I am hoping Martial will be available more after WC. I have a feeling he is just being very careful right now.
Erik ten Hag - Manchester United manager / awaiting clarity from the club over his position
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Imo Maguire was sent in not to score but rather to win headers and create chaos in their box. A second ball or a bounce off from some crap hoofball then a tap in would be more than enough.
As long as we keep winning I ain’t complaining.
Hope we draw Barca.
Hope we draw Barca.
No knives here. EtH is clearly a better coach and I much prefer this way of playing and building up. However I'm also not blind to his flaws. I don't like the way he chases games. There was no need for us to go the weird 3-3-3-1 route. All he had to do was put Bruno through the middle and Rashford on the right. He overthought himself.
This is something LvG used to do too. Just throw a big body forward and start hoofing it to him with 10 MINUTES to go. There was soooo much time to just play normally - maybe just look for more precise killer balls instead of overplaying around the box and we'd be fine.
Ole is clearly a worse coach - but that doesn't mean you can't appreciate certain things he did do better (like chasing a game) that EtH will have to get better at too. And all United fans should want him to get better at it too.
The season isn’t over yet. If we don’t end up top 4 I would be disappointed.Isn't it very clear that we are doing much better than last season? In our 16 games since the opening 2 which were clearly a different situation, we've won 12 games, drawn 2 and lost 2. The feck are you on aboutnot to mention seeing our actual football on the pitch. The way we've played against other big sides.
You seriously have to be a WUM to not see the painfully obvious improvement in us.
The last thing we needed was 2 extra games.Tweet
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Even with half his face obscured, Southgate's nose makes it into the picture.Could have been worse.
1. Bruno is far too careless with possession. His Hollywood balls and flicks rarely come off and it’s a systematic disaster in a possession-based side to rely on a #10 who is so erratic with the ball.
2. He is a much greater liability defensively through the middle as any physical midfield just brushes him aside as if he isn’t even there.
3. Floating into half and wide spaces isn’t rocket science. It is something any quality midfielder can do while not putting us at such risk with and without the ball. And furthermore, Bruno’s crossing is probably the most consistent part of his game. So a wide berth if anything utilizes the best part of his game.
In short, get used to seeing Bruno out wide. It is management 101 for ten Hag or any other competent manager. And if he doesn’t improve centrally or out wide get used to seeing him on the bench. It might not happen this season but if we add options this summer it will definitely happen the next.
Surely that isn't getting the line up wrong. It is the players were poor on the night.
It's obviously not black and white. The manager takes some of the blame for picking the players who don't perform but generally I agree with you the player should be expected to not be poor at the very least.
Thing is last night was ETH experimenting especially with his changes and starting Donny and i think both of those key decisions he got wrong.
Put the phone down Ole.
Completely agree. We finished second due to the poor showings against the other two teams, not due to last night's result. We should have hammered the other two teams in each leg.
Changes in second half last night didn't work, that's fine, he is only 4 months in he job. No big deal.i just hope financially we can back him in the summer - that's the only concern I have.
I guarantee you Ronaldo gets dropped the moment our other forwards, especially Martial, are fit. It’s not so much about being unable to handle Ronaldo (he’s proven that he’s quite clearly capable), it’s about the lack of options in the squad.
Sigh... Its almost impossible to have a conversation without people making all about that. Yes I love ETH and would much rather him be manager than Ole. And yes we chased games much better in his two good years. They're not contradictory.
We finished 2nd because of shite refereeing
Martinez misses our 1st RO32 match because of 2 shite refereeing decisions against a Spanish side. Go figure.
Both is true, to be fair. If we beat Omonia by more than one goal, the penalty wouldn't have matteredWe finished 2nd because of shite refereeing
tbf I could say the same thing about Sociedad having a 2-1 result against Omonia in the group. It's not like Sociedad was banging in goals. They finished with 10 goals same as us. The difference being they got a gifted 3 points when it should have been 1.
Putting Maguire up front was definitely the manager trying to be clever. There were still attacking players on the bench.
You could argue that the sub would've been the most attacking one, if he brought in Maguire as a defender and we reverted back to 4-2-3-1 with Dalot and Shaw providing some offensive output again. Instead we lost all shape and any idea of what to do
I'm hoping this is the case and I'll be carefully watching what he does in the Aston Villa game since all of Martial, Antony and Sancho will likely be available. But it's quite odd how Ronaldo hasn't missed a single minute of football since his episode. Prior to that Ten would bench him or sub him off when stinking up the place but that hasn't been the case since his reintegration with the team. He's been allowed to put in mediocre performances 3 games in a row without getting subbed. Makes one wonder.
Exactly this.
It was clear that we were struggling to play out with 3 at the back. Reverting to our standard formation and giving De Gea the option of two centre backs or the full backs to play through would've made us better going forward. Plus without the full backs making forward runs Garnacho and Bruno basically become non entities. Our whole front line vanished apart from when they were contesting aerials out of the back.
After the subs we played virtually no football. We couldn't build up because of the shape so our players resorted to long ball football. For pretty much half an hour our 'tactic' was boot it to Ronaldo, then Maguire, and hope for the second ball.
I'm still surprised that Ten Hag didn't keep faith with his traditional approach. Against Newcastle and Sheriff, for the most part, he stuck with 4-2-3-1 and just had the team keep playing until they made that final chance. Against Newcastle Rashford missed, against Sheriff McTominay scored, however there was no panic. We stuck to playing football and eventually made an opening.
I could be wrong but I feel like, had we just stuck to what we know best, we would've made at least 1 more good chance in that last half an hour.
Ten Hag panicked and p-d the bed. That's the only explanation I have for that second half. Even if you wanna resort to long ball football, do it on 80 minutes not 60 minutes. Such a huge and unneeded departure from the quality, systematic football we have been trying to play since Ten Hag took over.
Thanks, FA, for needlessly cancelling 2 of our games when the Queen died.
Exactly my feeling as well. Keep playing a not great but decent game and the chance would come. Change everything to something clearly no one is comfortable with, and we didn't even get close
Actually I’m not sure what all the fuss is about bringing Maguire on as forward?
It’s a pretty standard tactic in a "nothing to lose" situation to put a good in air defender up front to pressure the defence. Like sending the goalie up for a corner.
Ok it didn't work but it's hardly some weird esoteric approach.
It’s a pretty standard tactic in a "nothing to lose" situation to put a good in air defender up front to pressure the defence. Like sending the goalie up for a corner.
Ok it didn't work but it's hardly some weird esoteric approach.
Best manager we’ve had since Sir Alex. We’re actually heading in the right direction at last. If we can somehow remove our parasitic owners next then we’ll in very good shape.
Exactly. Too many so called fans in here slagging the manager when things don’t quite go our way. Where are these fans when he gets it right, like most of the time so far in his reign??? It’s blatantly obvious that EtH is by far our best manager since Fergie.
I'm of the same opinion. At the point it didnt matter if we ended up shipping 2 goals as a result of us trying it - it was score one more or nothing. The options were threadbare and to be fair to ETH he pushed us forward with the Lindelof sub - basically playing with the 1 CB with one or 2 of the CMs dropping back if needed. Get the goal, Maguire goes back to CB and we play on the defense (notice all the attacking mids were off for the defensive ones). It was a gamble which didnt work out but thats exactly what gambles are.
Think it's a common approach I generally disagree with. Of course there are cases where it works beautifully, but in my experience 'throwing the kitchen sink' at an opponent quite often has the opposite effect. Bringing in an additional striker (or in this case defender as CF) kills the system, balance and cohesion the team has, unless it's used to it. You see it with many teams, but unless you manage to bombard the opponent with crosses and deadballs, it's rarely effective since the attacking play suffers from the lack of system.
As expected.
Really, just based on that one half?
People find it very difficult to praise, but are ready to spam out their lives in the first half chance they get to criticise.
Hate modern social media lifestyle. Really.
Hate modern social media lifestyle. Really.
Before the subs we played no football either. We were piss poor for the first 15 minutes of the second half. When you're flat out of attacking options on the bench and playing as badly as we were then you can see the logic in trying something radical.
By all accounts, the 3331 formation we ended up playing is something he used a lot at Ajax when chasing a game. So this wasn't panic. This was something he's used many time before, in similar situations. And obviously something we've worked on in training.
So, is everyone injured now? Martial, Antony, Sancho, Elanga? Why did we need to play Bruno on the Right Wing? Where is this obsession coming from?
I don't care that much about the subs he made yesterday, we played no football all game and I guess we had no options. The biggest worry is Eriksen looks done.
Edit: Elanga was on the bench, so I guess ETH is a big fan of Bruno in whatever position.
I don't care that much about the subs he made yesterday, we played no football all game and I guess we had no options. The biggest worry is Eriksen looks done.
Edit: Elanga was on the bench, so I guess ETH is a big fan of Bruno in whatever position.
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Don't think that was obvious at all. Absolutely nothing against changing system and getting creative, but McT as RWB for example didn't look like anything we've practiced before
What did Ole do when he chased games?
I'm giving ETH the benefit of the doubt that he played such a weird system in a game that we technically could afford to lose. If there was any match that he could experiment in and see if it was a proper option going forward, this was probably it. Obviously League Cup (and to a lesser extent FA Cup) matches are also an option, but those probably won't have most of our starting 11 so it would be useless in that sense.
Obviously it would have been great to not have to play those extra two games, but either way we were still going through.
I do hope not to see something like that in a more important match that we're chasing.
Obviously it would have been great to not have to play those extra two games, but either way we were still going through.
I do hope not to see something like that in a more important match that we're chasing.
It didn't look like it.
We didn't play particularly well at the start of the second half. We didn't play particularly well first half either. However, playing our normal game we still managed to get people up the pitch and get into dangerous areas at times.
As I said, I compare it to what he did against Newcastle and Sheriff, where he kept faith with plan A despite it not working and eventually fashioned chances late on.
Our fullbacks are so crucial to our attacking play, thanks to Ten Hag, and we struggled to do anything without them underlapping. I was hoping when Maguire came on it was to go back to a back four, because it was clear we had gotten worse having changed the shape.
I'd much rather Ten Hag do what he has done so far in previous games, even the loss at Brentford when we got embarrassed, and just stick to the chosen system.
You honestly think an elite manager with a reputation for attention to detail and heavy involvement in coaching would try a formation/tactics in our biggest game of the season that he hadn’t worked on in the training ground beforehand?