embarrassing”
Scholes, speaking on The Good, The Bad and The Football, wanted the ritual stopped. He called the laps “embarrassing” and said they belong “after the last game of the season”. He was clear that his target was not only Carrick, saying the criticism applied to the team as well, and he added that he felt sorry for the players.
His point is about timing and honesty. A lap of applause tells a stadium that something has been achieved. A club in the bottom three, eight league games without a win, has not earned that moment yet, and Scholes does not want the players to pretend otherwise.
Neville: “painful to watch”
Neville reached the same conclusion on NBC Sports, but with more sympathy for the players. He said he had played for United 602 times and always appreciated the fans at the end of a game, yet the habit of walking round after defeats by Bournemouth and a 4-4 draw at home to Villa was “almost painful to watch”. In his words, they are “almost causing themselves emotional damage”.
That is a softer reading than Scholes’s. Neville sees a group of players who are hurting and reaching for the only comfort available, rather than a squad going through the motions. His verdict on the ritual, though, is just as blunt: “This just can’t go on, can it?”
Where they split: who owns the problem
Neville then widened the lens. He argued that changing the head coach is not an answer and that eight managers in 12 years proves it. “Michael could leave, Michael might stay, we don’t know. The ownership don’t have a clue what to do,” he said. For Neville, recruitment, the performance department and leadership “right through the spine of the football club” are what have failed.
Scholes, at least in the remarks reported, kept his focus on what happens on the pitch and after the whistle. The distinction matters for Carrick. If Scholes is right that the culture inside the dressing room needs to change, the head coach is a legitimate part of that conversation. If Neville is right, another change at the top of the technical area would simply repeat the cycle. We looked at that argument in Neville’s earlier warning that sacking Carrick will not fix United.
What it means for Carrick
Carrick was combative after the match. Asked whether he might walk away, he said it was “not going to happen”, and in his press conference he said there was “more than enough” in the squad to turn the season around. Both pundits have now given him something to answer: Scholes on the standards the players are setting, Neville on whether the people above him are doing their jobs.
Roy Keane also weighed in on Sky Sports that evening, with a more pointed critique of the players’ words and the defending. Between the three of them, there is little agreement except that the current picture is not good enough.
The debate, then, is less about whether United are in trouble and more about where the fault lies: in the dressing room, in the dugout or in the boardroom. The next fortnight, with no match to hide behind, will probably settle the question of the dugout. It will not settle the other two.
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