After the 5-1 rout at Cardiff City today, Manchester United midfielder Paul Pogba expressed his gratitude to his now former manager Jose Mourinho. While Pogba and Mourinho had a notoriously rocky relationship, resulting in the Frenchman seeing the bench with regularity lately, United’s most expensive player in history had nothing but positivity for his former boss.
Pogba made the starting XI today, and he responded by nothing three assists, helping the Red Devils to a laugher of a runaway rout in caretaker manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s debut. Shortly after Mourinho was sacked, a very poorly timed sponsored post showed up on Pogba’s social media accounts. The timing brought some heat on Pogba, as most observers misinterpreted the intent of the content.
Pogba made his true feelings felt in the mixed zone today.
“I know you’re waiting for something about Jose, about the result today. Obviously, we are very happy with the result,” Pogba said to a group of reporters at Cardiff City.”
“We played well, the performance of the team was great and I know you want to ask me but, ‘Oh yeah with Jose.’ With Jose, we won trophies and I want to thank him for that. Not everything worked well but things went well, we won trophies.”
“Winning trophies makes you improve as a person as well and that’s it. That’s the past. I want to thank him for that. I’m sure all the players are now looking to the next game, the points, and we have to go back into and we want to go back to the top of the league.”
“That’s all I want to say. The performance of the team was great. We are happy the first game with the manager starts like this and the important thing now is to carry on like that. We cannot play like this and score five goals and then lose. That’s it.”
Pogba is definitely saying all the right things here, but in terms of “trophies,”…well, they did only won two- the Europa League and EFL Cup in 2016. It’s a nice thing to say, but not all that accurate.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, regularly appears as a guest pundit on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
He also contributes sociopolitical essays to Chicago Now. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. The content of his cat’s Instagram account is unquestionably superior to his.