Manchester United began their pre-season campaign with a comfortable 5-2 thrashing of LA Galaxy in the early hours of Sunday morning (UK time).
In their first outing since clinching the Europa League trophy with victory over Ajax back in May, the Red Devils swept aside the MLS outfit with relative ease as a brace from Marcus Rashford as well as further goals from Marouane Fellaini, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Anthony Martial sealed an easy win.
But what did we learn from such a convincing result? Well here’s five things…
1) Jose Mourinho experiments with his formation
The most common formation associated with Jose Mourinho from his time at Porto, Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid and United is his reluctance to shift away from his favoured 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 systems – to his credit he’s been successful with those throughout his career.
However, against LA Galaxy he opted to experiment with a 3-5-2 system and it worked to perfection. Phil Jones, Chris Smalling and Daley Blind were deployed as the back three, with Antonio Valencia and Jesse Lingard used in the wing-back roles.
It also allowed Juan Mata to operate in his favoured no.10 role behind Marcus Rashford. Then allowed Romelu Lukaku and Anthony Martial to forge a partnership in the second half.
As a result, it would appear Mourinho was impressed with the system: “We have trained for five days and in these five days we trained for two days in the relation to this system.
“The improvements are in relation to four hours of work so I couldn’t expect much better, it’s something we have to keep working on in case during the season we decide to play three at the back.
“We did it twice against Rostov and maybe we want to do it more times.”
2) Marcus Rashford looks raring to go
Message delivered. Much has been said about the young England international and whether he will get many opportunities through the middle now that Romelu Lukaku has arrived. Well he got the chance against LA Galaxy and didn’t disappoint.
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He opened the scoring with a cool finish after just a couple of minutes and was grabbed another in a devastating 45-minute showing. In fact the only downside to his performance was failure to net a hat-trick as he was one-on-one with Galaxy keeper Jon Kempin but couldn’t finish.
Aside from that, Rashford looked very sharp and appears ready for the start of the new season.
3) United supporters get their first glimpse of two summer signings
They had to wait until the second half but Manchester United fans got to see their two big-name summer signings so far in action as Romelu Lukaku and Victor Lindelof were introduced to proceedings with the Red Devils 3-0 up.
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That allowed the pair to ease themselves into the game. Lukaku in particular held the ball up well to earn plaudits from Mourinho: “He didn’t score goals, but he played better than the ones who did score goals.
“A good thing for me today is he’s a team player and was not worried about himself. He was worried about the improvement of the team.”
4) Martial makes his case
There’s been a lot of speculation surrounding Martial. He didn’t have the best of a second season at Old Trafford and has been linked with a move away this summer – most recently as part of a swap deal involving Inter Milan winger Ivan Perisic.
Yet the Frenchman was put talk in regards to his future aside, climbed off the bench and impressed in the second half – even outshining debutant Romelu Lukaku at times – as he thrived playing closer to the Belgian striker instead of being stuck out wide.
Not only did he score, but he weighed in with an assist for Henrikh Mkhitaryan.
5) Will Timothy Fosu-Mensah make his mark next season?
Mourinho opted for a strong team in the first-half but gave a number of the club’s promising talent a chance to impress in the second half. Joel Pereira, Axel Tuanzebe, Andreas Pereira and Demetri Mitchell all featured, but it was Timothy Fosu-Mensah that had the greater impact.
Latching on to quite possibly the pass of pre-season from Paul Pogba the Dutchman picked out Martial in the area for the Frenchman to grab United’s fifth of the game.
After breaking into the first-team towards the end of the 2015/16 season, Fosu-Mensah didn’t see much game time last term. But at 19-years of age and capable of playing in numerous positions, maybe the 2017/18 campaign will be a fruitful one for the youngster.
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