Pundit Alan Smith has weighed in on Manchester United’s captaincy options and decided that only one player of the current crop is qualified enough to take on the esteemed role.
Harry Maguire was awarded the armband just five months after his record-breaking move from Leicester City in 2019, with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer choosing the Englishman to succeed Ashley Young following his mid-season departure to Inter Milan.
It was a position that Maguire held up until last summer; after a campaign spent mostly sitting on the bench and watching on from the sidelines, Erik ten Hag made the decision to strip the centre-back of the captaincy and pass it on to Bruno Fernandes in July 2023.
Fernandes has since had his critics – including club legend Roy Keane, who previously claimed that the midfielder was the ‘opposite’ of what he’d want in a skipper, however, Smith is adamant that Fernandes is the only Red capable of filling the boots.
Smith on Fernandes
“Fernandes will always take the ball in difficult situations, and yet people look at him as he’s not a captain in a certain way, he moans at people a lot – in his situation, he’s probably just as frustrated as anybody else, and wants the team to do better and push on,” he told BritishGambler, as cited by UtdDistrict.
“He always wants to take the ball, and that shows a certain type of person. When you look around the dressing room for who is going to play, he’s fit for nearly every single game. He drives the team forward.
“He might get frustrated and annoyed, but he probably just wants more for the team, and he’s trying to do so much that this is what happens. He gets frustrated in certain situations, but when you look around, he is the one player who should be captain.”
