There wasn’t a single match I saw Pereira play which I thought he was “decent”. He was part of a shit run which he was a big contributor to.
I’m not a Lingard fan but he’s definitely given us more than Pereira ever has.
I actually did the stats back in January and you'd be surprised.
In the premier league he'd started 12 matches at #10 or right wing for 7 wins, 3 draws (including the match against Liverpool which was the first dropped points they had all season) and 2 losses.
In the other 10 matches we'd had at the time (which include him playing at CM, him coming on as a late sub, or him not playing at all) we had 2 wins, 4 draws, 4 losses.
I think I did those stats just before the losses against Liverpool and Burnley so that would have dropped his percentages a bit, but even with that it was notable that we performed far better with him than with the other two. The Arsenal match was also memorable when he was surprisingly dropped for Lingard, only for that to be an obvious mistake that we had to fix with a fairly early sub and he was one of our better players once coming on.
Once again I'll stress that I'm not saying he was great or anything like that. But of the three options he was the only one providing anything while the other two were both atrocious. His terrible form later in the season when he was playing in a deeper role seems to have made a lot of people forget that, when at the time (around January) pretty much everyone on the forum preferred him over them.