Unleash Chido Obi! Teenage goal machine can inject life into injury-ravaged Man Utd's hopeless season and give Rasmus Hojlund the reality check he needs

Ruben Amorim is not usually shy about making substitutions during a game, be it hauling off Joshua Zirkzee after 33 minutes against Newcastle or the nine changes he has made at half-time in his 21 games in charge of Manchester United. And yet as he watched his side toil to the eighth defeat of his tenure at Tottenham on Sunday, the coach did not look to his bench until the 89th minute, when he decided to hand 17-year-old Chido Obi his debut.

There was a good reason for the Portuguese's inaction: United's sudden injury crisis mean that eight of his nine substitutes had no senior experience with the club. The only player who did was Victor Lindelof, who was returning from a long lay-off from injury and was not exactly the player United needed as they searched for an equaliser.

Obi had less than four minutes to make an impact against Spurs and, perhaps unsurprisingly, he did not touch the ball. His debut merely served as an opportunity to get him in the record books as United's third-youngest debutant in the Premier League and to get a taste, however brief, of playing in front of 60,000 people and millions more on television.

But the fact that Amorim turned to Obi shows just how much potential the teenager has and how much faith the club has in him. So with United so shorn of hope in any form, the time has come for Amorim to unleash the prolific teenager to give the team the shake-up it needs...