Manchester United fans are celebrating the team's comfortable 2-0 victory over Manchester City in their preseason tour of United States. New signing Romelu Lukaku opened the scoring and just less than three minutes later, Marcus Rashford scored the second one for the Red Devils on Thursday.
Three out of three wins so far for Manchester United in their preseason tour and the future looks brighter for the club. Check out their entire pre season 2017 schedule.
The Lukaku and Rashford partnership is now being compared to one of the best forward lines in the history of the club, featuring Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole.
Considered as one of the deadliest strike combinations in the history of the English Premier League, their antics upfront led Manchester United to a hat-trick of English league titles in 1999, 2000 and 2001.
The pair of Yorke and Cole scored 53 goals between them and that combination remained one of the biggest highlights of Sir Alex Ferguson's legendary managerial career. The forthcoming legendary pairings of Wayne Rooney-Nisterlooy, Roy Keane-Scholes and Rio Ferdinand-Vidic continued that rich tradition of the club.
Ironically, Lukaku and Rashford also share the same jersey numbers as that of Cole and Yorke -- #9 and #19.
Can Lukaku and Rashford play together under Mourinho?
Although talismanic club forward Wayne Rooney has made the exit and Zlatan Ibrahimovic has been released, owing to his vicious knee injury, the forward line of Manchester United doesn't seem that bad, if the recent results are considered.
Lukaku, Rashford, Anthony Martial are the only players who can play in a proper centre-forward role for the club.
And it looks really unlikely that Jose Mourinho will be looking to deploying two centre-forwards upfront during the main 2017-18 season.
4-2-3-1 is Mourinho's preferred position. That said, the Portuguese tactician did use the 3-5-2 formation during United's first preseason match against LA Galaxy, which they won 5-2.
Mourinho has mentioned that he might look into changing a few tactics here and there to bring the best out of the team. A three-man defence needs the club to have plenty of defenders and Manchester United do have that at the moment in the form of Victor Lindelof, Eric Bailly, Chris Smalling, Danny Blind, Phil Jones.
Axel Tuanzebe, Timothy Fosu-Mensah and Marcos Rojo also seem comfortable to take up that position.
Luke Shaw and Antonio Valencia, hands-down, gets the left and right winger roles respectively in the 3-5-2 formation, while Carrick, Herrera, Fellaini, Paul Pogba or even Juan Mata, in a No.10 position, could fill up the three positions in the heart of midfield.
Having said that, the possibility of seeing the likes of Anthony Martial, Henrikh Mkhitaryan or even in that case, Mata, might be under heavy doubt.
Mourinho has cleverly played with all his men in various positions during the first three preseason matches, and it definitely gives him enough food for thought to deploy the best formation possible with the start of the new season.
