An ode to Shinji Kagawa at Man Utd and the calmest hat-trick ever

Shinji Kagawa was not what you’d call an overwhelming success in his two years at Manchester United, but he still won plenty of fans in England, not least when he scored one of the calmest hat-tricks of all time.

One of my favourite useless Premier League facts is that while the competition has only ever had two players named Shinji, both won the title in their first season in England.

While Shinji Okazaki stuck around for four years in total at Leicester, his namesake and compatriot burned more brightly but for a much shorter amount of time.

Indeed, most players with Shinji Kagawa’s record at Manchester United might find their achievements shrugged off and their time at the club barely even acknowledged.

It says a lot about Kagawa’s quality, then, that United fans still hold him in very high esteem and curse the changes higher up which stood in the way of him becoming a hero.

In a sense, Kagawa moved to Old Trafford both at the best possible time and at the worst.

While much will be made of the wall he hit under David Moyes, he was the exact tonic United needed after narrowly missing out on the title to Manchester City in 2012.

While Robin van Persie’s goals were the difference when it came to accruing enough points to reclaim the title in Sir Alex Ferguson’s final season, the introduction of a classy, elegant player like Kagawa was similarly important.

Over the years, United have been blessed with players who are simply so lovely to watch that it becomes impossible for neutrals to hate every facet of the team – something which should be rare for a side so dominant.

Kagawa was supposed to follow in the mould of players like Eric Cantona and Dimitar Berbatov, which explains not only why fans of other clubs enjoyed seeing