UNITED SET UP FOR ANOTHER MESS AFTER LATEST PUSH ON PANIC BUTTON
While Cavani has a proven track record, his age and recent fitness issues suggest his spell at Old Trafford may end up being more reminiscent of Falcao than Ibrahimovic
SO, ABOUT that “cultural reset”. Eight months after Manchester United agreed a loan deal for a journeyman striker who had spent the previous three years plying his trade in China, the club who had been insisting they had finally got recruitment sorted were back hitting the panic button on deadline day.
This time for a 33-year-old veteran forward who last played a competitive game seven months ago and who has been plagued by injuries for the best part of two years, yet who is commanding £250,000 (€276,000) a week in wages and a huge slab of cash to his agent. And, all the while, glaring holes in the squad that everyone can see continued to go unserviced.
That is some cultural reset. United arrived at Odion Ighalo, now 31, in January via moves for Josh King, Danny Ings and others after a serious injury to Marcus Rashford sent the club into a familiar blind panic.
Yet there was something altogether more troubling and bewildering about the scenario that had United signing Edinson Cavani on a free transfer in the final hours of a window for which they had longer than ever to plan.
A three-month lockdown and an elongated 10-week transfer window offered United the perfect opportunity to get all their ducks in a row, to shape and refine their Plans A, B and C.
Emotional
Yet, as an emotional, irate Patrice Evra pointed out over the weekend, if it looks like United are making it up as they go along then that is probably because they are. On and off the field, there is no direction, cohesion or joined-up thinking.
“There is an element of thrill and excitement and intrigue to it [Cavani] because he’s been one of the world’s best strikers in the last 10 years,” Gary Neville, the former United captain and a vocal critic of this bungling Old Trafford regime, said on Sunday before his old club were trounced 6-1 by Tottenham in one of the lowest moments of the Glazer family’s reviled ownership and their ringmaster Ed Woodward’s tenure as executive vice-chairman. “But there’s also an element of, ‘How have you ended up here?’”
The Cavani transfer is not an outlier, an isolated experiment where United are concerned, though. We have been here before and we will be here again in the future if the same people who have presided over the mess that has gripped Old Trafford since Alex Ferguson vacated the building in May 2013 are allowed to keep calling the shots.
United hope the Uruguayan will have the same sort of impact as another superstar veteran, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who scored 28 goals in 2016/’17 before a cruciate ligament injury in the April of that season derailed him.
There is no doubting Cavani’s experience, leadership and proven track record of goals and, heaven knows, United need all of those things and much more.
Yet there is also no denying that his body failed him repeatedly over the previous two seasons and, while it would be uplifting to see one of the great forwards of his generation get and stay fit and set the Premier League alight, United fans will be right to wonder if they are about to witness another Radamel Falcao-type episode, not an Ibrahimovic repeat.
Falcao arrived on loan from Monaco on deadline day in 2014 – yes, another of those last-minute panic signings – with a big reputation but also a pile of injury problems and the next nine months were not fun for anyone to watch as the Colombia striker’s body would not carry him to places his mind wanted to go.
United felt they had moved on under former manager Louis van Gaal, when they admitted recruitment had become a huge problem, and had made a big play about how they were targeting younger, hungrier players motivated by a desire to represent the club. Yes, that so-called cultural reset.
Scrambling
And yet, here they were, flailing and scrambling around again, while a manager whose appointment was, at best, a leap of faith and, at worst, a reflection of the hare-brained decision-making at the place is left to pick up the pieces.
Woodward demonstrated considerable leadership during lockdown, when United rightly won praise for so much excellent work, and his commercial acumen has never been in doubt.
Yet it has reached the point where he must seriously ask himself if he is the right man to oversee football operations at a club screaming out for a sporting director and a drastic overhaul of a set-up that has somehow permitted Matt Judge, another former investment banker, control of transfer and contract negotiations.
Whatever your opinion on Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s suitability for the job, he has been thrown under the bus this summer by a hierarchy who are no good at buying and selling footballers and who seem to have a problem identifying the right faces at the right time.
Solskjaer wanted the England winger, Jadon Sancho, but watched on as Borussia Dortmund’s refusal to budge from their €120m valuation threw United into disarray and was left hoping a loan deal could be struck for someone else late on.
He wanted a full-back, but it took until the final day of the window to resolve a deal for Porto’s Alex Telles after Sergio Reguilon – part of the Spurs side who thrashed them on Sunday – joined up with the former United manager, Jose Mourinho, instead.
He wanted a centre-half and a striker, too, but probably always knew Glazer finances would never stretch that far, even if there is a strong case to argue that they should have been a priority over Sancho, all the more so when you look at how Harry Maguire, Victor Lindelof and Eric Bailly and the like have fared this season, and the absence of a top-class No 9 such as Harry Kane, their nemesis at the weekend.
United have reminded fans repeatedly of the financial impact of the Covid-19 crisis, but supporters tuned out from that message long ago. In the past 10 years, an extraordinary £838m of club money has been sucked out in interest, debt repayments and dividends to fund the Glazers’ ownership structure.
That is the equivalent of one potential game-changing £80million signing every season for a decade.
Drink that in for a moment. And then remind yourself that all roads have now led to a thirtysomething striker with a worrying injury history. What a mess. (© Daily Telegraph, London)