Angry John Stones refused to trade shirts with me over a Twitter jibe and a fiery response, let me know exactly how he felt.

Tom Pope has revealed that John Stones “didn't even want to look at him or talk to him” after calling the England defender a “weak***”.

Pope is best known for his time at Port Vale, where he scored 115 goals for the English football league team, but the England defender remembers it for entirely different reasons.

In 2019, when the Three Lions lost 3-1 to the Netherlands in the Nations League, Pope wrote on X, then known as Twitter: “I know he earns £150k a week, I know he's a million times better player than me, but I would love to play against Juan Piedras every week! They would give me 40 per season!

To add more salt to the wound, he added the hashtags “soft” and “weak***” to his post.

Well, less than a year later, Pope put his theory to the test, when Port Vale eliminated Man City in the third round of the FA Cup.

City won 4-1 that day, but Pope scored Vale's only goal, beating Stones, who was in the center of the home defense, and the rest of the defense.

Now, Pope has revealed that Stones had clearly taken note of his previous tweet and that the defender had “refused to speak” to him after the match.

Recalling the original tweet, he told the I had tests once Podcast: “I think he played for England and he was very soft.

“I don't remember who he played against, he could have been turning over Zlatan (Ibrahimovic) or someone, I don't remember who it was, but he got hit.

“I thought, he's a target's dream. Technically, he's amazing, really good. I just tweeted saying 'you'd love to play against him because you'd just hit him.'

“You're not being derogatory to him because he never gives the ball away, he's incredible with the ball, but if you're scoring balls and going far, you want John Stones to beat (Virgil) van Dijk's record, you don't do that.” you?”

Since their FA Cup encounter, Stones have won four Premier League titles and one Champions League, as well as reaching two European Championship finals with England.

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Pope, meanwhile, left Port Vale in 2021 and has not been in the league since.

When told of Stones' recent success, Pope revealed that the defender had told him to “f*** off” in the FA Cup match after Raheem Sterling and Benjamin Mendy persuaded him to come and say hello.

“Yeah, he's just an absolute idiot,” she said. “Because you go into his dressing room… I didn't go in, I was the only one who stayed in our dressing room.

“Everyone else came over after the game and took pictures and stuff. And I stayed there, I was there for about 15 minutes.

“And then Sterling and Mendy came in, 'get in here, we've been beating him up for fucking months for your tweet, the group chat has been a fucking mess.'

“I say 'I'm not going in', they literally dragged me, I say 'I'm not going in'.

“And then at the end they say, 'come on, please just come in.' So I walked in and they said, 'he's here!'

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“And Stones said 'oh, fuck you, no, no'. I said 'you fucking bag'.”

“I said, 'You've let a fucking pub player get into your head that much? You're okay, aren't you?'

“All the money you have, you have in Man City and have you let that affect you?

“He didn't even look at me. I said 'can I have your shirt?' He said, 'No, fuck you.'

“He didn't want to talk to me.”

Pope, now 39, currently plays for Premier League Division One West club Kidsgrove Athletic in Staffordshire.