Unai Emery gave a very non-committal one-word answer to a question about Mesut Özil on Saturday, but that hasn’t stopped half the English media running with it ever since.

Speaking to the press after the West Ham match, Emery confirmed that he’d spoken to Özil on Thursday, and that’s when he learned of the playmaker’s illness. The club doctor then recommended the 29-year-old sit out of training on Friday, and they decided not to include him in the squad for the London derby.

The story in the English media is very different. They believe Özil was dropped, or asked to change position, and then invented an illness.

Trying to get Emery to back that story up, one journalist asked: “When you spoke to him [Özil] on Thursday about what you wanted to see from him [against West Ham], did you plan to play him in a different position?”

Emery simply responded: “Maybe.”

The Guardian describe that as a ‘telling’ reply, and claim it shows Özil and Emery’s relationship has reached ‘breaking point’. The Mirror write that the single-word answer said the most about the tension between the two. 101GreatGoals published a whole article about the ‘cryptic one-word Mesut Özil comment’.

Realistically, Emery was probably just not keen to get into his plans for the team publicly. It’s generally a good thing to keep the element of surprise on your side in football.

The media are really starting to get mixed up in their own story now though. The original source of the Özil training row news, Joao Castelo-Branco, said in his tweet that the German ‘decided not to be at the game’ after learning he’d be on the bench.

Except now the story is that Özil was just changing position, not being dropped to the bench. Plus, all the quotes from Emery suggest the playmaker was in the dressing room with the team, so he was at the game. It’s hard to keep up sometimes.