Remembering Nick Powell’s right man, wrong time spell at Man Utd

Nick Powell became a bit of a laughing stock towards the end of his Manchester United career, but things could have been very different if the man who signed him stuck around.

In 2015-16, with Louis van Gaal’s United chasing the equaliser they needed against Wolfsburg to make it out of their Champions League group, their manager took off Juan Mata and brought on Powell for his first outing in the competition for three years.

‘Powell for Mata’ became a stick used to beat the Dutchman, before eventually veering into meme territory. Soon, you didn’t even need any context to see the phrase ‘Powell for Mata’ thrown around as if it was a sentence anyone ought to be able to understand.

But to restrict Powell’s United career to that low point is to do him a disservice in a number of ways.

First of all, United did find that equaliser after his introduction, only for lax defending to allow Naldo to restore Wolfsburg’s lead and put them back to where they were when he entered the field of play.

More importantly, though, while Powell was close to the end of his career at Old Trafford by December 2015, there’s another timeline where that may not have been the case.

When an 18-year-old wins a Player of the Year award, even in League Two, it’s going to make people sit up and take notice.

Powell was already on the radar of bigger clubs when he led Crewe to the play-off final, and the presence of so many eyes might have caused him to shy away, but instead it brought out the best in him.

It took him just 15 minutes to steal the show, scoring the kind of goal that makes you performatively rub your eyes. It was like watching a player from 2012 thrown into a game from 1992, such was the gap in terms of speed of thought and of movement.

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