IF you were to manufacture the ideal, modern-day midfielder he would look something like Paul Pogba.
Athletic, technically brilliant, good reader of the game, fantastic vision, scores goals, can defend, good in the air, unafraid of the physical aspect of the game and a fine tackler.
What’s not to love about Paul Pogba?
There are times he illuminates games, whether it’s by beating a player in a tight space, or finding a pass that no-one else sees or shooting from a ridiculous angle.
On his day, there is nobody better, nobody more imaginative.
Pogba tries things on a football pitch that others would never dream of contemplating. On his day, the Frenchman is a glowing reminder that spontaneity hasn’t completely left the building.
In an era where you could, quite literally, close your eyes and predict a passage of play and where the ball will end up, Pogba offers something different.
His unique skill set keeps us engaged in the game. Last Sunday against Leeds United, he produced moments of magic you would rarely see nowadays.
In the first half, he received the ball down the left flank. With one defender in front of him - the hapless Adam Forshaw - the safe thing to do was pass the ball back to a team-mate and for Manchester United to try another avenue of opening up the Leeds back-line.
Instead, Pogba stood Forshaw up, taunted him with a couple of feints before flicking the ball with his right foot onto his left and leaving the Leeds defender trailing in his wake.
Dribbling. The dying art of a midfielder. A decade or more ago, this moment of skill would have been commonplace - a midfield player beating another player with quick feet and imagination.
Later in the half, the Manchester United midfielder produced another audacious moment of skill.
Accepting a throw in from Luke Shaw, instead of playing a simple wall pass back to his team-mate, he flicked the ball over Forshaw’s head, collected it the other side before beating Luke Ayling and Pascal Struijk and laying it off for Bruno Fernandes to have a shot on goal from the edge of the box.
It was mesmerising – and with end product.
Paul Pogba is world class. On his day. An important caveat.
The problem though is that he simply doesn’t have enough good days.
Not for Manchester United at least.
For all his ridiculous skills, it feels as though Pogba’s footballing epitaph is already written at Old Trafford, and it’s not of the flattering kind.
He returned to Manchester United in 2016 in what were expected to be the peak years of his career. He'd enjoyed a sensational few seasons with Juventus where he was a key player in the Old Lady’s domination of the Scudetto.
A Champions League runner-up in 2015, Pogba was consistently justifying the burdensome ‘world class’ tag in Italian football.
The Juventus system appeared to suit him too.
He was part of a narrow midfield three in Turin.
Andrea Pirlo was the cerebral anchor with Pogba and Claudio Marchisio either side of him. In what could be described as an old-fashioned inside right position, it was Pogba’s best position.
It allowed him to move up and down the pitch and get involved in all aspects of Juve’s play.
It was as close as the modern game would get to preserving the all-action, box-to-box midfielder before more nuanced formations and midfielder’s playing in specific zones took over.
Clearly, United’s player recruitment, lack of stability since Alex Ferguson retired and perpetual tactical indecision from different managers certainly weren’t conducive to getting the best out of Pogba.
But neither did the seemingly constant rumours that the Frenchman was wanting to leave Old Trafford help.
Since he re-joined the club there hasn’t been one season where there wasn’t something leaked to the press suggesting Paul Pogba was “unhappy”.
The stories were so desperately predictable that sports hacks could cut-and-paste the rumours from the last time. It wasn't so much the uninspiring averageness he was always surrounded by on the pitch, it was the people that he surrounded himself with off it that was the problem.
United’s midfield options were always so bleak the club, like a scorned lover, perhaps felt that it simply had to tolerate Pogba’s constant behind-the-scenes agitation for a move away because he was still the most creative player on their books.
The club’s fans had finite patience too for the midfield axis of Fred and Scott McTominay – and so the mercurial Pogba always held out the hope that he could be the answer.
But, of course, Pogba’s erratic performances for several years now have been roaring at the club’s hierarchy that he is not the panacea.
Producing the goods in one in every four or five games can’t be the answer to ending United’s on-going woes.
They won’t be successful with Pogba or Fred or McTominay at the helm.
Worse, Pogba became all the more infuriating when he was able to perform such a disciplined midfield role for France that saw them win the 2018 World Cup and finishing runner-up at Euro 2016.
It’s ironic to suggest that a World Cup winner like Pogba, who turns 29 next month, never got close to fulfilling his rich potential for most of his club career.
On Wednesday night against Atletico Madrid, interim boss Ralf Ragnick substituted him on 66 minutes when the temptation was to keep their midfield creator on the field in the hope he would conjure one of those inspiring moments that lit up Elland Road three days earlier.
But with Atletico in United’s faces from the start, Paul Pogba seemed incapable of matching their opponents’ intensity and desire.
In retaining the enigmatic Frenchman all this time, Manchester United are getting what they deserve.
