WHY SAY ANYTHING?

It’s official, the leaks have been plugged. With the arrival of Aaron Wan-Bissaka to replace old man Young and Harry Maguire to replace the average Jones/Smalling/Rojo and injury prone Bailly the Manchester United defence looks, on paper anyway, decidedly more solid than it did last season.

The downside is that football is, and has always been, a game best played on grass, not paper, so the proof of the pudding will only really be evident when United play Chelsea at Old Trafford in the season’s opener.

David De Gea must really be looking forward to the first season in many when he will not be expected to be the player of the year!

So United won’t concede as many goals as last season, that’s almost a guarantee. How about the new midfield arrivals? How will they fare?

Oh, they haven’t replaced Fellaini or Herrera and there’s a chance Pogba may leave? Well Tielemans was available, as was Fernandes and, latterly, Eriksen. Maybe Ed knows something we don’t. This would be very unusual though as most experts agree that, as far as football is concerned, Ed actually knows nothing.

So the midfield could be a problem then. How about up front? Surely there’s enough firepower to score some goals, no?

Well again Lingard, to quote Paul Ince is “bang average” and some people would go as far as to say he isn’t even THAT good. Rashford and Martial suffer from the same problem in that neither of them wants to pass the ball preferring instead to try and beat five players at least twice before blasting the ball wide or over the bar if they haven’t already lost it, (which they usually have).

Could this man save United some money or will he just keep costing them a fortune?

Alexis Sánchez may be an option this year as surely he should be expected to do SOMETHING to justify being paid more than anybody else!

Lukaku is now gone so that just leaves the kids.

We do expect the likes of Mason Greenwood and Angel Gomes to be on the bench a bit more often this season with Tahith Chong either joining them or going out on loan.

Either way we can’t see this team scoring many goals so maybe that stressed the importance of strengthening the defence.

Manchester United have signed three players during this transfer window. Two defenders and a winger. They have problems creating opportunities and they will have problems scoring them so a midfielder like Fernandes or Eriksen would have been an excellent buy on the creative side and a striker to replace Lukaku would also not have gone amiss.

As far as clearing the deadwood goes, it just hasn’t happened and United can complain all they want about their wage bill but, at the end of the day, it is the clown Woodward who negotiated the salaries with the likes of Sánchez and Pogba and it is the clown Woodward who continues to pay three unneeded centre backs in Smalling, Jones and Rojo without appearing to do anything to move them out of the club.

That position is now well catered for with Maguire and Lindelof presumably first choice. This means that Tuanzebe should make the bench and Bailly, if he ever gets fit, can cover two or three positions, (there may even be an argument for keeping Jones as cover, just in case of injuries).

All-in-all this, up to now, hasn’t been a great window for United but it hasn’t been a bad one. “Experts” have always maintained that it would take two or three windows to repair the damage at Old Trafford. That may well still be the case but only because the club does not have a director of football and relies almost entirely on a bank manager to conduct it’s transfer business.

Rodri slipped, almost unnoticed, into Manchester City’s squad

Manchester City, for example, identified Rodri and Joao Cancelo as two players they should buy and then, without a fraction of the drama attached to United, they went and bought them. This is how it should be and, hopefully, when Woodward is replaced by a DOF is how it will be.