Idon’t know if anyone would be brave enough to take on Sir Alex Ferguson, who recently denied he planned to sell Wayne Rooney by saying: “There’s no issue between Wayne and I.”

Sir Alex, manager of Manchester United football club and subject of a Harvard Business School case study, had already banned two newspapers from his press conference for reporting that Rooney would be leaving. He is also famous for subjecting players to “hair dryer” tirades.

His “between Wayne and I” mistake is a common one. As an Oxford Dictionaries online writing tip explains: “A preposition such as ‘between’ should be followed by an objective pronoun (such as ‘me’, ‘him’, ‘her’, and ‘us’) rather than a subjective pronoun (such as ‘I’, ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘we’). Saying ‘between you and I’ is grammatically equivalent to saying ‘between him and she’, or ‘between we’, which are both clearly wrong. People make this mistake because they know it’s not correct to say, for example, ‘John and me went to the shops’. They know that the correct sentence would be ‘John and I went to the shops’. But they then mistakenly assume that the words ‘a(chǎn)nd me’ should be replaced by ‘a(chǎn)nd I’ in all cases.”