Mason Mount can still be useful for Man United, but his last chance is near
Mason Mount can still be useful for Man United, but his last chance is near “I love it when a plan comes together,” Mason Mount may once have said about something. Perhaps his successful stint as Chelsea’s poster boy, possibly when signing his contract at Manchester United. But barely at any point this season would those words have rung true for United’s woebegone number 7 .
False dawn True, he started the first three games of a season which was supposed to be Ruben Amorim ’s redemption, the theoretical pay-off of all the suffering up to that point. The hard-running Mount was meant to be one of the key pressing machines in a stronger, leaner United side, a terrier with a goal threat lurking in one of the number 10 roles. But just as the wheels came off the Portuguese’s project, so too did the 27-year-old gradually, inevitably, fade from view.
His purple patch amounted to two goals in three games in the run-up to Christmas. Then came the team’s general fall-off, eight games missed through injury and an absolute failure to get into Michael Carrick ’s notoriously tight-knit starting lineup. There’s always next season The interim head coach has so far given Mount less than half an hour of playing time , during which his biggest contribution has been a booking in the battling victory at his former club.
He featured for nine minutes. It’s not a pretty picture for the £60m man, but there remains one last chance to turn around his desperately underwhelming United tenure next season. Much has been made of United’s embarrassingly slim fixture list, which has allowed Carrick to settle on his preferred starting lineup and deviate more through necessity than tactical creativity.
Next season the Red Devils must fight on all fronts, and they will need the squad depth to cope with playing twice a week for as long as possible. Mount may seem a distant figure at present, but his energy and creativity make him a useful player to have on the bench, and one not out of place on the pitch in a way that, say, Joshua Zirkzee seems. Or maybe there isn’t Carrick may not have stamped a rigid identity on his teams in the way his predecessor did, but his preferences are pretty clear in terms of personnel and positions.