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It is rare for a player to speak so candidly on a failed move but so strongly does the disappointment still burn within Wilfried Zaha on his difficult time at Manchester United that he has returned to it often, revealing much.
At the start of this season the Crystal Palace wide-man offered a frank account to Shortlist of his miserable two years in the north-west, describing it as ‘a hell’ endured without any support. He has also spoken elsewhere of the depression this drawn-out mismatch caused and been generally critical of the thirteen time Premier League champions for not giving him a fair chance to succeed.
When weighing up the evidence it’s hard not to accept that the 26-year-old flyer has a series of points.
What fascinates about Zaha’s time at Old Trafford is that so little of his torment derived from footballing matters. Granted he was afforded just two league appearances which barely allowed him time to assimilate his team-mate’s names never mind their movement. Furthermore, for a teenager burdened with huge pressures to perform and justify his fee, those 180 minutes amounts to a criminally scant opportunity.
Yet even so, much of Zaha’s woes derived from misgivings off the pitch rather than anything that occurred on it, with rumours soon doing the rounds that the extravagantly gifted winger had an attitude problem which partly explained his lack of first team action.
These whispers it transpired were entirely erroneous and considering that Zaha was a 19-year-old fish out of water surely it was beholden on the club to publicly dispel them? They didn’t. Soon after came another salacious piece of tittle-tattle with many believing that the reason David Moyes was so reluctant to trial his expensive talent was because Zaha had reportedly slept with the manager’s daughter. Again, this was nothing more than a mischief-making untruth, with the Ivorian later insisting he had never even met the girl in question.
The broader circumstances also hardly helped. In January 2013, with retirement looming for Sir Alex Ferguson, he paid £10m for a player who was routinely tearing apart Championship defences as he sought to freshen up an ageing squad for his successor. It then made perfect sense for Zaha to be immediately loaned back to Palace as they chased promotion.
What this ultimately meant however is that the winger arrived in Manchester to a club thrown into disarray and that situation only worsened as United lurched from one crisis to another. First Moyes hopelessly flailed and then Louis Van Gaal struggled to steady the ship and in their plights they perhaps understandably looked more and more to the familiar coupled with their own signings.
This then was hardly the best environment for a youngster with the weight of the world on his shoulders to find his feet.
If that in some way excuses all concerned and suggests that Zaha’s doomed stint at Old Trafford equates to bad timing it shouldn’t. The bottom line is that Manchester United had in their possession an explosive and direct attacker who has since gone on to win Crystal Palace’s Player of the Year award three years running. They played him twice before prematurely giving up on him and signing Angel Di Maria and Anthony Martial to replace him at a combined cost of over £100m.
United may well marvel now at Zaha’s exploits and think what could have been but they have nobody other than themselves to blame.