Manchester United’s £60m playmaker showed enough creative spark in win over
Chelsea to point towards brighter future
Back in my student days, when I was an editor on the campus newspaper, we ran a regular feature called “George W Bush’s Thought Of The Week”. It was an empty box with a blue border. We were 19 and, as it turned out, not as funny as we thought we were.
For much of the last decade you could make a similar joke about Manchester United’s midfield: an entity that seemed to be defined as much by its absence as by its presence. Through the Fletcher years, the Fellaini years, the Schneiderlin years and more latterly the McTominay years, United’s midfield has felt like a metaphysical puzzle: if it doesn’t do anything, can it actually be said to exist? Even the world-record capture of
Paul Pogba seemed only to exacerbate the problem: a sort of footballing anti-matter that merely highlighted the paucity of his context.