The last time Manchester United were top of the table, past the mid-point of the season, they won the Premier League title in 2013. Following another come from behind win on the road, this time at Fulham FC, midfielder Paul Pogba spoke to the club website and encouraged his team to be “arrogant” and keep up the effort.
Pogba is a huge reason why United are title contending, for the first time in eight years. We’ve seen a big change in attitude, and it’s for the better. He’s realized that he’s better off not being a diva, and he’s benefited from having more star players around him now at Old Trafford. He doesn’t have to be the main focus, or the best player on the team right now, and we’re starting to see him look more like the player he was at Juventus.
He’s been a hero in many of the recent wins, but he’s got plenty of teammates that can also step up and be the go to guy. United are only in first place by two points, and the team closest to them, their intracity neighbors, have a game in hand on them. They haven’t suffered a league defeat on the road since last February, but they need to keep on getting results.
“It’s never enough. We are still far from the trophy,” Pogba said.
“It’s been hard to get here, it’s going to be even harder to stay there. Be arrogant in the way that ‘yes, we are proud to be there and we want to stay there’, but we have done nothing yet so we need to keep working,” Pogba said.
“We are happy with what’s happening but we want this to carry on. We want this more and more. If we think ‘we won and we have arrived’, this is when we are going to drop.”
The Frenchman is playing much better now as he’s currently happier at the club than he was before. Now it’s just a matter of whether he wants to stay or not, and if he can get his agent to stop running his mouth and creating distractions.
Pogba and United will next take on arch-rival Liverpool, for the second time in a week, at Old Trafford on Sunday, in the fourth round of the FA Cup competition.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank, partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated, Chicago Tribune and SB Nation. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.