Antony is the best in the Premier League for winning possession back in the final third | OneFootball

Manchester United’s Antony surprisingly leads the Premier League in the amount of times he has won back possession in the final third this year.

The Brazilian has endured a season from hell and seems to have lost his place in the starting lineup to fan favourite Amad Diallo.

Such has been the form of the former Ajax man that he is unlikely to start the FA Cup final on Saturday against Manchester City.

He has played 38 games this season, scoring three times while providing two assists. Poor numbers for a £86 million signing, even though the massive price is not his fault.

However a recent Premier League statistic has highlighted the one thing the winger is good at.

Antony leads the league in terms of most possessions won back in the final third per 90 minutes of action.

He wins possession back on average 1.7 times a match in the upper regions of the pitch and this is substantially more than Crystal Palace’s Eberechi Eze and Everton’s Beto who win the ball 1.4 times a game, in joint second place.

Erik ten Hag spoke at the start of the season that he wanted to transform the team into the best transition team in the world. He wants his team to press high and aggressively up the pitch, and punish opposition mistakes in a flash.

United certainly have the pace upfront to do this with Alejandro Garnacho, Rasmus Hojlund and Marcus Rashford.

However, what has been missing this season is a unified pressing structure from back to front with Ten Hag’s men too easy to play around. They have ironically ended up defending more transitions than they have actually managed to create.

No winger should be deemed a success due to how much they press, especially an £86 million signing. It is not only a numbers game when it comes to analysing Antony.

He regularly fails to get involved in games and when he does, he often loses the ball running into blind alleys or taking very little care with his passing, much to the frustration of United fans around the globe.

This commitment to carrying out his coach’s instructions and do the dirty work probably explains why Ten Hag was so eager to keep him in the lineup earlier in the season, even when it was obvious to most that he wasn’t good enough so start regularly at a club like Manchester United.

His poor form has meant that there have been rumours that the club are open to offloading him in the summer and should Erik ten Hag also leave, the chances of the Brazilian departing will also go up substantially.

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