The most disappointing news of the day is that Marcus Rashford will be replaced in the Manchester United first team by Zlatan Ibrahimovic. I know that many will be pleased with the arrival of a true great in the Premier League. Even though he will be 35 soon, Zlatan will be more than a match for the swathe of second rate defenders he will face. If Chris Smalling and Gary Cahill could be bullied off the pitch by a couple of Icelandic strikers what will he do to them?
Doubtless, many of those welcoming a declining great to our top division will not be the same people who have been complaining about the dire state of the national side. Of course it won’t. The Premier League ‘product’ is the only thing that matters, isn’t it?
Roy Hodgson looked like a man who was making things up as he went along in France, but does anyone really think England is blessed with world class players? Ironically, Marcus Rashford was one of the few relative success stories in our dismal campaign and could be exempted from criticism. Sadly, next season he will probably not get a chance to shine, barring a dramatic change of heart from new Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho who never selects young home-grown players if he can buy a foreign ready-made product instead. Either young Marcus will loiter on the bench for long periods, turning out in League Cup games if he’s lucky, or he will be farmed out to somewhere in the Championship “to gain experience”, before in a few years he gets a free transfer and ends up another journeyman with his best years behind him.
Expect Manchester United to win something this year, maybe even the Premier League itself. Mourinho is a winner and he will be given however much money is deemed necessary to ensure that happens. There will be no legacy, no seeds planted for the future, as Sir Alex Ferguson planted through the decades, but the short term will be good and it won’t be English. And if the short term isn’t English, don’t expect the long term to be any different.
