Paul Scholes has reached out to Manchester United interim manager Michael Carrick to apologise after a social media post prompted criticism. The former midfielder said he had not intended to upset Carrick and moved to resolve the matter directly.<\/p>\n
It was a sharp intervention from Scholes that drew reaction from supporters and former players. Patrice Evra accused Scholes of courting controversy to attract attention and also targeted comments from Gary Neville and Roy Keane that were similarly critical of Carrick.<\/p>\n
\u201cMichael is one of the nicest people you will ever meet in football,\u201d Scholes said on The Good, The Bad & The Football in response to the criticism. \u201cHe\u2019d be the last person I would want to offend.<\/p>\n
\u201cI messaged Michael anyway. I went straight to Michael and said, \u2018Look, I never intended to upset you.\u2019 And I don\u2019t think I needed to say that anyway, and he told me himself he wasn\u2019t upset by it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people have just took it differently from what was meant. The only thing I was saying was that I don\u2019t think they played that well the last four games, and he\u2019s still managing to get results.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scholes and Carrick have a long playing history together. Scholes sits 12th on the list of Carrick\u2019s most frequent teammates, having shared the pitch with him 160 times for a total of 9,900 minutes before Scholes retired in 2013. Five years later, after his own retirement, Carrick gleefully named Scholes as the best player he ever played with. \u201cI always say Scholesy because he was right next to me and, as a partnership, he was fantastic to play with,\u201d Carrick told The Mirror. \u201cWe had some incredible players, amazing, but I always go back to Scholesy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Their relationship was tested when Carrick took interim charge in 2021 following Ole Gunnar Solskj\u00e6r\u2019s departure. Scholes accused Carrick of disloyalty for stepping into the role and said on BT Sport: \u201cI get the impression with Ole that he put a lot of trust into Michael,\u201d Scholes said live on BT Sport. \u201cHe put a lot of trust into Kieran [McKenna]. He put a lot of trust into Mike Phelan. Which is why they shouldn\u2019t be at the club now, I don\u2019t think.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got big friends. Michael\u2019s a good friend, Darren Fletcher, I\u2019ve worked with Mike Phelan, I\u2019ve worked with these people. I just think if I was in their position now, I\u2019d be feeling guilty working at this football club still, while Ole put so much trust in them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scholes went on to challenge Carrick for a perceived lack of \u201cresponsibility\u201d for the form which saw Solskj\u00e6r sacked, insisting he played a significant role as an assistant and should not have been protected from criticism. Carrick offered a diplomatic response and said he had quickly sought advice from Solskj\u00e6r after being offered the interim job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Scholes apologised to Carrick after his social post drew criticism; he said he did not mean offence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8085,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,172],"tags":[1505,1162],"class_list":["post-8086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-manchester-united","category-epl","tag-accountability","tag-analytics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}