From Manchester United’s next big star to Aston Villa bench - Tom Cleverley’s future looks bleak

The future of Tom Cleverley looks far from certain with the midfielder failing to impress on-loan at Aston Villa, writes Richard Jolly.

Tom Cleverley, right, has lost his place in an Aston Villa side that is struggling in the Premier League. Phil Noble / Reuters

Being generous, it could be dismissed as wishful thinking. Viewed in another light, it is probably the most misguided statement of the season. Louis van Gaal had arrived at Old Trafford and Tom Cleverley felt he had an insight into the newcomer’s beliefs.

“I watched the manager’s Holland team in the World Cup and from that I think I’m going to be his type of player,” he said. Suffice to say he was not. Cleverley may have captained United against Roma in pre-season but he was gone by early September.

The British record signing Angel Di Maria is Van Gaal’s type of player. The World Cup semi-finalist Daley Blind is. Even the misfit Marouane Fellaini sometimes seems to be. Cleverley is not.

Yet in his defence, others have had an inflated opinion of his abilities too.

“He, to my mind, is probably the best midfield player in Britain, potentially,” said Sir Alex Ferguson in 2011. “He has fantastic promise.”

Three-and-a-half years later, Cleverley is not so much the finest midfielder in the country as the fourth best in a wretched Aston Villa side that is on course to become the least prolific in Premier League history.

Fabian Delph, Ashley Westwood and Carlos Sanchez all offer more, even though none has provided a finishing touch. It is one of the many startling statistics surrounding Villa that no one remotely resembling a central midfielder has scored all season.

Cleverley hasn’t created a goal, either. Include his United days and his last 38 league games, the equivalent of an entire season, have brought no assists and a solitary goal. Inevitably, that was against Villa.

Therefore, he can’t be described as a constructive midfielder. But nor is he a destructive one. It is little wonder many are confused as to precisely what Cleverley offers beyond an enduring ability to be ineffective.

Rather than standing out at a lesser club, he has taken capacity for anonymity from Old Trafford to Villa Park. It is not entirely surprising.

His last two years at United suggested he was one of too many slipstream players in their squad: those who could turn in reasonable performances in others’ slipstream, but were not leaders themselves, who did not have the personality, presence or, perhaps, quality to exert a decisive influence on a game.

At 25, he is not a young player any more but too many hid behind the excuse of youth for too long.

In Cleverley’s case, being neat and tidy in possession is not enough. Indeed, arguably his penchant for passing sideways has cost Villa their counter-attacking menace, which did represent their sole threat under Paul Lambert.

The manager’s tactical failings were a major factor in Sunday’s 5-0 thrashing at Arsenal, but it showed Cleverley lacked the athleticism to halt Arsenal’s more inventive midfielders.

There was something symbolic in the opposition. The biggest win of Cleverley’s club career came against Arsenal, Manchester United’s 8-2 victory in 2011 – and that sounds still more improbable now when you consider Ferguson’s central-midfield duo that day were the Englishman and the Brazilian Anderson – and so, now, has the joint heaviest defeat.

Yet that 8-2 win propagated the Cleverley delusion, that this was an attacking, creative central midfielder of the highest calibre.

That reputation was preserved in absentia, an injury sidelining him before a reality check could be applied. He was over-hyped – not least by Ferguson, who ought to know better – on the basis of few good but essentially unexceptional performances.

His reinvention as Michael Carrick’s less dynamic sidekick showed Cleverley in a truer light and, if he became an easy target for United fans on social media sites, it was difficult to question their assessment of his footballing inadequacies.

The greater fault lay elsewhere. Cleverley benefited from Ferguson’s extraordinary passiveness during a six-year spell when he did not buy a central midfielder and it is hard to escape the feeling that he owed his 13 caps to his status as a United player, rather than selection on merit.

The petition to ban Cleverley from England’s World Cup squad was cruel but indicative and, tellingly, he has not figured in Roy Hodgson’s squad since joining Villa on a season-long loan.

Their fans have cheered sarcastically when he was substituted and, with Cleverley out of contract in the summer, his negligible impact in a dismal team scarcely guarantees a future.

Roberto Martinez is still a fan, after a loan spell at Wigan in 2010/11, but even that was a qualified success rather than proof of Cleverley’s supposedly outstanding promise and he certainly would not figure in Everton’s strongest side.

Far from being Van Gaal’s type of player, it is ever tougher to see whose type of player Cleverley actually is.

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