Time for your daily Jadon Sancho to Manchester United summer silly season update. It seems not a matter of if, but when the Borussia Dortmund winger will transfer from the Bundesliga to the Premier League. Currently teammates for country with England, Sancho and Marcus Rashford should likely soon be club teammates as well.
Sancho has barely played at the Euro 2020, only featuring in the third game, and that was just a cameo appearance, playing a handful of minutes, very late, off the bench. With England’s knockout round game coming against Germany tomorrow, Rashford expects the Dortmund man to play a much larger role.
Fair to say Rashford and Sancho have been spending some quality time together. pic.twitter.com/56MJP9lk98
— ?? (@TheFergusonWay) June 27, 2021
Sancho has scored 38 goals in 104 appearances with BVB since he moving up to the senior team in 2017, so he has thrived against the top competition in Germany for several years. His experience should come in handy tomorrow. When asked whether Sancho could be Three Lions’s most important player in this monumental match, Rashford said to ESPN:
“In a way yeah because he’s played a lot of football against them, more than the rest of us.
“I’m sure he knows the players, their characteristics, strengths and weaknesses and he’s definitely someone that can exploit them. If one thing doesn’t quite work we have a big opportunity to change things and adapt in the game.
“Adaptability is one of the biggest skills in football and there’s a lot of times in a game where you have to change or tweak something slightly to hurt your opponents. The fact that he’s played against them a lot, he’s hurt them a lot as well, it will be a big factor for us.”
It all makes sense and sounds well and good on paper, but what will actually happen in real life? The theory is sound, but how will it materialize? Given England’s struggles in attack this tournament thus far, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to try and shake things up in the final third.
They have only scored two goals this far in three games, both of which were accomplished by Raheem Sterling. Manager Gareth Southgate would be best served by switching it up a bit, and one has to wonder why he has barely given Sancho much of a chance during the group stages.
Ahead of Jadon Sancho on the depth chart are a lot of very talented and exceedingly skilled players, who have been producing- in addition to Sterling, Jack Grealish and Bukayo Saka have also impressed.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank, partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune.
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