Paul Pogba has been in and out of the Manchester United team through injury, bad form or, occasionally, to suit one of his managers strange tactical decisions. He has been inconsistent over the last four years with most of his games falling well below the standard expected of an £89 million player. He hasn’t scored as many goals as he should have and he hasn’t created as many goals as he should have.
He has stayed silent as his brother and his agent have spewed disrespect on the club suggesting that Pogba was too good for them and should move on when, in actual fact, he has only very recently started to show that he IS good enough to play for Manchester United.
On the other hand Bruno Fernandes has become the signing Paul Pogba was supposed to be and yet, if the reports are to be believed, he nearly went to Tottenham Hotspur.
How could a club like United re-sign somebody, for such a large amount of money, who they deemed surplus to requirements under Sir Alex Ferguson and, to add insult to injury, let go for free? What was Ed Woodward thinking? What were the scouts doing? Surely the potential was evident before he left for Juventus!
Conversely, when the club dithered over signing Fernandes taking, as is now the norm, two transfer windows to bring him in, they risked losing him to another club. So the same two questions are relevant. What was Woodward thinking and what were the scouts doing?
The cynic in us would suggest that Woodward, as usual, was playing a waiting game which he thought would end with him paying less for the player. This has never worked for him and the last time he employed this tactic he actually cost the club £4 million more than they needed to pay for Marouane Fellaini! With Fernandes it could have resulted in the player going to Spurs!
Ed Woodward, as everybody except Ed Woodward is aware, knows nothing about football and should just approve or veto the signing of players depending on price. He should have NO SAY in which players are brought to the club and which aren’t. Those decisions should be made by the manager and, in United’s case, the clueless coaching staff, (Carrick and Fletcher excepted).
The scouts don’t appear to know much more about football than Woodward. Which “scout”, for example, was responsible for suggesting that Pogba would be a good signing from Juventus? Which scout found Fernandes but then didn’t impress upon the manager that this player should be a priority and signed as soon as possible?
We have often ridiculed United’s scouting in the past when missing chances to sign Virgil van Dijk from Celtic, (before he even went to Southampton), Andy Robertson and Harry Maguire from Hull and even Kieran Tierney from Celtic and, unfortunately, we have seen nothing recently to change our opinion of them.
So between the non-existent scouting and a useless CEO who insists on sticking his nose into matters about which he is bereft of any knowledge, Ole Gunnar Solskjær is doing a reasonable job keeping the club at their current level.
Now if only he could work out a way of winning at the semi-final stage of competitions then he may even pick up his first trophy as Manchester United manager!
WHY SAY ANYTHING? 