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13th November 2021
01:44pm GMT
"[Maguire] puts his hands up to his ears. He's like 'shutting the critics up'. I think it's embarrassing. He's been a disgrace the last few months for Man Utd. He thinks if he scores there, he's going to shut his critics up. Embarrassing."
But Maguire has since come out and defended the celebration and claimed that his gesture wasn't aimed towards anybody.
Speaking on Sky Sports News, he said: "It was a great ball from Reece. We'd worked on it, we knew the areas we could exploit and credit to all the staff for doing that.
"I managed to direct the header into the far post and I think when you play these games, the first goal is crucial and it comes quite a lot from set-plays. We knew we'd get a lot of set-plays and we had to be clinical with them. "The celebration was a knee slide, it just came naturally to me. It's an amazing feeling to score for my country. "It wasn't directed at anyone, it just came naturally to do that and open the scoring for England and get the important three points."England boss Gareth Southgate also played down the celebration, taking a more light-hearted approach by questioning whether Maguire was inspired by famous wrestler, Hulk Hogan. He said:
"Is he a Hulk Hogan fan? I don't know what the celebration was for. He's a fabulous player, two months ago he was in the Euros team of the tournament. "He's rushed back because he's the sort of player who has a huge conscience to help his club. You get lots of players who hide in the treatment room when pressure is on. He hasn't done that and I have massive respect for that but you can go into matches not fully fit and you're judged as fully fit in those moments.""I've had a good chat with him this week," Southgate added, "reminded him how important he is for us, he's been able to switch focus and have a few days on the training pitch which has probably helped, and his performance was very good." Related links:
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