Our first choice front 3 is Rashford on the left, Martial up top and James on the right.
None of whom are established strikers, which is terrible planning going into the season. Also if one gets injured our front line is in chaos. That's not good planning whatever angle you look at it. Signing a player like say Mandzukic or Cavani doesn't suddenly mean you are only buying ageing players. There needs to be a balance between the two and Ole has gone into an extreme.
Also his idea that there were no identifiable targets is a pile of wank. Lozano is a hard worker, young, rapid and can play left right or central. Only went for 40m and is much better than any right wing option we have. Haller is a player who can play physically, interchange, selfless and hard working. Also went for 40m. Players are there - Ole is just out of his depth. Both these players didn't even have a lot of competition for them. They were open goals.
Lukaku wanted to leave because he'd dropped to second choice CF, and Sanchez for similar reasons on the wings. There was no point keeping unmotivated players.
I don't blame Lukaku. To be dislodged by Rashford as the 9 is a farce. But an unmotivated Lukaku is of better use than no one. He equalled goals and Old sold him and cited Greenwood as the guy to help us out for fecksake. As for Sanchez, his professionalism can't be questioned. He was always giving 100% in training and Ole said it himself. I have little doubt he will do better at Inter than Rashford might here, or at least he will be comparable. And yet we sold both.
We tried to sign Eriksen and Dybala but neither wanted to come. What else could he have done?
This is the problem for fecksake. It's reactionary. You think these were Ole targets or from our scouting set up? One was running down his contract and the other had a for sale sign from his own club. Ole and the club just reacted to the situation and took a punt. It was a clear panic thing, in the dying embers of the window. There are no reported targets that Ole had, and he'd been involved in transfer talk since he was a caretaker. Outside of dembele who is bang average there's no one. There is nothing to show he knows about strategy or identifying targets.
As for what he was supposed to do, here's an idea, how about doing his job and motivating players that were looking to leave? If they want to go the door should be open
if we have replacements ready to recruit. If we don't, we keep them an extra year because we need them.
We could have kept them, but unhappy and unmotivated players is how Mourinho got sacked. We could have bought lower level mercenaries, but below par players is how LvG got sacked.
Mourinho got sacked massively because of his outings of transfer failures and bringing player mediocracy into the limelight. Which I think was needed and others thought was bad management. But hey, he was 9 points better off after the same number of games if I'm not mistaken, and he got sacked whilst Ole is still in charge. Go figure.
As everybody has been saying all Summer, the United revolution is going to painful because we're no longer going to go down the easy route of bringing in stopgaps who turn into deadwood. Beyond that, the recruitment was always going to be hampered by the reality of our fall.
Without repeating the mistakes of the previous two managers, Ole has done as well as can be expected in his non-coaching duties.
This is such a cop out answer. Yes there will be pain but there won't be absolute trash and below par performances versus sides that have worse squads than us. We may be down to bare bones but we have more quality than fecking Astana, Rochdale, AZ, Newcastle. I mean for fecksake no one can say "hey I told you it will hurt" to try and justify shit like that.