Sour-pussed Paul Pogba has ssen it fit to deliver some final partings shots at Man Utd but it’s quite likely to fall flat on his face in his desire to prove the club were wrong in letting him go.
Paul Pogba will be checking into his new environment in Turin ahead of the new season loaded up with plenty of motivation to make his second coming at Juventus a success, which, again, looks like a déjà vu as that was what he had vowed he would do when he returned to United after deserting them for Juventus the first time around.
The French midfielder with the yo-yo proclivity looks certain to return to the Serie A giants in a career path that will confuse most football observers for a long time more to come. The self-serving player has now gone from Manchester United to Juventus to Manchester United and, soon, back again to good old Juventus.
Juve – again reluctantly licking their wounds after a second successive season without a Scudetto – would be these days a far cry from Pogba’s last spell at the club during a run of nine successive league titles. Now there have been only successive fourth-place finishes since then with the club desperate to reclaim a title that has landed on Milan turf for the second year successively.
Pogba is naturally anxious to start stacking up his medal haul once again as in five disappointing years at Old Trafford he won only a Europa League and a League Cup. But now his new agenda is to thrive for his new, former club to prove that his old former club, United, were wrong to let him go. It seems the shoe is on the wrong foot as he has possibly forgotten that he was the one who had initiated the self-serving indulgence to leave three years ago.
“My thought process is to show Manchester that they made a mistake in waiting to give me a contract,” Pogba says in The Pogmentary, released on Amazon today.
“And to show other clubs that Manchester had made a mistake in not offering me a contract.”
There is obviously loads of crap and plenty of fluff in Pogba’s indulgent film with his attempts to rewrite his own history with United the main priority. His only public comment on his future in the past three years that gave any hint to his intentions was his statement that he wanted a “new challenge” in the summer of 2019. Now he’s trying to paint his departure as something United could have avoided.
Pertinently, there were relevant questions that Pogba could have answered as in what position did he think was his best for United? Why did he play by contrast play so much better and look so much more invested with France? And, yes, what did he think of Mino Raiola’s constant, pugnacious attempts to undermine the club and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer?
Rafaela Pimenta describes it in the film that these are questions we’ll probably never get the answer to because it doesn’t justify the Pogba “brand”.
Next season will be instrumental in showing the football world whether Pogba’s word will hold good that he will show United they “made a mistake”. As it is, given he’s featured in less than 55 per cent of the club’s Premier League games in the last three years, it would be sufficient for the Pogba brand that simply being available would be a promising start.
Rather than proving United were wrong, the situation is more likely to prove them right. Nobody is shedding a tear for Pogba’s departure because in six years he hasn’t done enough to make himself missed. Every United fan would rather have Frankie De Jong than a bloated Paul Pogba in their midfield.