Graeme Souness has finally apologised to James Milner, 18 years after taking aim at the midfielder following his loan move from Newcastle to Aston Villa.
Souness had been in charge of the Magpies for a year when he opted to send Milner to the Midlands, having been reluctant to play him during his first season as boss. After sanctioning the loan, Souness defended himself to his critics.
But the comments he made appeared to be a slight on Milner, who has since gone on to have an excellent career. He has won three Premier League titles, two FA Cups and the Champions League across spells at Manchester City and Liverpool.
But that was a level of success that then-Newcastle boss Souness did not see coming. And the Scot has now finally issued an apology to the Reds star, who is set to leave Anfield at the end of the campaign.
“I was discussing leadership with Simon Jordan. James Milner was one of those I named as a leader I would want in my dressing room. At Newcastle, I knew him as a young boy," he wrote in his Daily Mail column.
"He has matured into a professional you can bet is a ten out of ten around the dressing room. He was upset with me many years ago at Newcastle when I said that ‘you won’t win the league with James Milners’ and he took that as me saying he wasn’t good enough.
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“I was trying to say that you needed men. He was only 19 at the time. I apologised to him for that and I hope he’s forgiven me. You can never have enough James Milners in the dressing room. He makes other players turn up.”
While it has taken Souness nearly two decades to publicly apologise to Milner for his comments, it appears the midfielder has already moved on. He was asked about the incident in an interview with FourFourTwo in 2018 and made it clear he holds no grudge.
“I think it was more like, ‘You don’t win anything with a team of James Milners’. Newcastle was tough – the manager who’d signed me, Bobby Robson, got sacked three games into the season, so a new manager arrived and I ended up going on loan again, to Aston Villa," he said.
“I think the first time I finished a season with the same manager who started it was Martin O’Neill at Villa, probably five seasons into my career. When someone has an opinion, even if it ends up misquoted, people jump on it.
"But as a player you love the chance to shut people up. Any time that you’re criticised, it drives you on and you try to prove people wrong. That’s what I did in that part of my career.
“But I get on with Graeme – there’s no beef. When I won the Premier League title at Manchester City, he was covering the game and he came over to congratulate me.”
