Man Utd rocked with Dalot and Onana set for training ground clash after teammate is praised

There could be an imminent battle between Diogo Dalot and Andre Onana in Man Utd training after the former disgracefully praised an international teammate.

Flagging order

Mediawatch wakes up every day praying that the England flag stuff was all just a terribly boring dream which can be happily ignored for the sake of everyone’s mental health. But if there is a dead nationalistic horse to flog you can bet The Sun and Nick Parker are more than willing to oblige.

GRAN Lynne Bellinger came up with a super sub when hubby John asked her to “sort” England’s “woke” collar motif.

She ironed a small St George’s flag over it. This is news. Actual news. In an actual newspaper.

England and West Ham nut John Bellinger, 61, bought the shirt for Saturday’s friendly against Brazil at Wembley.

‘Nut’ indeed.

Lynne, 61, used a high-tech “Cricut” machine to make a miniature replacement iron-on flag which covered up the unloved emblem hours before the game.

JUST HOURS before?

And the home-made version wowed fans who pledged to follow the lad’s lead if they fork out a fortune on the new Euro 2024 shirt.

It ‘wowed’ them?! It’s a small rectangle on a shirt collar. And it ‘wowed’ them. This is deeply unhinged stuff. And we haven’t even got to the quotes from the ‘England and West Ham nut’ John yet. Quotes we will now present without comment:

“It only cost about £1 and she ironed it on top of the badge on the back of the collar to cover up that awful woke design.

“Bobby is named after England’s 1966 captain Bobby Moore – a West Ham legend who would have hated the new shirt.

“And our Bobby was so proud of the badge he kept taking his jacket off at the game to show it off, even though it was freezing cold.”

His parents will presumably accept hypothermia as an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of the war against ‘woke’ pieces of fabric.

Costa living crisis

Moving as far away as possible from such utterly deranged nonsense, it is actually something of a relief to see some good old bad-faith journalism rather than simply offensive, dog-whistle fare.

And there is no better proponent of the former than the Daily Mirror website, who bring us this:

Diogo Dalot risks Andre Onana’s wrath by rating Man Utd alternative as a better goalkeeper

What has Dalot said to potentially prompt ‘extreme anger’ from Onana? The Man Utd keeper has ‘lost his rag’ with a teammate before but this sounds even more serious.

Well Dalot reckons Diogo Costa “has that ability and for me he will be the best goalkeeper in the world soon”. His Portugal teammate, Diogo Costa. His actual friend, Diogo Costa. And he was speaking in his capacity as a Portugal player on international duty, about Diogo Costa.

Unless Onana is a child he probably won’t be too perturbed.

But try telling the Metro, who run with the same quotes and write of Onana that ‘it appears some of his Man Utd teammates still need convincing’.

Dalot answers a question clearly specifically about Costa by saying that Costa is quite good, which obviously means he thinks Onana is bad. That is definitely how it works.

Also, Dalot has played around 100 career games with Costa from the Portugal and Porto youth teams upwards, while he has been Onana’s teammate for a single Man Utd season. That feels pertinent.

Not to the MailOnline, who believe Dalot has ‘snubbed’ Onana by talking about a different player when asked a question about that particular player.

It is dreadful, awful and wilfully misleading, yet infinitely better than ‘woke’ England flag chat.

Hot Cross bunsThere is an incredible juxtaposition to be found on the Twitter timeline of Daily Star chief sports writer Jeremy Cross, who spent a small amount of his Monday evening indulging in the favourite pastime of football tabloid journalists: impotently raging against the unfairness of the SJA awards.

‘Outdated. Prejudiced. Judges out of touch. Anti-tabloids. Shameful the way they exclude a huge part of the industry. Disrespectful,’ he wrote after retweeting a similar message from Neil Custis a month prior. Neither seem to realise that almost all Sports Journalism Association award categories require entered submissions to be considered for their category shortlists. And presumably both Cross and Custis – and their many supporters – were too busy being furious to enter submissions of their work for consideration.

But just below those two posts on the Cross timeline was a retweet of his most recent column, in which he calls Mikel Arteta ‘the perfect fit’ for the Liverpool job, because he is passionate like Jurgen Klopp and a former Spanish midfielder like Xabi Alonso. Oh, and ‘when it comes to history, tradition, expectation and success, Liverpool are twice the size of Arsenal’.

He also scoffs at the importance of Michael Edwards in Liverpool’s recent success, because lessons can never be learned on either that or the SJA front by our tabloid friends.

Either way, it was just funny to see Cross trying to uphold the noble art of journalism and lament how his is among the sort of work routinely overlooked and disregarded, so painfully soon after saying with no hint of sarcasm that Liverpool should ‘prize Arteta out of north London’.

Congratulations to Adam Crafton for claiming the big prise on Monday evening, by the way. And to whoever remembered to submit their work to be shortlisted instead of crying about it.

Ring my Bell

‘Why Jude Bellingham is streets ahead of a young Wayne Rooney’ is an eye-catching headline to see in the Daily Mail, not least because it is about 427 words too short and lacks any capitalisation. Also because it just sounds like a really stupid premise for an article but let’s give Oliver Holt the benefit of the doubt and take a look.

The first sign that he might have been stitched up a little is that the first mention of Rooney comes 15 paragraphs in. That is also literally the only time he is referenced by name. That isn’t good.

The crux of what Holt is trying to say is essentially that while Rooney had something of a reputation for reacting under provocation, Bellingham ‘appears too smart to get sucked into that kind of trap’.

The bloke was booked against Brazil for a foul of his own and has recently served a two-game suspension for a red card but yes, he is unrufflable for a reason not yet made clear.

He knows – and Southgate knows – that the opposition will try to unsettle him during the Euros. He will be ready for that.

Didn’t seem too ready for it against Brazil. Certainly not enough to pretend he is ‘streets ahead of a young Wayne Rooney’ in the temperament department. Which is no bad thing – both were and are incredible footballers at that age – it’s just weird to denigrate one of them while pretending the other has no such flaws.