I blame myself for getting into this. Some of you guys want his quality outlined in black and white terms. Show me the stats, in other words. My assertion is that football can't always be reduce to these terms. If we're having trouble breaking down a team who've parked the bus, say Hull at home in the League cup, the man you pluck from the bench may not be the best player but the one who is going to disrupt the existing pattern of the game. Horses for courses. In the cited instance, Lingard was decisive. On other occasions, others were. I just think he offers a different type of movement from anyone else in our squad. It's not always effective of course.
Stats can be misleading, agreed, just watch the matches, it's obvious that he is way down on quality compared to Mkhi, Martial, Mata, Rashford and even Pereira now he's back, why should any of the aforementioned players be left out of the team in favour of Lingard. All of them have the ability to offer something special or different, it may not always happen but you stick Lingard on and you have a very high chance that he won't score, he won't cross, he won't dribble , he won't make a decisive pass and he'll almost certainly get in someone's way.
If Lingard never played for United again, no-one would notice.
One day, surely, on the Transfer tweets forum, some team, some manager, somewhere in the world, will be "interested" in Lingard, make an enquiry, make an offer, anything. No it never happens - because no-one apart from United is interested in him.