The mood around Manchester United has started to shift a bit after a recent run of positive performances and results and one player has now managed to reel in the famously critical Paul Scholes.
Man Utd head into the international break on the back of two consecutive victories and more importantly, four genuinely good performances, counting the draws against Arsenal and away at Sociedad.
Players have stepped up and made themselves counted as they become used to Ruben Amorim’s system and its demands from them.
One of those players have gone slightly under the radar but he’d be feeling the most vindicated now because he caught the brunt of fire, with Paul Scholes at the head of that queue.
Paul Scholes comes around on Matthijs de Ligt
Many of United’s summer signings have come under fire and, at times, rightly so, because the team is on course to finish its worst-ever Premier League season.
However, there have been mitigating circumstances and each player signed in the summer has shown enough glimpses to prove they have a future at the club.
Now that the results are also turning around, there’s no need to put forward the mitigating circumstances to soften the criticism, or at least give it context.
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Speaking on The Overlap, Paul Scholes gave Matthijs de Ligt his flowers, something that is quite big because Scholes has been brutal on De Ligt previously.
From calling him not good enough to be a part of a league-winning team to comparing him to Harry Maguire, he made no effort to hide his opinion of the Dutchman.
However, after De Ligt’s recent run of form, he’s come around on him but as ever with Scholes, it came with a caveat.
He said: “I think he’s been a lot better, yeah. He’s done a lot better, of course, he has. I just… Man Utd are 13th. Last few weeks, we’ve looked better.”
It is debatable how much of that 13th position is down to De Ligt but to get even conditional praise from someone like Scholes feels like an occasion at this point!
Matthijs de Ligt criticism was always over-the-top
Scholes might have begrudgingly given De Ligt his flowers but the narrative around his criticism had always been over the top and misinformed.
From questioning why Bayern Munich and Juventus “let him go”, to saying he peaked early amid comparisons to Harry Maguire, there was a strong English bias to the narrative.
For starters, neither Juventus of Bayern “let him go”, one only needs to look at the fans’ sentiment from the time he left either of those clubs to get a true picture of how he was viewed at those clubs.
Secondly, while Maguire is a good player in his own regard, the pedigree of De Ligt isn’t anywhere close to comparable not just with Maguire, but any United teammate bar Casemiro.
A player of that quality would have always come to the fore, even if it did take longer than expected due to being dropped into a chaotic side and a changing system.
He’s good enough and remains a coup by United.