For a football club that has spent the best part of a decade building a squad, spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds on player after player, we sit today, in mid-December, with the stark realization that what we all already know is in the face and screams loudly.
We made a massive mess of everything.
We lack cover in positions so badly, it’s almost embarrassing. No, it’s bloody embarrassing, who am I kidding?
Right-back is a concern, a position United beat their chests a few years ago and boasted that they had scouted and considered a ridiculous amount of right-back options and, to the amusement of some, turned to Aaron Wan- Bissaka, for an exuberant file.
Fan bias, direct support of his support, led the rose-tinted glasses to proclaim him as world class, a specialist for one-on-one defense, who was unpassable by gangs! Diogo Dalot was cast aside as simply not good enough, this was the future, Spiderman was the solution to our right-back woes!
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Reality set in quickly, a huge fee paid for a right back who was tragically forward, which you can forgive (well, in the modern game you probably can’t, let’s be honest) when the defensive specialties come to the fore come
They didn’t.
Marked for having terribly poor positional awareness and the horror realization that he was not actually a specialist in one-on-one defense and clumsier than a bull in a china shop with the ball at his feet, Wan Bissaka found on the periphery, a forgotten man in a way, when Dalot returned from a relatively decent loan spell at AC Milan and claimed that spot for his own.
Dalot has been a revelation at right back, both for United and more recently for his country, keeping Cancelo at bay for the World Cup, the young Portuguese lad is leaps and bounds from every other weekly “oh FFS, don’t come . Dalot” expressed that his name is on the team sheet.
A welcome show of mental strength and determination, he went through a tough time, some people, me being one of them, forgot his age, and he turned it around to become our first choice full-back in a side where he t gets a lot of protection from those who play in front of him.
But with Wan-Bissaka looking ever closer to the exit, with West Ham looking like a possible destination (as reported by Stretty News) we need cover and we need it now.
Dalot’s injury as Portugal crashed out of the World Cup is worrying if it keeps him out for an extended period of time, or in fear of his appearance if he regains fitness, we are lighter than this writer’s hair in options!
With Ethan Laird out on loan and unproven at this level, Wan-Bissaka leaving, a right back is needed at an alarmingly increasing rate in January!
This leads us to another problematic position.
What? All that money spent and we have TWO positions in the starting XI that need immediate investment? Not sure?
Yes, we need a striker and we needed one yesterday.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s romanticized return to United ended in tears, with the Portuguese forward ending his time with the club after a kiss-and-tell interview with Piers Morgan. Although he is past his sell-by date in terms of age and movement as a lone striker, something he has refused to accept, largely attributed to his dreadful end to part two of his United career, leaves a gap that needs filling.
Anthony Martial, a man widely tipped to move on to Sevilla on loan, has somehow managed to stand alone as Manchester United’s lone striker, a position some are not convinced is his current position in a football team.
The same Martial has been injured again this season, which will now lead us to the abyss of a second half of the season without a striker, if he again disturbs a toe.
So here we are, mid-season, no backup right back, no out-and-out striker per say, and hundreds of millions sod the queen’s most beautiful, around the world to throw a catalog of poor investments and false potential.
Finding an embarrassing situation for us to lead to a rather uncertain future at the moment and how the team is able to cover these curious topics that any top team wouldn’t have, Erik Ten Hag has his work cut out for him
In addition to this, our beloved owners finally realized that they stole the club for every penny and had to sell it, amid serious and prolonged public pressure from fan groups like The 1958, they jumped ship.
But as the Rats abandon the Titanic, will they allow the repair of the first team problems in the forward and right-back roles? Will they spend more of our money, because they have never spent a cent of their own, on games as they go, or simply focus on making us flow to the highest bidder and like the leeches they are, try every last penny extra to extract they can achieve?VB,VB,VB,VB,VB,VB,VB,VB,VB,VB,VB,VB
The January transfer window will tell us all the result, I hope it’s what we need because we simply cannot afford to let another season slip by where we’re walking towards the finish line as well as Ran, outside of the Champions League qualification gone, wonder where it all went wrong.