Manchester United Treble winner Andrew Cole has hit out at the critics of Paul Pogba after France's Euros elimination.
The pre-tournament favourites crashed out on penalties to Switzerland despite Pogba scoring a superb goal in normal time.
"I thought he was brilliant," said Cole. "He proved to everyone just how good a player he is. Yeah, you're still going to have people question him. A lot of people try to blame him for the third goal but I can't get my head around that. If you lose the ball in their half, trying to create something, and then they run basically half a pitch to score a goal, that means his team-mates didn't help him particularly well. If you're going to blame him for that goal... It is what it is, but he proved just how good a player he is.
“Watching Pogba – oh my days," he enthused. “If a midfield player of that calibre is going to take risks, you have to take risks. He's got people like Kante and believes the back four are going to do things whereby he can make certain decisions in the midfield. For 45 minutes yesterday, I watched him and felt this is a top, top drawer midfield player.
"You can talk about he gave the ball away, but we all give the ball away. Mbappe missed a great chance when he should have gone inside on his right foot – has anyone mentioned that? It's a Paul Pogba thing, I think. It was definitely a brilliant penalty too – he did everything well last night.
"I think he'll be bitterly disappointed. Like you said, with the performance he put in as well, I thought he was brilliant. I listened to some of the comments and people were trying to [laughs]… I genuinely believed football was a team game. I genuinely did believe there were 11 players out there. I listen to everyone and the only player who was to blame yesterday was Paul Pogba. I thought he was brilliant: his passing throughout the tournament was absolutely immense; his creativity, his goal yesterday was top, top drawer.
“We can all sit here and pick up on people's negatives and what they didn't do. Let's talk about his positives and what he did do. France have gone out, yeah, and were the better team. But, when it goes to penalties, it's a lottery and they weren't good enough on penalties."
When asked if some people will never change their opinion on the World Cup winner, regardless of how he performs on the pitch, Cole agreed, telling manutd.com: “100 per cent, 100 per cent. What I never understood is when people talk about when he was at Juventus, he did this and now he's at Manchester United, he doesn't do that. If you look at the two teams, it's two sets of players that are totally different.
"I think Paul is trying extremely hard to do as much as he can, but when he is trying to do that is when he needs other people to step up as well. To be brutally honest, everyone prefers him in the Manchester United team rather than not in it. That tells you everything about what people say. Split or divided? Whatever. Everyone says: 'Yeah, we need him in the team' and when he doesn't play particularly well, it's not good enough. It's six and two threes."
