Butt tells Lisandro Martinez what he should do over jokes about height after online abuse

Nicky Butt says that he has received lots of abuse online after “tongue in cheek” comments about Lisandro Martinez and tells how to respond to it.

He and Paul Scholes mocked Martinez ahead of the City derby for the mismatch in height with Erling Haaland but in the end the Argentine defender came out on top and stifled the threat.

Butt had joked the striker “would pick Martinez up and run with him” like a “dad after school running down the road with a little toddler” before Scholes laughed and said that “he’d score then throw him in the net”.

And afterwards Martinez said of the comments: he said: “No, honestly, he can say whatever he wants.

“I told him already if he wants to say something to me, he can come to wherever he wants. To my house, wherever. I don’t care.

“And I think, for me, I respect the relations when they want to help the club because everyone can talk on the television, but when you see (them) here face-to-face no-one says anything in your face.

“So, for me, I don’t really care what they say. I just put focus on my performance, the performance of the team and I give everything to this club until my last day.”

And now Butt says that Martinez should "grow up" claiming he shouldn't be at a big club if he is going to get upset about criticism

And he continued: "I feel really bad about it, not because of what I said but because it wasn’t personal, it was just tongue in cheek chat about physicality.

"And to be honest the amount of c*** I’ve had on social media about what they are going to do to my kids, my mum’s this, my wife’s this, my girlfriend’s that. I don’t go and say please don’t do it, just ignore it. What are you going to do, start crying when someone starts saying something to you."

While Scholes said he too had received a lot of comments on social media from Martinez supporters.

"I’ve had a lot of Spanish messages, I did Spanish at school, I didn’t understand some of those words, they didn’t teach me those words, they seem very threatening," said Scholes.

Then Butt asked why Martinez is called 'the butcher' saying: "I’ve had the butcher is going to kill you, why is he called butcher doesn’t anyone know?"

And Paddy McGuinness on The Good, The Bad and The Ugly joked: "Maybe he likes steak."

Finally Butt added: "I want to move on from this, he was brilliant on the day, hold my hands up, every single one of them was, no one is more happier than me as a Man Utd fan."