Senne Lammens: Schmeichel and Man Utd setting another young player up for Old Trafford downfall

If you wanted to learn how best to speedrun the all-too frequent flopping of young Manchester United footballers in the stress cauldron that that football club has become, Peter Schmeichel is putting on a clinic.

A search for reasons as to why talented footballers arrive at the club and often briefly show promise before crumbling under the pressure should provide cause for introspection for the members of the Manchester United punditry caucus, who are absolutely just doing their jobs, but could also do with avoiding being so entirely hot and then cold, or vice versa, in their assessments of these players.

“We should have signed Emi Martinez,” Peter Schmeichel said just over two weeks ago. “In fact, we should have gone for Gianluigi Donnarumma when we had the chance.

“As for Lammens, I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of him until the link came up. I know his stats are excellent across the top ten European leagues. But that was with Antwerp in Belgium, in a team that finished fifth.

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“Stats don’t show how you react after a mistake, or how you cope with the pressure of Manchester United. That pressure is unlike anywhere else in football.

“Lammens could turn out to be the best signing ever – but right now, it feels like a hopeful one, and that’s not what United need at this moment in time.”

Lammens could be the kind of guy to use that as motivation, but may also have found it hard to ignore a legendary Manchester United goalkeeper a) admitting he doesn’t know who the f*** he is, b) insisting United should have signed someone else and c) ramping up the pressure by questioning his ability to cope with it.

And yet, after one (one!?) appearance for Manchester United, in which the fans serenaded the 22-year-old with chants of “are you Schmeichel in disguise”, one would hope with their tongues at least somewhere near their cheeks given he didn’t do an awful lot, Schmeichel claimed there was “some semblance to Edwin [van der Sar]”.

“First of all, it’s nice to see a clean sheet, then a really good and solid goalkeeping performance,” Schmeichel said.

“It’s what you see, you see this young lad, he didn’t really have much to do for a long, long time, he literally only had the ball at his feet and he did quite well.

“You’d expect that from any young goalkeeper these days – as that’s how they’re brought up – so there was some resemblance to Edwin, a couple of long balls, he had that first save down to his left, which you expect him to save, but once he’s done that, he’s a goalkeeper now, he’s saving balls.”

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Schmeichel did caveat his praise for Lammens by insisting “it’s far too early to talk about if this guy is good or not”, but you can’t help but laugh at Schmeichel’s admission that “it would be silly for someone like me to put more pressure on him” less than a minute after comparing him to one of the greatest Premier League goalkeepers of all time.

We get that he was asked about him and Lammens might not even be aware of what he’s said, but plenty of fans will have heard that and many will have read the article published by the official Manchester United website titled ‘LAMMENS: KEEPER OF PROMISE”. Again, after one actual game of football.

We love a kneekerk reaction, and balls in a vice, we would say Lammens looks like the real deal. But we have no skin in the game. If anything, another United goalkeeper being terrible is much more fun and thus more clickable for the majority of our readers.

Maybe Schmeichel and the rest of the cabal of United pundits are of a similar mind. Is it in their best interests for their former club to continue being a mess? If it’s not, we really think they should avoid comparing a goalkeeper with one Premier League appearance to another who’s won it four times.