We don’t need Roo! Four-star United send champions packing
SO this is what happens when you drop Wayne Rooney.
Everybody has been wondering. Now we know.
Jose Mourinho bit the bullet that no one else seemed willing to bite and within 42 minutes his team was 4-0 up against the Premier League champions.
Rooney smiled and politely applauded the goals from his seat on the subs’ bench but he must have wondered whether this was the day that everything changes for him.
He has been the dominant English player in both domestic and international football for 12 years.
United showed that not only can they do OK without him, they may actually be better without him.
With Juan Mata in the Rooney role and pace and youth on the flanks from Marcus Rashford and Jesse Lingard, United bore no resemblance to the team that had lost three of their last four games.
Mourinho, who had been tetchy all week, had seemed to be heading for another meltdown as United headed for crisis. Crisis? What crisis? This was the team’s best performance by far since his arrival.
Leicester, on the other hand, were an absolute mess.
They defended like a Sunday pub team – only with less steel and less organisation.
Champions don’t concede four goals in the space of 20 first-half minutes, three of them from Daley Blind corners.
Chelsea made such a shocking defence of their crown last season, it cost Mourinho his job.
Leicester won’t pull the trigger on Claudio Ranieri so readily but he needs to find some answers and fast.
The normally placid Italian made some big calls of his own at halftime when he yanked off last season’s Footballer of the Year Jamie Vardy and PFA Player of the Year Riyad Mahrez.
Neither of them had even reached the level of pale shadow of their former selves.
By then Chris Smalling and Paul Pogba had both headed in directly from Blind corners and Mata had set up Rashford for another.
The little Spaniard had also scored the pick of United’s goals, the second, at the end of a move he had started himself.
The irony, of course, is that Mata was the man Mourinho sold to United from Chelsea because he didn’t think he was good enough.
It was Leicester’s third defeat in six games. They only lost three in the whole of their title campaign.
Mourinho has a new name for people in the media who think they know better than him – Einsteins. It’s not meant as a compliment.
But it didn’t take an Einstein to work out that if you can’t defend basic set-pieces, you will concede goals. Leicester were consistently good at that last season with Robert Huth and Wes Morgan so dominant in the air.
Yet when United’s opener came on 23 minutes they were nowhere.
Blind swung over a left-wing corner and Smalling simply ran unchecked through a ruck of players to head in.
United should have made it two a couple of minutes later when Zlatan Ibrahimovic broke clear on to Ander Herrera’s pass and fed Rashford but the youngster’s shot was wild.
There was another chance a minute later, this time a lovely ball by Pogba and Ibrahimovic’s effort just cleared the bar.
Then Pogba’s cleverly whipped-in shot was tipped away at his near post by Ron-Robert Zieler.
United got the second they’d been threatening in the 37th minute, Mata beginning the move and finishing it superbly with his left foot, with Pogba and Lingard getting touches in between.
Mata was also key to the third, three minutes, later when he read Blind’s low near post corner and drilled the ball across for Rashford to ram in.
Another Blind corner, another goal – this one identical to Smalling’s, only it was Pogba who powered his header past Ron-Robert Zieler.
Leicester improved after Ranieri’s substitutions but nowhere near enough.
Demarai Gray, on for Mahrez, restored a tiny bit of pride on the hour with a glorious strike at the end of an individual run.
Rooney appeared for the final seven minutes but the applause was more for the departing Rashford than the skipper.
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