For a football club that has spent the best part of a decade rebuilding a squad, spending hundreds upon hundreds of millions of pounds on player after player, we sit here today, mid-December, with the stark realisation that what we all know already, is staring us in the face and screaming loudly.
We have made a massive mess of it all.
We’re lacking cover in positions so badly, it’s almost embarrassing. No, it is bloody embarrassing, who am I kidding?
Right back is a concern, a position where United a mere few years ago beat their chest lauding that they had scouted and considered a ridiculous amount of options for right back and settled, at the bemusement to some, on Aaron Wan-Bissaka, for an exuberant fee.
Fan bias, instant backing from his support, led the rose-tinted glasses to proclaim him as world-class, a specialist in one-on-one defending who was impassable by wingers! Diogo Dalot was cast aside as simply not good enough, this was the future, spiderman was the solution to our right-back worries!
Reality quickly set in, a huge fee paid for a right-back who was tragic going forward, which you can forgive (well, in the modern game you probably can’t, let’s be honest) if the defensive specialties come to the fore.
They didn’t.
Shown up for having terribly weak positional awareness and the horror realisation that he wasn’t, actually, a specialist in one-on-one defending and clumsier than a bull in a China shop with the ball at his feet, Wan Bissaka has found himself on the periphery, a forgotten man in a way, as Dalot returned from a relatively decent loan spell at AC Milan and lay claim to 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 spot, the young Portuguese lad has come on leaps and bounds from the every other weekly “oh FFS, not Dalot” expressed at his name being on the team sheet.
A welcomed showing of mental strength and determination, he went through a rough time, some people, me being one of them, forgetting his age, and he has turned it around to become our first choice full-back on a side where he doesn’t get much protection from those playing in front of him.
But with Wan-Bissaka looking nearer and nearer to the exit, with West Ham looking as a likely 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 length of time, or at the fear of a reappearance of it, once 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 are in need of instant investment? Surely not?
Yes, we need a striker and we need one yesterday.
The romanticised return of Cristiano Ronaldo to United has ended in tears, with the Portuguese forward ending his time with the club after a kiss-and-tell interview with Piers Morgan. Although he may be past his sell-by date in terms of age and movement as a lone striker, something he has refused to accept which largely attributed to his torrid end to part two of his United career, he leaves a gap that needs filling.
Anthony Martial, a man that it was generally accepted needed to be moved on, who flopped on loan to Sevilla, has somehow managed to find himself standing alone as Manchester United’s only striker, a position some are unconvinced is his actual position in a football team.
The same Martial has been injury riddled this season again, leaving us now staring down the abyss of a second half of the season striker-less, if he stubs a toe again.
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 finest, thrown around the world at a catalogue of poor investment and false potential.
An embarrassing situation to find ourselves in leading to a rather uncertain future at current in how the team will be able to cover these curious issues that any top team would not have, Erik Ten Hag has his work cut out
Adding to this, our beloved owners have finally realised they’ve robbed the club for every penny and have thrown it up for sale, amid serious and prolonged public pressure from fan groups like The 1958, they are jumping ship.
But as the rats abandon the titanic, do they enable the repair of the first-team issues in the striker and right-back roles to occur? Will they spend more of our money, because they have never spent a cent of their own, on players as they leave, or simply focus on flogging us to the highest bidder and like the leeches they are, try to extract any final few pence extra they can achieve?
The January transfer window will tell us all the outcome, I hope it’s what we need because we simply cannot afford to let another season pass by where we trudge to the finish line as also-rans, languishing outside Champions League qualification, wondering where it all went wrong.
