Jesse Lingard: From big game player to Manchester United outcast

The last time Manchester United visited Anfield, Jesse Lingard scored. Of course he did. It was Jose Mourinho’s last stand, and he picked a bizarre team including Matteo Darmian as a centre-back and excluding Paul Pogba. Liverpool racked up 36 shots.

But Lingard scored, and it scarcely ranked as a surprise. Back then, he was United’s big-game Jesse, a player who scored a disproportionate proportion of goals on the major stages. A couple of weeks earlier, he had scored against Arsenal. A month later, he did again, in the FA Cup.

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Richard Jolly

Richard Jolly also writes for the National, the Guardian, the Observer, the Straits Times, the Independent, Sporting Life, Football 365 and the Blizzard. He has written for the FourFourTwo website since 2018 and for the magazine in the 1990s and the 2020s, but not in between. He has covered 1500+ games and remembers a disturbing number of the 0-0 draws.