Paul Scholes was angered by Christian Eriksen’s ‘upbeat’ post-match interview after Manchester United’s loss to Sevilla in the Europa League quarter-final on Thursday evening. The ex-United midfielder-turned-pundit said he had ‘no idea why’ Eriksen appeared so cheery after being dumped out of the competition against a side currently ranked 13th in LaLiga.
Yet Scholes was left bemused by the Dane’s positive demeanour after what was widely considered a poor performance from United. Speaking to BT Sport after the loss in Spain, Eriksen said: ‘We lost a bit of our coolness, we made more mistakes than we do usually and the whole team could not catch up with mistakes our team-mates made.
Eriksen described United’s performance as ‘a bad day’ and claimed he was looking forward to atoning for the team’s errors when they travel to Wembley to face Brighton in the FA Cup semi-final on Sunday.
‘If you give away goals like we did, you lose,’ he continued. ‘It’s nothing to do with the atmosphere. Our own game was not strong enough. ‘It’s football, sometimes you have good days, sometimes you have bad days and it was a bad day. Luckily we have a game in four days.’
‘The mentality has to change, we know it will be a completely different opponent and different style so from tomorrow we will be focusing on Brighton.’ After cutting back to the pundits in the studio, Scholes immediately noted: ‘He looks quite upbeat there, Christian [Eriksen]. I have no idea why.’
‘Every football player makes mistakes, they punished us straight away. It’s how we bounce back and today we were not strong enough to bounce back from the mistakes. United had led the tie by two goals until the 81st minute of the first leg, before being pegged back twice following a late spell of pressure from Sevilla at Old Trafford.
A series of costly errors in the return leg led to United shipping three goals at the Ramon Sanchez-Pizjuan Stadium and flew home with a 5-2 loss on aggregate. Erik ten Hag and his team will travel to London to face Brighton in the FA Cup semi-final at Wembley on Sunday afternoon.
