Player Focus: Is Tom Cleverley Manchester United material?

Tom Cleverley has a distinctive style of running, something that was particularly noticeable during Manchester United’s 2-2 draw at Tottenham last Sunday. Again and again, he spreads his arms, waddling with them outstretched so he looks like a confused penguin. Presumably he’s gesturing that his passing options are limited, but it’s hard not to turn the question around. Rather than him asking, “Where are you?” it’s as though he’s actually saying, “What am I doing here?” And the answer to that isn’t immediately clear.

After stints on loan at Leicester, Watford and Wigan, it was in 2011 that he made his United debut, coming off the bench in the Community Shield against Manchester City and playing a major part in transforming the game as United came from 2-0 down to beat City 3-2. It was Cleverley’s part in the second goal that stood out – a darting run, a lay-off, clever creation of space and then a flick that set up Nani to score. Here, it seemed, was a player of genuine verve and imagination, a new Paul Scholes perhaps.

That goal, though, was illusory. For United, Cleverley has only ever contributed three Premier League assists. For United in the league he has averaged just 0.7 key passes per game. He has scored just two goals in 49 Premier League and Champions League appearances for the Red Devils, both last season, but it’s the misses that live in the mind, especially for England.

It’s not a huge sample size so we should perhaps be cautious of making too definitive a judgement of him, but there is a clear contrast between his time at Wigan, when he averaged 1.6 shots per game, and his two full seasons at United, when he has averaged just under a shot per game. This season that figure is down to 0.4. Whatever he is, Cleverley is not an attacking midfielder, and certainly not the reincarnation of Scholes.

The really striking thing when looking over Cleverley’s two and a bit seasons as a United player is how his obvious defensive attributes have improved. He’s gone from 1.1 tackles per game in 2011-12 to 1.7 last season to 2.1 this. Again there must be a caveat about sample size, but interceptions per game have also increased, from 0.5 to 0.7 to 1.2. Those aren’t startling figures (particularly not set alongside his United team-mate Michael Carrick, who has made 1.9 tackles per game and 4 interceptions per game this season), as they place Cleverley 63rd for tackles and 87th for interceptions of Premier League regulars, but it does perhaps begin to suggest the sort of player he is becoming, that he is taking on a more defensive role.

Cleverley’s real strength, though, is his passing. His pass completion rate has dropped slightly from his first season, down to 88.7% from 91.5% – still good enough to leave him 24th in the division – but his passes per game has gone up from 30.5 to 55.1, the 22nd highest figure in the Premier League. He has, in other words, begun to develop into a facilitator, one of those players who just keeps the ball circulating, without necessarily creating much with it or doing huge amounts to win it back.

That can be an important role in a side – think of how Paul Lambert brought the best out of others at Borussia Dortmund when they won the Champions League in 1997 – but there are two big issues. Firstly, who are the players around him? It’s only worth having a facilitator if there’s something to facilitate: you can imagine Cleverley forming a useful midfield three with a destroyer like Phil Jones and a creator like Shinji Kagawa, but given the preference for playing a front two with Wayne Rooney off Robin van Persie, that has little tactical relevance in United’s present system; to play a three-man central midfield would mean width having to come from wingers alongside a central striker and that means either Rooney playing wide or either he or Van Persie being omitted, neither of which is likely to happen.

And secondly, why has he developed like that? After all, Cleverley is 24: it seems odd that at that age we should still be querying how he is best to be deployed. And, perhaps even more pertinently, what happened to that adventurous dasher of the Community Shield? Was that always a misleading 45 minutes, or has the spark somehow been coached out of Cleverley?