Valencia Shin Crosses
Full Member
Football is a game of tradeoffs. You make several choices all over the pitch with the players and their roles, you win some things & lose some others, but the strife is to strike a good balance. This is what makes a team "more than the sum of its parts".
If you sit down and watch clips from the last couple of years, you'll notice that opposition defenders deliberately choose to use a double-team on him and leave others unmarked because they know he won't pass the ball. It would make you laugh, if it didn't make you cry. But that's the price we currently pay for him "getting in good positions and being a threat".
Will he become better? Who knows? But "leaving him out there to do his thing" isn't the way to nurture a player. This is why we have turned from a prime destination for young players to a graveyard for talents. It's a vicious circle: Managers need to get results out of a bad team, players (now more than ever) are after the big paycheck from day one, and the commercial behemoth that is United will try to "create" stars even if the performances on the pitch can't provide one. The manager hangs on to an unpolished and still limited player's ability for dear life, the player does his own thing because he realizes this is his moment to chase the big bucks, the club rushes to protect "the asset". All the while, the fans are starving for some exciting players amidst all the doom and gloom. So, of course, Ronaldo is the point of reference. Both the club and the fans want it to be so. Ask yourself this simple question: Would we be having this debate, if United were a well-functioning side and Garnacho (at this point of his career) was being compared to - let's say - Trossard (but with age on his side)? Puts a shift in, carries the ball adequately, a bit wasteful to be the main threat, but can score important goals. With an appropriate squad role and salary. I don't think we would.
Of course not. I've said as much too, in that in an ideal world Garnacho is just some hungry bench/squad player type that we chuck on for the last 20-30 minutes in games but no one really expects a ton out of him.
But that's not the world we live in. Garnacho has basically been our marquee attacker for 2 seasons now. We are broke as a club and need to sell players in order to bring more quality in. Garnacho, because of his age and solid face value production, is a player that will fetch a hefty fee on the open market. So viewing him needs to be through the lens of "is he worth turning down 55/60m+ type offers?". Because if we are turning down those types of bids, then he has to be worth more than that to us, and this excuse of "oh he's a young player it's normal to be erratic/inconsistent" doesn't get to still hold water.