Yesterday's game was the first time in history (since pressing systems like this weren't incorporated before) where I've seen United play through the press of a top team. In big games, we usually have had to rely on massive exertion of energy to get through the games before having to deal with lulls where we get peppered, but yesterday, through playing out of the back effectively, we were able to manage Arsenal for most of the game; that's new and not enough people are realizing it.
Why did this happen? Because after spending a few weeks getting used to Onana, we were finally truly able to use Onana's ball playing abilities, which allowed us to keep the ball far longer than we have done in games like this. Why didn't we do this before? Because we didn't have the keeper or central defenders with the confidence to do this, but we can do it now. City and Liverpool have been tiring out our presses and creating gaps in our centre through doing this for years, and for the first time in our history, we are actually able to do this too. That's fantastic and a massive sign of progress.
Last season we did this with our defence and midfield, which allowed us to control games and was the reason for the home form we enjoyed. In my opinion, this will help us in a lot of our more difficult away games with high pressure teams which we've struggled with for years.
Yesterday exposed another problem we've had for years, since Lukaku left, with our attack. Depending on Bruno to drop things on a plate for our attackers to create anything. Yesterday's game made me realize that we've been wasting years without a striker. We've had Ronaldo, Martial and Rashford playing that role without truly being true strikers. Hojlund came in, and you could see the clear lines and link up. You could see a proper target for our attackers and you could see the movement created for himself and others with the small sample size. We spent 25 years with Sir Alex where he focused so heavily on getting really good strikers and ensuring they had good rotations only to not have those things for almost 5 seasons. People lambast our decisions in the final third, but haven't realized that most of that comes as a result of having no proper presence in the box to play with. Hence, having to play almost individually in attack.
My point here is that with this realization ( and potentially getting depth there in future), I feel we will also improve significantly in attack. This will help our away form as we wouldn't be relying on complete dominance or moments of brilliance to ensure away goals.
Fans need to understand how poorly made our team was for modern football prior to ETH's arrival and how much has been already achieved. The progress isn't linear and ETH isn't perfect, like any other manager. There are system tweaks and changes that won't work, there are players that we sign that won't work and there are in game decisions that are made that won't work, but it's all part of the process and learning. No manager is that exceptional, Pep literally had to tweak systems and sell players to get this current shape that led to the treble. Prior to that he experimented with a 4231 and has even experimented with a 352. Add that to the fact that we've suffered a lot of injuries, and are having to rely on the depth that Ten Haag banked on. Despite not having Mount, Varane, Shaw, Malacia, Amad, Amrabat and Hojlund for most of the season so far, we've been able to pull out really good starting xi's. That's a sign of how far we've come and how much we haven't had the chance to do yet due to all the changes
