When Odion Ighalo joined Manchester United in January, people remembered his five-month goal drought at Watford and three years in the uncompetitive Chinese Super League.
They’d forgotten he scored 20 goals in his first season in England and was among the Premier League’s leading scorers in 2015-16 with 15 – only Harry Kane, Sergio Aguero, Jamie Vardy and Romelu Lukaku bagged more discounting penalties.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer wasn’t so dismissive of the Nigerian’s pedigree though even he couldn’t have imagined the impact the 30-year-old has made. From being a last-minute loan signing, United are now prepared to pay £15million to make his transfer from Shanghai Shenhua a permanent one.
It’s a remarkable turnaround for Ighalo, whose original brief was to come and give Anthony Martial a few minutes’ rest here and there.
Instead, the boyhood United supporter has grabbed his lottery ticket with both hands. Though he hasn’t started a Premier League game, he has scored four times for his new club in the cup competitions, against Brugge, Derby (twice) and LASK, the latter courtesy of a wonderful finish worthy of some of the club’s greatest strikers.
Nobody is pretending Ighalo is a Cristiano Ronaldo or Wayne Rooney, but he brings qualities to Solskjaer’s frontline lacking in the rest of the squad, as talented as Marcus Rashford, Martial and Mason Greenwood are.
‘He has a physical presence,’ explains the United manager. ‘You get the ball up to him and he can keep hold of it.
‘It’s hard to be a central defender when he’s looking for you first and buys himself half a yard by his movement.
‘He is a different type of striker. He is experienced and has scored goals his entire career.’
