Ibrahimovic rises to occasion to prove his worth once more

United now rely heavily on talisman’s goals, but can they provide the swansong he deserves?

What a way to insist on your indispensability. With seconds left, Zlatan Ibrahimovic stepped up to score the penalty that gave Manchester United a point. And just about maintained a pulse in their stuttering scramble for a top-four finish.

After an enforced lay-off, the Swede returned to a United front line which had been bereft of his guile, his cunning, and more to the point his goals. He came back in no mood to prevaricate. Speaking on the in-house television station MUTV before kick-off, the club’s leading scorer made his contractual position clear. He needed some demonstration of title-winning ambition, he insisted, if he were to sign on again.

“I’m 35. It’s not like I’m 20 and I have another five or 10 years,” he said. “Probably, I have one, two, three years, so everything depends on what you want and what the club wants, what the vision of the club is. Because I said from day one I didn’t come here to waste time, I came here to win. If you want to win bigger, then you have to create bigger.”

His return was timely. Not just for his own immediate contractual interest but for his team’s wellbeing. Without him, United had been faltering in the Premier League at the precise moment they needed to accelerate in pursuit of a Champions League spot. Such had been the singular failure of those who had come in to replace him that absence had given his reputation an injection of rocket fuel.

Of a front quartet lambasted by Jose Mourinho for their inability to match the master in the home game with West Bromwich Albion, only Marcus Rashford and Jesse Lingard had survived the cull of the inconsistent. But their response to the tough love of the manager’s public ire was hardly pyrotechnic. Rashford made a few dashes down the line to no great effect, while Lingard seemed to disappear into irrelevance.

And Ibrahimovic’s disdain for the failings of his colleagues was evident as United’s game quickly became ensnared in errors. The shrug when a pass was misplaced, the little mime of where he wanted the ball played when he made a run

and it failed to arrive, the arms out in despair when a blue shirt intervened on a through pass: all had an outing during an unproductive opening salvo.

But then his own contribution was hardly the most persuasive of bargaining chips. Within five minutes he was played in by Ander Herrera’s shrewd dummy. Suddenly he was baring down on goal. But he is not the most fleet-footed of predators these days. As was made clear when the defender who had outpaced him to slide in with a beautifully timed challenge was identified. It was Ashley Williams.

And, give or take the odd flick and feint, that was roughly it from Ibrahimovic in a first half memorable only for United conceding a comically hapless goal that was hardly consistent with a team likely to give him a titlewinning swansong. He had so little in the way of legitimate service, he was unable to lift himself from the disappointment.

Things did not hugely improve for him in the second half, despite the arrival from the bench of Paul Pogba, the man who has supplied most of the ammunition for him to fire this season.

With Everton exercising increasing control on the tempo and flow of the game, with the United crowd growing fractious, with the ball moving round in ever decreasing circles of productivity, Ibrahimovic looked ever more isolated, more despondent. When his diving header past Joel Robles was incorrectly ruled out for offside by the referee, the putative moneybags offer from Major League Soccer’s LA Galaxy for his services began to look not such a bad idea after all.

Still, for Ibrahimovic self-doubt is never an issue. And when the penalty chance came his way in the fourth minute of stoppage time, he sent Robles the wrong way with an emphatic swish of his boot. “I came here as a 35-yearold,” he had added in his interview. “Everybody thought I was in a wheelchair. What happened? The lion is still alive and that’s the way it is.”

At the last, when most needed, the lion roared. How many noughts has that late, late intervention added to his new contract?