William Saliba among five Premier League frauds unveiled during international break

Will Ford
Premier LEague frauds Haaland, Saliba and Rodri.
Premier LEague frauds Haaland, Saliba and Rodri.

We thought these five Premier League players were pretty bloody good at football. Boy, do we have egg on our faces now.

On the basis of one game of pretty meaningless international football, through social media clips, cropped headlines, doctored stats and off days, their fraudulence has been uncovered.

These guys are *actually* terrible, but have worked out how to hide their deficiencies through 95% of the season, with their true selves uncovered when they’re not playing in The Best League In The World. They’re a devious bunch.

 

William Saliba
You can just imagine the rival fan excitement at hearing Arsenal’s centre-back poster boy was playing in defence for France’s 3-1 defeat to Italy. Cue desperate attempts to find evidence of his failings, and short of finding that evidence, just select any of the goals against and insist it was all his fault, because you can be damn sure there will be enough people with unreasonable hatred of William Saliba to back you up.

You don’t need us to explain what you’re seeing but we will anyway. Saliba is marking striker Mateo Retegui while pretty much every other France player fails to do their job, whether that’s ignoring runners, failing to prevent the pass or quite simply, watching. He could have stepped up to try and play Retegui offside, but it would have made no difference to the outcome as it was Giacomo Raspadori who scored, running unchallenged from deep. That goal is not Saliba’s fault.

We love the caption too, from a Spurs fan clearly fully signed up to the Ange Postecoglou ‘it’s just who we are mate’ method of not really playing with any centre-backs and scoring 15 fewer goals last season than Arsenal and their bus-parking ways.

 

Erling Haaland
Like pretty much every other outlet glued to the Tv2 coverage of Norway’s draw with Kazakhstan, we cropped the words of former national boss turned pundit Egil Olsen to form the headline of our story on his criticism of Erling Haaland’s 2/10 display. Quite simply, “it’s one of the worst things I’ve seen from Haaland” is nowhere near as funny as “it’s one of the worst things I’ve seen”.

The worst thing Haaland’s done probably isn’t that bad; he’s got 31 goals in 33 games for his country. But the mind boggles at the worst thing Olsen has seen. On a football pitch or life in general? We know he managed Wimbledon to a 3-0 defeat to Bradford in April 2000.

 

Rodri
One bad game for Spain and that’s the Ballon d’Or down the drain. Sorry mate.

Except it wasn’t a bad game. All other posts on Rodri point to his near-faultless display for an hour on his return for Spain, who spanked Switzerland 4-1, with the fans chanting “Rodri Balon de Oro” as he came off. We’ll never get it, but people really care about the Ballon d’Or; Noodle Vini is among them.

We suspect he may have an agenda given his username, name and avatar, but his genius plan to pull the wool over our eyes was uncovered within seconds of his post.

The first comment revealed he had changed Rodri’s rating from a 7.0, which is weird enough before you ask yourself why – if he’s going to make an alteration – he would only reduce his score by 0.2?

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Andy Robertson
Moved level with Paul McStay as the fifth most-capped Scotland Men’s player of all-time by winning his 76th as Cristiano Ronaldo scored another goal that doesn’t count in Portugal’s 2-1 win, but there is a healthy portion of Scotland fans hoping it may be among the Liverpool star’s last, with social media tributes including ‘he’s pish for Scotland’, ‘wtf does he do?’ and our favourite…

 

Matthijs de Ligt
Different from the others in that he may yet turn out to be a big ol’ flop in the Premier League, and Manchester United fans certainly won’t have been encouraged by their £38m summer signing’s performance against Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I don’t really know what happened.. I should have cleared the ball but I kept having doubts during the play. It’s just f****d.” Yikes.

There were predictable musings on social media about him being The Next Harry Maguire, and while we would suggest on current form De Ligt may well take that as a compliment, it certainly wasn’t meant that way and you’ve got to wonder whether Manchester United is a good place right now for a footballer so clearly lacking in confidence.

 

F365 Features William Saliba

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