Lingard’s critics call him a waster and a failure. They could not be more wrong
IN December 2019 I was asked if I would like to interview Jesse Lingard. The Manchester United forward had, I was told, something to reveal.
It was a strange morning, that one, hanging around at home wondering what it was.
I wondered if he was ill. I wondered if he wanted to leave. In the end it was less dramatic, but just as important. Lingard just wanted to talk about his life, its stresses and strains and his difficulties in coping.
Back then Lingard was 26. Less than 18 months earlier, he had played in a World Cup semi-final. But with his mother Kirsty in hospital being treated for depression, Lingard had taken on parental responsibility for his two younger siblings.
Meals, parents’ evenings, school runs. He had also become a father himself. ‘Some of this stuff has broken my heart, you know?’ he told me that lunchtime.
‘I have to take this responsibility on. But sometimes when your worries are so deep you can’t function properly.’
Lingard was at that point where many of us have been, when the bigger picture feels so dark and blurred that the small things become almost impossible.
His football had become poor and he felt bad about it. He felt he was failing manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, United supporters and Alex Ferguson, who had persuaded him to stick at it back in the day when his slender frame threatened to derail his progress as an academy player. Lingard speaks in a whis per. He is boyish, even now. His public image does not play to that. He has made some mistakes and owned them.
He can appear a little flash. His friendship with Paul Pogba, dating back to those academy days, has not helped him in the eyes of those who are more sceptical.
But as I think about Lingard now and listen to what people say about a player who is still only 31, but is without a football club after struggling at Nottingham Forest last season, I keep returning to the conversation at that table at Carrington a little over four years ago.
The Lingard I spoke with — and indeed the one I had spent similar time with 18 months earlier — was a young man who cared about his football deeply, but also carried with him an air of vulnerability and gaucheness that was obvious as soon as you came within 10 yards of him.
Lingard split with his agent recently and posted cryptically on social media about his next steps.
Former clubmate Paul Scholes was not slow to comment. ‘Are you just gonna f*** about in the gym or are you actually gonna play football?’
This has been the general take. Lingard is wasting his talent, they say. Lingard doesn’t want it enough. Lingard has his priorities mixed up.
And this is the thing about sport and the people who earn a living from it. The rest of us, who would like to have been good enough but never got close, like to impose our own values, wants and needs on them from the sidelines.
How dare Lingard be without a club at 31? What an unforgivable failure to meet those obligations that have been placed on him by the rest of us.
The truth is that we don’t know. We don’t know why Lingard’s career — and those of others like him — has not followed the path we had laid out for them in our heads. What we do know is that professional football is exacting both physically and mentally at the top level.
Longevity is not for everyone. The accepted norm is for players to wring every last drop from what they have. It’s a short career, we tell them.
Some just can’t do that, though. Dele Alli — who played in that same England semi-final in Moscow — is trying to push forward, but the odds seem against him. He is 27.
Ross Barkley has come again at Luton and that’s wonderful, if it lasts. He is 30. And we judge them don’t we? We talk of wasted careers and failure.
But Lingard is not a failure, quite the opposite.
He played for the biggest football club in the country and scored the winning goal in an FA Cup final. He has been picked for England 32 times.
After a successful loan from United at West Ham in 2021, he was criticised for taking a good financial package at Forest.
The truth is, though, that the Hammers matched it. He chose Nottingham because it is closer to his family in the North West. It didn’t work out and now he looks lost.
But the truth is that Lingard knows about life’s real challenges. He knows what perspective feels like.
When he was a child, his mother’s difficulties would keep her in bed all day. ‘I’d go in and ask for money for ice cream,’ Lingard has said.
That’s a real life problem, right there. That’s a life beyond football, a life none of us can claim to know anything about.
So forgive me if I don’t join the throng wishing vengeance on a young man just because his path has not transpired to be a straight one.
Me? I just hope Jesse is OK.
THOMAS TUCHEL has started to exhibit signs of restlessness at Bayern Munich. If I were Manchester United’s new kingmaker Jim Ratcliffe, I would be paying very close attention to that.