Manchester United left-back Luke Shaw has issued a transfer plea to the club’s hierarchy after their crushing 3-1 Premier League opener against Crystal Palace yesterday.
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Shaw, 25, joined United from Southampton all the way back in 2014 in a move which cost the Reds £33.75m, as per TransferMarkt and has since gone onto feature a total of 140 times in all competitions in a six year spell which has seen him win just two major trophies.
The English defender was tipped to become one of Europe’s best full-backs, however, Shaw’s career has failed to follow his projected development. After a string of bad injuries including a broken leg in 2015, Shaw has really struggled for consistency.
The 25-year-old was part of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s side yesterday when they hosted Crystal Palace in their Premier League opener. Despite naming a strong starting 11, Solskjaer’s men eventually went onto lose 3-1 after a Wilfried Zaha brace and an early Jordan Ayew opener. After being caught out of position and well behind the run of play, Shaw was arguably at fault for Palace’s opening goal.
However, despite Shaw’s faults yesterday, he wasn’t the only player to under-perform in a red shirt and with it being recently discussed among United fans how frustrating the club’s lack of summer transfer activity surely yesterday’s shock result is a reminder that the board need to put their hands in their pockets?
Speaking after yesterday’s game, Shaw spoke to TV 2 and addressed the lack of signings, as quoted by Manchester Evening News he said: “As I said, we have a very good group, but personally I think we need more players to strengthen the squad.
“It can give us a boost. When you look around at how other teams are strengthening their teams, then we must also do it to keep up with the others.”
Assessing the game and his own individual performance, Shaw went onto say: “Possibly everything went wrong.
“Personally, from my point of view, the pre-season that we’ve had altogether is not the correct way it should have been. We’ve had a week all together.
“My first day back training: I could have probably counted on one hand the number of people who were training. We have only been back a week all together. Look at teams who have been together a while, training, playing games. I think Palace have played quite a few more games than us and it showed tonight. We lacked that fitness and confidence.
“We haven’t been able to prepare in the way that we wanted and that’s not an excuse because we have the quality of players to be able to win games like this but we weren’t up to it tonight and we’ve been punished. It’s the start of a new season, we should have been fresh.
“We knew how Palace were going to play, sit in the block and try and stay on that, possibly all of their goals came from that. We paid the price today and at times we were sluggish and weren’t at it and like I said we paid the price.
“We’re back in training tomorrow. A lot of things were said after the game and we need to put it to bed tonight. We need to be very disappointed because we should be, but forget about it tomorrow and move on tomorrow. Training tomorrow and we’ve got a big game on Tuesday.
“We need to win that and pick up momentum again. At the start of the season it’s always key to how the season will go ahead.”
With just two weeks left in the transfer window, is there enough time for United to bolster the required areas?
Let us know in the comments.