Fred and McT can’t defend… or can they?

Dan_F said:

How many different combinations have we had in those games that they didn’t start. It’s logical that the two that play together most have the best understanding off the ball. If Pogba was given a settled partner (which suited his game) and they were given time to learn each other’s game, we might find that we would have a similar defensive result, or not much worse, but be far more imposing on the ball.

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Agree. How anyone can't see that we won't win the big prizes playing 2 mediocre players who wouldn't start at any of the top teams in the league at present. Get a DM who can tackle and pass and we can play with another attack minded player.

The problem is mainly with McTominay, you mention the Roma goal and it was amateurish defending from before the half-line.

McFred isn't really a partnership as one of them barely brings anything to the table except being just there and about.

VorZakone said:

Why is there such annoyance with the McFred partnership? I like them.

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Because some of us want to want a central midfield that play better on the ball, not without. They’re good players there’s no denying, but both have very evident flaws.

Kag said:

They’re an industrious pair and they provide some balance in there. Good players, both of them. They work hard and they’re worthy of a place here.

But they can’t pass the ball like United midfielders should. That’s a bigger issue than any defensive inconsistencies they may have.

On the defensive front, they’re much better at pressing the ball and making tackles further up the field than they are sniffing out danger in behind them in their own half. McTominay is particularly poor at that, which is probably something to do with the fact that he’s more of an attacking player than a defensive one. This is why folk complain about them defensively; neither of them sniff out danger that well. Matic remains by far the best at doing this but he’s essentially resigned to the wheelchair at this point.

There’s a lot more nuance to this debate than simply looking at the goals conceded tally.

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Exactly this, really.

The way in which we set up our front four to defend is really poor.

Rashford being ahead of his full back and free from the responsibility of tracking him, in conjunction with Fernandes looking to press ahead of the deepest opposition midfielder and close down the centre backs with our striker, is not a robust way to approach not having the ball. In particularly awful instances, Greenwood/ James or whoever the third attacker is also adopts a position between the centre back and full back on their side and looks to press high, but not quite as standard as with our other two 'off the striker' positions. This is generally far too easy to bypass, leaving our opponents with free players at full back and in deep midfield areas to receive the ball and giving our back six too much to do.

What Fred and McTominay do is mitigate that risk. Neither are natural holders but they are combative, cover a lot of ground and generally react very well to turnovers in possession, which is all necessary because our attacking players are constantly being taken out of the game when we lose or don't have the ball. If we persist with a flawed defensive approach further up the pitch Fred and McTominay are the most suitable players for the double pivot. We should be changing the setup of the front four though.

They’re a solid midfield for the most part, but there’s a bit of an obsession on here with this phantom DM who’ll solve all our problems. They’re energetic and hard working, they’re a bit of everything. There’s 4 players in front of them who are supposed to provide the creativity.

I want a midfielder who works as hard as Fred and wins the ball back as much as Fred with the mimimim passing ability of carrick.

Is this midfielder available.

I keep coming back to Kalvin Phillips.

Phillips, Kane, Grealish In £230 million

Martial, Lingard, Pogba, Mata out £130 million

Forwards
Kane, Rashford, Greenwood, Grealish, Bruno, Cavani, Diallo, VDB.

Midfielders
Matic, Phillips, Fred, Mctominay.

Does that win us the League? Is it viable?

———-———--———Kane——————
Rashford —Grealish-Bruno-Greenwood
————————-Phillips———————

We could do that if chasing games, I don’t think it’s a big ask.

Pogue Mahone said:

Roma’s second goal made Fred and McT look like mugs, defensively. And there’s been a few goals conceded this season where they’ve made poor individual errors. The Fred thread is full of stuff about how easy he is to dribble past. The McT thread talks about him hiding all the time.

Brain farts aside, I was curious to see how good they really are at protecting our defence. The stats are interesting.

We’ve started 18 games with them as a pair at the base of midfield (including almost all our toughest fixtures) In those 18 games we’ve conceded 11 goals. Every second fixture was a clean sheet. Extrapolated to a full season that’s 23 goals conceded. City have the meanest defence so far this season with 24 goals conceded and 4 games left to play. Chelsea are next, after shipping 31 in 33.

In games where they didn’t start we conceded 21 goals in 14 games. That works out at 57 goals over a full season.

Yet somehow Fred and McT are both portrayed as defensive liabilities.

Something just doesn’t add up. What’s going on? Discuss.

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It’s simple, goals conceded is a terrible way of looking at whether a midfield pairing is any good. Also, the judgement that they are clueless positionally comes from comparing to other pivots in which both players are tasked with mostly defensive work. Neither Fred nor McT are asked to do much possession wise besides recycle it. So when they are mostly lacking responsibility on that side of the pitch, leaving spaces constantly on the other end is unacceptable.

TheGodsInRed said:

I think most would say it stifles our attack having the two in the team, rather than the defence. Neither have any passing ability, Fred runs around the pitch trying to force mistakes and McT is able to cover the gaps left by Fred. Matic doesn't have the legs to do this any more, but he can actually pass a ball at least.

With McFred in the team, we lose a deep playing midfielder that can direct play. I think if we had a decent DM we could play Pogba a little deeper, but it doesn't work playing Pogba deeper with just McT or Fred.

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They'd be wrong.

It's no coincidence that Shaw and AWB have become two of the most productive fullbacks in the league since McFred became first choice.

It's the Klopp formula: shithouse the midfield in order to advance the fullbacks. If we bought a Thiago style midfielder, there's every chance that our LB and RB could revert back to their former selves.

In addition, Fred and McTominay keep it safe with average 87%+ passing accuracy so that Bruno and Rashford can get away with playing risky passes higher up the pitch.

Best defensive record since 1 January 2021:


Attack could have been better. But we've been playing with 10 men for much of Martial's season.

Pogue Mahone said:

In games where they didn’t start we conceded 21 goals in 14 games. That works out at 57 goals over a full season.

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11 of those were in our first three games when the team blatantly wasn’t fit though. We also set up quite defensively in those big games. Both are poor at tracking runners, you can see that just by watching games.

Pogue Mahone said:

Even if we pretend those first three games never happened (which seems unfair but whatever) there’s still a huge difference in goals/game. Would work out at about 15 fewer goals over 38 games. Which is a big difference. Plus the fact we conceded a lot of goals when they didn’t start doesn’t take away from how few goals we conceded when they did.

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Being better defensively than a midfield two with Pogba isn’t great evidence of being brilliant defensively. We set up ultra defensively in those tougher games though as evidenced by how few goals we scored in them. Are they better defensively than the current version of Matic paired with Pogba? Yes. That doesn’t really qualify as being great defensively for me.

A bigger issue for me is what we sacrifice to have them both for a little bit more stability. We draw too many games because we struggle to break teams down. We don’t need to be playing them against the likes of West Brom or Leeds.

Pogue Mahone said:

Just checked and the 23 goals over a season we would have hypothetically conceded if McFred started every game would be the fifth fewest games conceded in PL history.

As above, does anyone seriously think this would be mainly because we have amongst the five most watertight defenders/goalkeeper in PL history? If not, how else do you explain it?

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City have actually only conceded 24 goals this season. Is Gundogan great defensively?

Pogue Mahone said:

I agree we shouldn’t be playing both of them against teams like West Brom or Leeds. But the fact Ole won’t risk that is justified by our woeful goals against column when McFred don’t start and says more about the other CMs in our team than it does about these two.

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Yeah, but two defensive minded players playing instead of 1 leading to less goals conceded is what should happen whether they’re great defensively or not. Which is why when McTominay plays with Pogba in a two we concede more.

I am surprised to see that people think the pair can't defend or can't help our defensive play.

As someone said above, we can play both of them as long as it frees up our FB and let them stay high. It would not mean we are too defensive.

In fact, we are more attacking with that setup as long as the FBs provide the width that we lack normally.

Also regarding City, I think their FBs usually become CM/DM and plug the spaces behind two attacking midfielders instead of overlapping from outside.

I think that affords them to play with only one DM/CM at times. I have not watched them closely for a while though.

There is no magical tactic or formation or DM that will be able to defend tight and cover all the spaces alone within half a second. There are other tactical factors involved to balance out in any formation.

11101 said:

Most people think defending = tackling. Carrick was a brilliant defender just by being in the right place to prevent a pass. Neither Fred nor McTominay are ideal defensive midfielders because they don't read the game well enough and they cant pass from deep, but both are good at what they do.

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Yeah again this bullshit, Carrick was decent positionally but we looked solid because he had absolute monster of a runner and ball winner Fletcher next to him or he played in a 5 men midfield otherwise he closed the gaps but he was very average defensively and movement wise. Yes you don't need to make tackles but without a player who really goes for it, stucks in and actively wins the ball you play too deep line and find it very hard to counter quick enough to get good positions unless if you don't have absolutely brilliant and consistent players on counter which we had mostly under Fergie but struggled against the likes of more innovative football playing Barcelona. Carrick played ahead of the best CB pairing in the modern history of PL too which helped him to look so solid. I loved him when he was on song but his defensive work is so overrated..

Pogue Mahone said:

No but their midfield clearly protects their defence very well. I’d probably give Fernandinho more credit than Gundogan.

Plus City defend from the front. High press and pin the other team deep in their own half. Which takes a bit of heat off the midfield/defence. Which is pretty much the opposite of how we approach the game and have you seen how few tackles Rashford and Martial have made this season?!?

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Plus on a really basic level they keep the ball more than anyone else too, which Pep has said is the main reason they don't concede. Think they average out at about 10% more possession than us per game, which is 10% more time the opposition can't score.

Well Liverpool dominated PL and CL last couple of seasons with Wijnuldum as a starter mostly which is our Fred basically, so I have no problem with that basically but we can certsainly upgrade on McTominay who is a bit of everything but pretty much nothing player, he's certainly hiding , very slow to anticipate any kind of pass - complete opposite to Fred who's very mobile and likes to take responsibility dropping into difficult positions to start the play, when he gets to play a pass, he's taking forever to move the ball forward and we know how "incosistent" and average his passing is while covering ground is not exactly his best trait too, often being out of position with the lack of awareness too, however he's still decent and consistent hard worker with occasional or more like rare offensive contribution so altogether with Fred they can build a good base, both can be upgraded but certainly McTíominay has to be next in line because if not for Mourinho and lack of players in his position he'd be playing for WBA. However still nowadays better than Matic who's legs are gone and is also a lazy defensive contribution while McFred is drilled to defend first and provide that base for our attacking players who alone are certainly very capable to win the game but without two of them we can quite easily be exposed with Lindelof at CB.

I hope Ole has in mind both replacements for Lindelof and Mctominay because we can certainly get even more solid and creative..

sherrinford said:

The way in which we set up our front four to defend is really poor.

Rashford being ahead of his full back and free from the responsibility of tracking him, in conjunction with Fernandes looking to press ahead of the deepest opposition midfielder and close down the centre backs with our striker, is not a robust way to approach not having the ball. In particularly awful instances, Greenwood/ James or whoever the third attacker is also adopts a position between the centre back and full back on their side and looks to press high, but not quite as standard as with our other two 'off the striker' positions. This is generally far too easy to bypass, leaving our opponents with free players at full back and in deep midfield areas to receive the ball and giving our back six too much to do.

What Fred and McTominay do is mitigate that risk. Neither are natural holders but they are combative, cover a lot of ground and generally react very well to turnovers in possession, which is all necessary because our attacking players are constantly being taken out of the game when we lose or don't have the ball. If we persist with a flawed defensive approach further up the pitch Fred and McTominay are the most suitable players for the double pivot. We should be changing the setup of the front four though.

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This is one of the biggest issue. Combined with poor pressing, it makes us heavy reliant on midfield two and back 4 to do the job defensively.

acnumber9 said:

Being better defensively than a midfield two with Pogba isn’t great evidence of being brilliant defensively. We set up ultra defensively in those tougher games though as evidenced by how few goals we scored in them. Are they better defensively than the current version of Matic paired with Pogba? Yes. That doesn’t really qualify as being great defensively for me.

A bigger issue for me is what we sacrifice to have them both for a little bit more stability. We draw too many games because we struggle to break teams down. We don’t need to be playing them against the likes of West Brom or Leeds.

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I'm pretty sure that's a myth. You could make a case we should be scoring more against the big teams, but that has more to do with our approach than quality imo.
We've done very well against low to mid table teams with Fred and McTominay.

Think they have obvious flaws, specifically, both of them concentrate too much on the ball, are overcommitting and are slow to react to danger.

At the same time, I believe that Fred is much less prone to this mistakes and other than him being slow on turn (hence losing the ball too much while receiving it from our defenders) I see no major issue with him. Think he will look even better with good reader of the game alongside him, who can seamlessly slot in defence when it is needed.

Scott's progress, on the hand, seems to be stalled, and being honest, he was very average for the most part of the season. Playing in double pivot doesn't help him though. Feel he would be much more productive further up the pitch.

Borys said:

This is one of the biggest issue. Combined with poor pressing, it makes us heavy reliant on midfield two and back 4 to do the job defensively.


I'm pretty sure that's a myth. You could make a case we should be scoring more against the big teams, but that has more to do with our approach than quality imo.
We've done very well against low to mid table teams with Fred and McTominay.

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We’re better at it than we used to be sure. I’d say we’re still a little behind where we need to be in that regard. Having Pogba and Bruno on the pitch helps, but currently that means Rashford on the right. Which brings us back to the issue I have with playing two limited midfielders so we concede less.

I think they are probably defensively stable when played together as they do have the energy to cover a lot of ground, they can both win the ball and anticipate chances to intercept. So it's not that they lack all defensive characteristics.

I think the idea they are positionally suspect and fail to track the odd runner is probably something that is more visible to the fan than through statistical analysis because to be borne out in stats they have to result in something that is going to be recorded, which depends on the opponent. It's logical that the stats for them would correlate with our overall defensive stats.

There's certainly an argument that "if the stats are good what does it matter?" but if my line of thinking is correct the issue is probably that Ole always reverts to this partnership because there are few defensively stable combinations and then we seem to sacrifice something in deep areas in some fixtures.

But then you can also approach that particular conundrum from the other point of view. Shouldn't Pogba and VDB be expected to give us a little bit more defensively if they are considered contenders for those roles?

lex talionis said:

It’s not that McFred “can’t defend”. The problem with McFred is neither are creative players, which leaves us a man short in options in attacking situations.

When we’re under siege the two can do a job — but let’s not go overboard with praise, please, fir the defensive job they do — but it boggles the mind that when we go up against sides that sit back on us that we persist with McFred to defend against a threat that just doesn’t exist.

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Agree, but they make us solid in big games. What we miss is a Carrick type that can dominate from the deep or a Scholes with more attacking flair against the weaker teams.

Pogue Mahone said:

Just checked and the 23 goals over a season we would have hypothetically conceded if McFred started every game would be the fifth fewest games conceded in PL history.

As above, does anyone seriously think this would be mainly because we have amongst the five most watertight defenders/goalkeeper in PL history? If not, how else do you explain it?

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It’s not very honest math behind it. First of all you use matches where they started. What about matches where they were on the pitch when we conceded? Example:
Everton 40th minute, 2-0 and Pogba subbed off. Fred comes in, plays with McT and we concede 3 goals in one half. If we add those 3 conceded goals on 50 minutes to the extrapolation it doesn’t look as good.

We are more defensively solid with both of them playing for sure, but I still think both of them are doing one man's job, which is proper DM. If we have proper DM like Fernandinho/Casemiro/Carrick, that frees 1 spot of CM that can help Bruno in attack and we can still be defensively solid

Pogue Mahone said:

Any other examples you can think of like that? I’m willing to bet that’s an isolated incident and even if we swap those three goals to the McFred column it doesn’t make much difference to the overall stats.

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There could be more but that would be a big job for me to check, sorry...I however agree with many of your points, just didn’t like the match
Edot; Could of course also be goals which happened after any of McT was subbed off as well.

@Pogue Mahone
They were on the pitch at 2 of the conceded goals vs Spurs
Fred was subbed off before we conceded vs. Burnley.
And then the 3 conceded goals vs Everton came after Fred had joined the game at min 40.

Maybe there are some more but this is what I found with a quick look

sherrinford said:

The way in which we set up our front four to defend is really poor.

Rashford being ahead of his full back and free from the responsibility of tracking him, in conjunction with Fernandes looking to press ahead of the deepest opposition midfielder and close down the centre backs with our striker, is not a robust way to approach not having the ball. In particularly awful instances, Greenwood/ James or whoever the third attacker is also adopts a position between the centre back and full back on their side and looks to press high, but not quite as standard as with our other two 'off the striker' positions. This is generally far too easy to bypass, leaving our opponents with free players at full back and in deep midfield areas to receive the ball and giving our back six too much to do.

What Fred and McTominay do is mitigate that risk. Neither are natural holders but they are combative, cover a lot of ground and generally react very well to turnovers in possession, which is all necessary because our attacking players are constantly being taken out of the game when we lose or don't have the ball. If we persist with a flawed defensive approach further up the pitch Fred and McTominay are the most suitable players for the double pivot. We should be changing the setup of the front four though.

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I've noticed this a ton, too. Too often do the front 4 ultimately fail to press the opposition (with a couple of major culprits), and that results in the other 6 outfielders having to disrupt and contain the opposition in order to slow them down. Fred and McTominay together do help with their pressing to slow the opposition down, but they still need support from the attacking players, which they don't always get. I see other teams' attacking players, and they tend to defend better than certain players in our team do. They also tend to track back more than those certain players and play a part in defending as a team more often.

Pogue Mahone said:

Any other examples you can think of like that? I’m willing to bet that’s an isolated incident and even if we swap those three goals to the McFred column it doesn’t make much difference to the overall stats.

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They were both on the pitch for the last two of Spurs goals in the 6-1 too.

Pogue Mahone said:

Roma’s second goal made Fred and McT look like mugs, defensively. And there’s been a few goals conceded this season where they’ve made poor individual errors. The Fred thread is full of stuff about how easy he is to dribble past. The McT thread talks about him hiding all the time.

Brain farts aside, I was curious to see how good they really are at protecting our defence. The stats are interesting.

We’ve started 18 games with them as a pair at the base of midfield (including almost all our toughest fixtures) In those 18 games we’ve conceded 11 goals. Every second fixture was a clean sheet. Extrapolated to a full season that’s 23 goals conceded. City have the meanest defence so far this season with 24 goals conceded and 4 games left to play. Chelsea are next, after shipping 31 in 33.

In games where they didn’t start we conceded 21 goals in 14 games. That works out at 57 goals over a full season.

Yet somehow Fred and McT are both portrayed as defensive liabilities.

Something just doesn’t add up. What’s going on? Discuss.

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My problem with the pairing is that they don't create enough. both players are the "jack of all trades master of none" type.

In Pogba we have an incredibly creative player but one who excels at given licence to roam a bit. Neither of these two are defensively good enough to cover for him.

I think the amount of negativity this pair get is massively over the top. The match thread from the Roms game would be a good example.
I'm not saying we couldn't improve on either of them because obviously we could. Yes Pogba could play instead of one of them but its clear by now hes suited to a more free role further forward.
I think in most matches they probably are our best option. Both of the try hard and probably deserve more credit than they get.

Dan_F said:

Last season being before we had Bruno and when Pogba was out for basically the whole of autumn? And October this season, when we had Fred and McTominay starting the games we didn’t win in October (Chelsea and PSG). Im not counting the Spurs game, but if anything it proves my point that you can’t just throw Pogba and Matic together one in five games and expect them to outperform two players who start together all the time.

I’m not suggesting McFred isn’t working for us currently, but I’d be massively surprised if we can really challenge City or the best in Europe using that midfield.

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Except for the fact that we have literally have challenged the best in Europe with them this season; we've played 7 games against this season against the teams in the Champions League semi finals, winning 2, drawing 3 and losing 2.

In one of those defeats, Fred was sent off & in the draw at Chelsea we were a blatant penalty away from a 1-0 win. All three of the draws were 0-0 and interestingly all three games we were playing with Rashford and Greenwood up top, so you could say without a "proper" striker - maybe that was the bigger issue in those games?

People really just need to ask themselves honestly, tomorrow against pool, would you start mcfred or not?

city-puma said:

People really just need to ask themselves honestly, tomorrow against pool, would you start mcfred or not?

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I would. To defend the wide areas where their strengths are and also to support exposing those areas behind their FBs.