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Getting things very wrong is part of the territory when it comes to punditry

7 Gary Neville opinions that have aged like milk: Messi, Ronaldo, Liverpool & Man Utd’s midfields…

Nestor Watach •

Being a Sky Sports pundit is all about sticking your neck out and giving opinions and predictions.

It’s the name of the game that invariably some of those opinions will age terribly. Just ask Gary Neville, who has been made to look pretty daft on more than one occasion during his time on television.

We’ve revisited seven times that Neville got things badly wrong.

Arsenal

Do you remember when Harry Kane first broke onto the scene and his critics spent about five years insisting he was a one-season wonder before accepting he was actually the real deal?

Well, Neville’s been a bit like that when it comes to Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal. To be fair, he now describes the Gunners as a “powerhouse” and accepts they’re Manchester City’s closest challengers in the Premier League. But he took his time to get there.

“My concern is if Arsenal finish fourth this season – which to be fair, I think is 50/50, I still think there’s a long way to go in that race – but if they finish fourth, that’s in some ways as good as it gets,” Neville said, speaking on Sky Sports in March 2022.

“You’ve got Pep [Guardiola], [Jurgen] Klopp, Man United, Chelsea, where can Arsenal go? They’re not going to compete.

“Mikel Arteta is a brilliant coach, I love that we’re seeing a team that he’s getting the maximum out of, I can see exactly how he wants to play, we all can. But he gets to fourth [and] if he was really hard about it, he’d probably say ‘right, that’s the best I can do there, I’m going now and getting my next job’.”

Arsenal may not have won anything in the past couple of years, but their 84 and 89-point tallies as they finished runners-up in back-to-back seasons have demonstrated that Arsenal’s ceiling under Arteta is already miles higher than Neville ever thought it could be.

Cristiano Ronaldo

“Absolutely it brings them closer to winning the title, it will absolutely get them closer,” said Neville, speaking back in August 2021 following Ronaldo’s return to the club.

“But do I think it will win them the title at this point? No I don’t. But now I’m more excited about Manchester United challenging for the title than I was maybe five or six days ago. I don’t think they will. I want them to.

“Cristiano Ronaldo and Raphael Varane will have the mentality to win United the title, there’s no doubt, but if I had to put my house on it now, do I think they’ll win the title this season? No. But I’m desperate for them to win the title. I’m just being pragmatic.”

While Neville stopped short of backing the Red Devils to win the league, even putting the club in the same sentence as the title soon looked incredibly fanciful.

It’s all too easy to forget now that Manchester United finished in second place the season before Ronaldo came back to Old Trafford, kicking off the 2021-22 campaign in fine fettle with seven points from nine available prior to signing the Portugal icon.

The club went on to endure an absolutely disastrous season, ending up on their lowest points tally of the Premier League era, in sixth place and a whopping 35 points behind the champions City. They’d finished just 12 points behind the year before.

Lionel Messi

“You start to think: is this what Argentina are?” Neville stated, speaking as an ITV pundit at half-time of Argentina’s 2022 World Cup group stage match against Mexico. The score was goalless at the time, and Argentina had suffered a shock defeat to Saudi Arabia in their opener.

“They had a great run coming into the tournament, but you’ve watched them now for a game and a half and there doesn’t look like there’s anything there; there’s no pattern of play, there’s no rhythm in what they’re trying to do.

“Players aren’t fearful of Lionel Messi anymore.”

Forty-five minutes later and Messi had scored and assisted in a 2-0 win. “My mate @GNev2 is having as bad a tournament as Infantino!” tweeted Carragher after the final whistle, reminding Neville of his harsh words.

Messi went on to notch seven goals and three assists in Qatar as he inspired Argentina to World Cup glory, picking up the Golden Ball award for the tournament’s best player.

Graeme Souness

“I’ve never been more relaxed coming here in the last nine years as a Manchester United fan…” Neville told Souness, speaking on a live Instagram in March 2023.

The game? Liverpool 7-0 Manchester United.

Souness struck an altogether different tone, speaking on Sky Sports ahead of the match.

“What a perfect time to put a marker down, to shout all the Doubting Thomas’ up and damage United,” the ex-Liverpool midfielder said, accompanied by quizzical smirks from Neville and Roy Keane.

“It’s a long time since I’ve been this confident of a Liverpool win against United. I just feel they’re going to turn up today. I think they’ll be bang on it today.”

1-0 Souness.

Cole Palmer

“It’s just a little bit mad, isn’t it? ‘It’s chaotic,” Neville said, speaking on his Sky Sports podcast in September 2023 – just days after Palmer’s deadline day move from Manchester City.

‘The amount of players they have signed. I saw Palmer come on today who they bought for £40million from City and you think, ‘there’s another one’.”

In fairness, Chelsea’s recruitment strategy has been chaotic and worthy of criticism. And he wasn’t the only one questioning the Palmer fee, given he never made it beyond the fringes at Man City.

Still, it’s needless to say that Palmer has silenced Neville and every other doubter. He enjoyed an unbelievable debut season at an otherwise dysfunctional Chelsea, notching more goals and assists than any player in Europe’s five major leagues barring Kylian Mbappe and Harry Kane.

READ NEXT: 7 of Gary Neville’s most memorable punditry put-downs: PlayStation, bottle jobs…

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Liverpool & Man Utd’s midfields

“When you look at the actual players, let’s take United as an example; Fernandes, Mount, Casemiro, Eriksen. I think that Jurgen Klopp would swap his midfield now for United’s…” Neville told The Overlap, speaking alongside Jamie Carragher ahead of the 2023-24 campaign.

At the time, it wasn’t the wildest shout in the world. Manchester United had finished ahead of Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool the season prior and Casemiro had enjoyed a decent debut campaign at Old Trafford.

Meanwhile, the jury was still out on Liverpool’s midfield – with Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister, Ryan Gravenberch and Wataru Endo all newly recruited that summer.

Carragher continued to remind Neville of the shout as the season went on. Liverpool spent most of the campaign up there with Manchester City and Arsenal in the title race, with their new-look midfield generally faring pretty well.

While Klopp’s Reds fell away in the end, they still ended up a colossal 22 points better off than United, who succumbed to their lowest-ever Premier League finish of eighth, ending up with a negative goal difference for the first time in the modern era. All season their midfield had looked particularly open and dysfunctional, with an ageing Casemiro bearing the brunt of the criticism.

Liverpool & Man Utd’s midfields (again)

Despite the 22-point gap and very mixed midfield fortunes last season, Neville doubled down on his shout ahead of the 2024-25 campaign.

“I think Liverpool have got a better team than Manchester United. Liverpool have got far better forwards, that is the thing that they do have,” Neville said, giving his pre-season predictions on Monday Night Football – with United two places higher than Liverpool in the table.

“I think in midfield, if I look at Manchester United’s midfield players, if you add equal coaches – and we don’t know what Erik ten Hag and Arne Slot are going to match up like – I do think Liverpool, with [Wataru] Endo, [Dominik] Szoboszlai and [Alexis] Mac Allister, they’ve done unbelievably well to get the performance levels out of those three that they have with Jurgen Klopp.

“I really do question [whether] that midfield three is going to stand up throughout the season. If it does again, I’ll take my hat off to them, ‘well done, unbelievable, you’ve proven me wrong’. I think Manchester United have got more in midfield, more depth, good players in there…”

Neville may yet get the last laugh on that front. We’ll have to wait and see. It’s still very early days in the season, but on the evidence of United’s 3-0 home defeat to Liverpool it doesn’t look all that likely.

There was a great irony in it being Ryan Gravenberch that bossed the midfield battle, given Erik ten Hag’s propensity for assembling the rest of his old Ajax gang back together in Manchester.

Carragher took great delight in reminding his sparring partner of his shout from the Old Trafford commentary gantry. Neville’s stunned silence spoke volumes.

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