Rock-bottom Sanchez leaving United supporters short changed

THE question: When will the real Alexis Sanchez stand up?

The second half had not long got underway at Old Trafford when Sanchez started beckoning to his team-mates to push up after Manchester United had won a throw-in deep in Seville territory.

It was about as much of a protest as the Chilean staged all evening. United supporters arrived here wondering if this would be the night their new signing finally sparked into life.

They will have left simply hoping this constituted rock bottom for Sanchez and that his standards cannot slip any further. Make no mistake about it, this was a chastening night for everyone involved at United, a surrender so supine against such ordinary opponents that it may take some time to properly digest this humiliation.

It was very much a collective failure and it spoke volumes that the best player on the pitch was Steven Nzonzi, once of Blackburn Rovers and Stoke City.

But Sanchez’s failure felt particularly acute and the Old Trafford supporters who almost sounded forlorn when they called for United to “attack, attack, attack” must be feeling terribly short changed for their £500,000 a week.

If there was a moment here that encapsulated Sanchez’s start to life at Old Trafford it came in the seventh minute. Picking up possession just over the halfway line, he tucked that chin into his chest and began to burrow forward only to run into an opponent, lose possession and allow Seville to hit on the break. Anyone who has watched Sanchez down the years will know that is part of the bargain, the rough that comes with the smooth. But it has been too frequent a sight over these first six or seven weeks and, understandably, a source of considerable frustration for fans, particularly when there have been precious few moments of inspiration to compensate.

Perhaps that has been exacerbated by Sanchez joining a team that, almost two years into Jose Mourinho’s reign, is still struggling to find a fluency and rhythm to its football and one that at times, as showcased quite startlingly last night, and stray into the realms of the witless and

aimless. Would Sanchez, for example, have looked very different had he been parachuted into Manchester City’s side in mid-season?

City look such a well-oiled machine that Sanchez might well have hit the ground running had he ended up across the road, as most originally thought he would. But, equally, had he displayed the sort of single-minded, tunnel vision that does not so much excite as exasperate, it would have been easy to picture Pep Guardiola self-combusting on the touchline and screaming at the Chilean to “get his head up”.

It is certainly interesting to wonder how Guardiola would have accommodated Sanchez’s individualistic tendencies into his grand design.

Mourinho has suggested it may be next season before United see the best of Sanchez but it is not too much to have expected the forward to have delivered far more than he has offered so far.

It was troubling to see Sanchez so peripheral to things here. Remember that talk about how he could help to ignite United’s Champions League campaign and bring a little X-factor to a largely workmanlike team?

It felt like a bad joke against Seville. No one embodied United’s huff and puff, their lack of imagination more than Sanchez.

Romelu Lukaku worked hard and grabbed a late goal but he was too isolated.

Marcus Rashford and Jesse Lingard ran a lot, albeit to little avail. But Sanchez? If anything, he actually looked lost.

Michael Carrick knows a good player when he sees one – enough have passed though in his 12 years at the club, after all – and he offered a persuasive argument on the eve of this game that Sanchez’s talent will eventually win through.

It certainly can’t look any less unfulfilled than this. (© Daily Telegraph, London)