What a load of nonsense sorry.
Erik ten Hag - Manchester United manager
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
The injuries are a real bummer; we are finished this season. We have a whole medical department; I don‘t believe Ten Hag would throw on players who aren‘t declared ready, like Martinez.
I would be interested to see how much ‚running‘ we do compared to other teams. It sure looked as though we were outmatched and outrun by Brentford. Maybe someone can look into this.
If we top the stats for running and sprints, the criticism of Ten Hag could be valid.
We aren‘t the only team that suffers from a lot of injuries (although we are probably the worst affected); the PL is very intense and managers have been complaining about the amount of games.
Going forward, we should probably put more emphasis on recruiting healthy athletic players who can ‚survive‘ the PL.
Also we need a stronger ‚2nd team‘ squad so we don‘t drop levels when rotating players. Right now we have trouble putting out a good squad period.
I would be interested to see how much ‚running‘ we do compared to other teams. It sure looked as though we were outmatched and outrun by Brentford. Maybe someone can look into this.
If we top the stats for running and sprints, the criticism of Ten Hag could be valid.
We aren‘t the only team that suffers from a lot of injuries (although we are probably the worst affected); the PL is very intense and managers have been complaining about the amount of games.
Going forward, we should probably put more emphasis on recruiting healthy athletic players who can ‚survive‘ the PL.
Also we need a stronger ‚2nd team‘ squad so we don‘t drop levels when rotating players. Right now we have trouble putting out a good squad period.
He‘s our only cb who can play Ten Hag‘s system. He is pivotal to two aspects:
1. Playing through the opponent‘s press quickly so we can attack in space
2. He can defend aggressively on the ball, stepping up instead of sitting back
The 7-0 was a statistical freak game we should have lost 3-1, it has nothing to do with Martinez. The whole team fell apart after going behind.
Lately, i feel like I can live with him being our manager for years despite the fact that I strongly believe that he will not be able to win major trophies. Perhaps I've given up resisting, or I've seen a spark of hope deep within that I can't recall.
Right now I think that we are tied for 5th, and as far as I can remember we haven't actually been much higher than that this season. While we have not been healthy, we haven't been the worst affected, especially since it seems to be the same teams that are healthy or not healthy.
And you brought up the comparison to Spurs and Villa.
Stop the broken high press, play more compact, go for real counter attacks with this squad. Committing the players to a high press and trying to have them score on high transitions doesn't work for United, covering for a not great defence by just scoring more doesn’t work. But it does for Villa and Spurs, which is why I mentioned their goals.
And give injured players the time they fecking need. Play with a kid one more match to give time for proper recovery and just accept you might lose a match more in the short term but be better off during the rest of the season. EtH almost always seems to field his nominally best team and runs it into the ground.
Edit: Also top 4 is stupid as a target. Set your targets in relation to your capabilities. Economically only City is in a better place, potentially Newcastle as well, but so far FFP seems to limit that. One team always can go on a great run, so top 3 would be acceptable for United in my opinion. Everything below is a bad season.
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This season has been really, really depressing after what was a relatively decent first season in charge for ETH. I don't understand the football whatsoever, and we look utterly abject the majority of the time.
A couple more of bad performances will extinguish that spark. If we drop off further surely the club will act.
The way this season has gone, we could expect anything in terms of performance. I‘m worried though that the back to back games will do us in.
Why did he change to Transition football, can anyone explain cause I don't understand the logic behind that!?
Not good enough in possession or against a press so we bypassed.
Those are obvious answers. The other ones being to not play on the counter and coach possession football if you don't have the players to effectively use a gegenpress approach. And there is no excuse to be made about player suitability, LVG did exactly that with worse technicians in the team, he beat possession football into their backsides and I suspect that with someone like Bruno in the final third, the team would have been a little bit more threatening, to a small extent at his best he can mirror a Litmanen.
Transition football was his bread and butter outside of Ajax and possession Football wasn't an obvious fit for our team or a requirement from the club.
But EtH said he wants to build a transition team.
But either way the key point is: make the team more compact. No matter if you move the defence up or retreat the offence.
Yeah in the context of defence.
Playing more compact would be a step back. We wouldn’t then be learning any of the long term phases of play that are needed to be a top side.
In terms of high press we’ve tackled the most in the final third so our front line is developing that skill. It’s far from perfect but it’s the right direction for long term rather than trying to win a league eventually though counter attacking from deep. At some point you need to train parts of the long term plan. This is what I think they are trying to do albeit in a very disrupted season.
I think it’s very easy for us to say how to manage a side with injuries, especially one with the pressures of United. Most managers try to play their best sides as much as possible the difference is where we are getting most of our injuries those players aren’t able to rest due to the injuries so it becomes even more brutal.
What do you see the alternatives as being?
Long term I think we will be.
I'll like to see us asset and dominate games for a change is that a difficult ask?
Well yes actually, that’s quite difficult to do in the PL. It’s taken Arsenal about 3 years to get there.
I know. My point was that outside of the obvious answer that you gave, there are other answers that go in different directions and are also viable. We are not actually forced to do what we are currently doing.
It's like Klopp pre-2015. He was the pope of modern gegenpress(sorry Ralf), he tried to apply it with Liverpool and it wasn't really working so he moved to a more possession driven approach.
Yeah but still no Martinez. It is impossible to play well without Martinez.
Looking deeper into those injuries we certainly stand out as having so many important players out. 75% of our main backline is injured along with half the backup options. City and Arsenal are virtully at full strength.
It's not about distance but intensity / number of sprints. You can run 12km at a sustainable pace and be fine but you can easily wreck your body doing half that if you are regularly overexerting yourself.
I refuse to believe you actually mean this. We haven't been able to control a game at all regardless of the opposition. The worrying signs we saw against Wolves the first match has been present in pretty much every single game this season, whether it's City or Newport.
Rest periods come when the team controls the game and retains possession, and because we can't do that then the team needs to chase the ball/game all game long, hence why they tire out in 15 mins and concede control.
In a way I agree. Still the top sides play more compact than United, just high up the pitch. So yes retreating into a deeper position would be a step back. My feeling is that it's easier to at first train a team to be in a compact shape and then move the whole team up, but that's a personal preference and I don't see it as a fact.
That's nice but at the moment ultimately useless as it doesn't lead to the amount of goals you would expect. And I believe that this also is caused by the lack of compactness in the team. Those who win the ball are more or less on their own, there are not (often) enough players nearby who can support.
So either drop this approach at the front which is a lot of effort and little to show for, or finally make sure that the team supports the forwards well enough.
To put it bluntly: order Onana to kick the CB's a** until they are close to the center circle on the pitch.
I'm sorry but when we get outplayed by the likes of Brentford, and injury hit Brighton, Fulham, Crystal Palace, Bournemouth, Wolves etc then this is a really invalid point. We had a £350m bench against Brentford, probably cost double or triple what their first team cost. Not to mention the fact that their injury issues are worse than ours and they played with a clear, effective plan regardless. I'm bored of this argument about our squad, we have backup players that would walk into other teams and yet our entitled fans think all our players are just shit because they can't drag us through every game. Man for man we have more quality than many teams in the league.
It pretty much says that in the next paragraph down. But yes, entire - you cannot be high octane on both sides of the ball for extended periods of time as it risks injury, exhaustion and mental fatigue. Without rest possession, players can't clear their heads and compose themselves, which is why it's gut-wrenching to see us have the ball after winning it back and then losing it again inside 6-10 forced, overly vertical passes, only to repeat the same stupid cycle again.
It doesn't take long to break a team playing like that; it doesn't take a team playing like that long before they break down.
Not necessarily true. Arteta turned Arsenal into a possession based team pretty quickly and they played good football, they just didn't always get the results but were transitioning to a much more youthful side. Of course they were inconsistent, but the signs were always there that they were heading in the direction towards where they are now.
Well there are two solutions. Ten Hag and the club should have signed a capable back up/alternative in the 4 transfer windows he's been here. Or change the system to suit the players available.
A manager can't employ the 352 formation, have a shite season and then blame it on the fact he doesn't have wingbacks to suit the system.
I dont want to be pedantic but we didn't get "outplayed" by Wolves and Palace.
I agree we got played off the park in the others though.
If the injury issue was our manager he wouldn’t be managing any club and Ajax would have had similar issues. Fitness of the team is not down to a manager.
In the Netherlands you play less matches and some of them can be played with less intensity than in the PL. An approach that works well there can push players over the edge when you don't adjust it for the PL. So I don't agree about Ajax proving it's not EtH's fault.
Fitness of a team in literally every sport is down to the manager and the coaching staff. Conditioning and rest aka fitness are planned by the coaching staff and specifically the physical trainers based on what the head coach wants.
His Ajax tenure adds weight to the argument. If it’s how ETH is coaching them, then why weren’t we getting the same injury’s last season ? Why only this sesson has it been so bad ?
City can rotate players at will, they have a massive squad of quality players. Liverpool actually had a similar drop off in performance last sesson, like United this season. The thing that connects the teams is amount of games played. They played 63, we played 62 (and a World Cup in between). And both squads looked exhausted.
Difference with Pool is that they had a settled squad and one that had already been very successful so an easier adjustment to make.
Expand that out, other teams are struggling with injuries. Not to the extend we are but there seems to be a serious amping of injuries across the board. More games for players , less down time , even more time with 10-15 mins injury time in games. It’s easy to plot the more probable reason.
Okhams razor suggests it’s nothing to do with ETH.
Martinez was signed in the first window, we also needed rw, gk, st, dm and cm upgrades and replacements.
Wingbacks? We play with inverted fullbacks.
I’ve said before that one mans ‘ton of excuses’ is the next man’s ’mitigating factors’ based on perspective.
I’ve also not seen a single poster (myself included) claim ETH to be the greatest manager alive. Thats just silly.
I do think however that now isn’t the right time to change managers. We need to do things properly and get the hierarchy up and running first. I also believe ETH will thrive with the proper support (like he had at Ajax)
Tough to debate with hyperbole like this
No it’s not. Like transfers and transfer fees are not down to managers. The reason we are hiring all these different professionals is because the conventional idea of a manager has changed dramatically.
They don’t decide who is fit. They don’t decide who joins a club. They generally don’t personally work on a players fitness. They may have some involvement but they rely moreso on the quality of the people around them (and the professionalism of the individual) to help them be able to focus on managing the players and tactics.
In many cases players have their own medical staff determining if or when they are fit.
So , no , managers aren’t to blame for players fitness.
First match of the season we quite clearly did.
Yeah that game was fortunate. But what are we arguing if we count all these games? I accept we've had more than the top teams by way of losing control in games, however lots of teams above and around us have had matches they sucked in. Spurs have had last minute wins of their own, arsenal too.