'I see it in the dressing room' - How Casemiro is helping Kobbie Mainoo at Manchester United

When Casemiro won his first Champions League title, Kobbie Mainoo was a nine-year-old pupil at Cheadle Catholic Junior School who had just embarked on his tentative first steps to a career in football.

Mainoo joined Manchester United that year, but back then making it into the first team at Old Trafford was a pipe dream, a fantasy that became reality for barely a handful of boys. But the prodigious midfielder has always had the game and the character to make an impression and by his teenage years, he was earmarked as someone who had more than a fair chance.

That progression has accelerated under Erik ten Hag this season. Mainoo caught the eye of the United manager in pre-season and although his progress was curtailed by an ankle injury, he was immediately restored to the senior set-up when he returned and has now started nine games in a row.

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The last three of them have been alongside Casemiro, a five-times Champions League winner and 75-cap Brazil international who knows a thing or two about making it to the top of the game as a midfield player. The 31-year-old has taken his teammate 13 years his junior under his wing and it is a partnership that is showing signs of promise.

But if Casemiro has become Mainoo's minder at United, it is the younger man whose energy is bringing balance to United's midfield, making the former Real Madrid holding midfielder look much better than he did before suffering his own injury in November. The teenager from Stockport and the experienced midfielder from Sao Paulo are dovetailing on and off the pitch.

"Kobbie is very coachable,