United youngster embarrasses Liverpool!

On Wednesday, while United and City's relative midfields were taking up a strategy of confrontation similar to those in parts of World War I, in the sense that both sides were camped in their own territory and rarely advancing, Wigan Athletic were pushing Liverpool onto the back foot, with the creativity of Charles N'Zogbia and Tom Cleverley attacking forward from midfield.

21 year old Manchester United midfielder Cleverley took the Championship by storm last season with a series of superb performances for Watford, which helped bring the youngster to the attention of both Sir Alex Ferguson and England under 21 manager Stuart Pearce.

An excellent talent, Cleverley was again farmed out, this time to Premier League strugglers Wigan Athletic, similarly to Chelsea youngster Scott Sinclair, who is now firing for Swansea City in the Championship. Say what you want about Lucas and Raul Meireles, they both struggled to deal with Cleverley's willingness to get the ball down in the ground, in a style that no doubt will have made him popular with manager Roberto Martinez, the way the Spanish manager likes his teams to play.

It's not the first strong performance from the youngster this season; his assist for Alcaraz's equaliser against Sunderland and his performance against Bolton both showing that despite having been picked for less than half of Wigan's Premier League games so far this season, Cleverley is impressing a lot more than players Ferguson didn't loan out like Darron Gibson and is starting to put in consistent high quality performances that should soon see him as the possible replacement for Paul Scholes that Gibson simply doesn't quite look capable of.

United need a player with the ability to break forward down the middle like Lampard does for Chelsea and Gerrard does for Liverpool and Tom Cleverley might just be that man.





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