Youri Tielemans had just lost 2-0 to Atletico Madrid when he was handed a microphone and a question about his team-mate’s remarkable broadside at the club. The Belgian midfielder was not going near it.

“I’ve got no comment on that,” he told Amazon Prime.

Asked whether emotions were running high in the dressing room, he offered only: “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.”

Instead, Tielemans stuck to the match. Pablo Barrios opened the scoring inside the opening minute at the Riyadh Air Metropolitano Stadium on Tuesday evening, and United never recovered.

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“When you concede after a minute, it’s very hard to get into the game straight away,” Tielemans said.

“The only thing that’s going to make us come back into it is to get a few wins.”

Martinez took aim at Wilcox

Minutes earlier, Lisandro Martinez had used the same microphone to say precisely what he thought of Manchester United’s summer business, and the man he holds responsible for it.

“We expect more from the top, from upstairs, to bring in more players to compete,” Martinez said.

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“I expect more from our technical director. I have to be honest.”

The target was Jason Wilcox, hired to run recruitment and credited with signing Tielemans from Aston Villa for £35m in July. Martinez’s complaint was that the window had delivered too little against a backdrop where rival squads kept growing.

“You can’t stay with what you did last season,” he added.

“The teams know how you play, they know every detail. If you don’t change, next season is a big problem.”

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Rooney calls Martinez’s outburst a line crossed

On the Amazon Prime panel, Wayne Rooney said the outburst, however sincere, had crossed a line.

“I think he’s maybe gone a bit too far, and that should have stayed internal,” Rooney said.

“That interview is not going to help the situation that the club is in. It’s going to bring greater noise, the players are unhappy, they’re unsettled and don’t trust their own team-mates. It’s not going to help at all.”

Rooney conceded that parts of Martinez’s argument held up. He said the club needed to invest more “at the top end of the pitch and the defence”, but accused the defender of pursuing an agenda that did not match the performance he had just watched.

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Carrick stays silent on Martinez

Michael Carrick, confirmed in the Manchester United job in May, told reporters he had not watched Martinez’s interview and would not comment on it until he had. The defeat extended his winless run.

Manchester United travel to Leeds in the Premier League next.

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