Forget Jadon Sancho - the solution to Manchester United's striker problem has been right under their noses

Whatever happened to drive a wedge between Jadon Sancho and Erik ten Hag over the last two years, they seem to have found a way to make nice – at least for now. Sancho may have been exiled from the first team last season and may have wound up on loan at Borussia Dortmund, but it’s now been widely reported that the former England international could easily end up as Manchester United’s starting striker for the new season.

It's a fairly surprising concept on a few levels, not least of which is the fact that Sancho’s refusal to apologise to Ten Hag over training ground disagreements led to his apparently permanent removal from the squad. An optimistic view of the situation is that the two have mended fences in private. A more cynical view is that United couldn’t find a buyer. Either way, and regardless of personal issues or attitudes towards the head coach, Sancho has simply not played well for his current employers over the last three years.

Nor has he scored very many goals. He managed to bother the scoresheet nine times in 68 Premier League matches in a red shirt, and while he did play thirty minutes as a centre-forward against Nottingham Forest last August, it’s not as though he’s spent much of his career operating as a number nine.

The vacancy has opened up because of an injury which will sideline Rasmus Højlund for an estimated six weeks – and because Ten Hag doesn’t seem to believe that new signing Joshua Zirkzee, himself more of a supporting forward anyway, is ready to start just yet. Sancho, then, is being considered alongside Marcus Rashford and Bruno Fernandes to start up top.

Rashford may seem like the more obvious candidate but if the long-term plan remains to play him as a left-winger (the position where he has played most of his best football) then there is a certain logic in allowing him to play wide and stretch play rather than making him the man needing to get on the end of the final pass – and in any case, it remains to be seen whether he can rediscover the form and confidence he lost last season in front of goal.

Fernandes, meanwhile, is a more established Premier League goalscorer – by quite a long chalk, come to that – but was absolutely essential to United’s attack as a number ten last season. If he doesn’t play in that role, it’s reasonable to wonder whether United would create enough chances for anyone playing at number nine.

In other words, one can imagine the leaps of imagination required to arrive at the idea of Sancho the Striker, even if he hasn’t demonstrated too much in the way of lethal form in and around the six-yard box recently. It’s not like he was firing them in away on loan last season, either. He scored three goals in 21 games.

But he has been a pretty free-scoring player in the past. During his first spell at Dormund, he hit double figures in three consecutive seasons – 49 goals in 111 games over a three-year spell, the form which persuaded United to splash a reported £73m on him in the first place.

And while he may have scored most of those goals as a winger, it was a high-pressing, advanced role which saw him making a lot of runs into the area – and indeed of the 38 league goals he scored for Dortmund, all but one was in the box, and they were scored off an xG of 23.6. He does have a track record as a fine close-range finisher. It’s just a matter of whether he can remember how to do it a few years on from his best form.

The worry, of course, is that he can’t. Sancho started up front in United’s two most recent pre-season friendlies, a narrow 3-2 win over Real Betis and a frankly concerning 3-0 defeat to Liverpool, and didn’t get himself on the scoresheet or look remarkably threatening in either game.

Meanwhile, Rashford has looked reasonably lively from out wide and Mason Mount was, mercifully, looking rather more like the player that left Chelsea in the number ten role during that otherwise depressing defeat to Arne Slot’s side. All of which rather suggested that it might well be Fernandes, not Sancho, who provides the answer up top.

Fernandes scores frequently, knows how to peel off defenders and find space and has the composure and experience not to fluff his lines in promising positions. And while he may also be the club’s key creative fulcrum, United may need to trust the money they spent on Mount and give him the chance to prove that he’s still got the creativity and skill around the edge of the area to create the openings that Fernandes did.

Maybe, one day, the old Sancho will re-emerge from the cocoon he’s constructed around himself since joining Manchester United, but whatever has caused his performance levels to drop does not yet seem to be resolved even if he has buried the hatchet with the manager. He was struggling before Ten Hag arrived, and until proven otherwise, it has to be assumed that those same struggles aren’t behind him just yet.

But the real problem for United is less about who will start up front in Højlund’s absence but how they have arrived, despite immense expenditure over the course of several years, at a point where they don’t have a trusted senior central striker. They have young talents and they have proven players out of form and they have a couple of number tens, but they lack a week-in, week-out number nine who can be relied upon to score the goals required to contend for the top four every season. And as Ineos figure out how to pilot the club going forward, figuring out how to fix that problem should probably be one of the very first steps.