Yes. But I do think that United's fans too easily accept mediocrity and have done so for a long time.
Erik ten Hag - Manchester United manager
- Thread starter sewey89
- Start date
We already know that Klopp is leaving in the summer. Anyway, this thread is about Ten Hag and how he's being replaced by Kenny Dalglish, who says that he has "unfinished business" and wants to make United "infamous", which sounds exciting to a no English word understanding animal like meselfs.He is gone, mutual agreement, end of season.
Nagelsman offered terms.
To your last point, I‘m not saying that all. I am saying Xavi did not do better than Koeman, considering the squad strength (or lack thereof in Koeman‘s case).
You mention Busquets: his legs were gone: he was getting overrun frequently. In the back they had Pique who was done at the highest level as well, Eric and Arauxo. Arauxo was the best of them although he just came into the squad.
Messi was carrying the team for sure.
WE HAVE TO KEEP HIM
Are you drunk? We had a negative goal difference, we faced one of the most shots in every game, we got beaten by lesser teams, we were humiliated in the Champion League, we had double-digit losses, we had so many injuries, we wasted 400 million on players who aren't good or ready, we cannot protect leads, wasting money on meaningless loan (Amrabat) Tell me why are we keeping him? Don't tell me that he believes in youth, he only started them because of injuries or he has run out of ideas. If his XI is fit, I am 100% sure that Kobbie wouldn't be playing.
If I’m honest though, I’d trust a football professional’s view over some random fan any day.
Im not going to tell an electrician how to rewire my house. That would be pretty stupid at best.
What happens if that electrician re wires your house but when you test things the ground floor is fine, the top floor is fine but on the middle floor none of the switches work?
Personally feel we also need CB, LB and DM too
If you mean my post, fair point, I don’t take well to giving a thorough and balanced reply to one poster, to get an answer from another poster that didn’t seem to read any of it but feels like calling me naive with no particular reasoning other than assuming they are obviously right and I am obviously wrong. I do think it’s naive to expect something very different from most of the options named so far, though.
Neither did I imply I know the answers, on the contrary, I think I specified in both posts that I don’t know, and don’t expect anyone to know looking from the outside. I am sceptical to anyone being very sure about the answers, is my point.
I do find your questions relevant and interesting, it’s just that I can only assemble some crude facts and half-intelligent guesswork about them:
1) Deep backline: I assume the plan A is for the backline to push higher faster (which I think both Ten Hag and several players have mentioned as well) and that the main obstacles are lack of cohesion, lack of continuity and lack of profiles. Plan A was Bissaka/Dalot - Varane - Martinez - Shaw, with Casemiro in front. They were on the right track last year, but have been injured (Martinez, Shaw, Bissaka, Varane), inconstant and surprisingly fast ageing (Varane, Casemiro). The backups lack the profile and/or quality and/or continuity. High backline demands confidence, coherence and the right profiles. I’m not assigning the blame for those factors cause I don’t know enough, but the factors are clearly there and contributing.
2) Man marking vs zonal in midfield: Ten Hag has been on record saying that is not how we are supposed to be playing, so it clearly is a question of not getting the balance and organization right. This is Ten Hag’s responsibility of course, made difficult by Casemiro injuries and general tempo loss, Eriksen free fall defensively nd physically, Mainoo inexperience, McTominay tactical weakness, Bruno despite high work ethic lacking disciplinary coolness when others waver, and Mount being injured. Again, I don’t know who is to blame for this confluence in each case, but the toral makes for a midfield that ends up chasing people way to much, shedding positional discipline way to easily.
3) Frontline press. Again, this worked much better last season. Again, an issue is that if one out of six players hestitate, it undermines the whole set up, spreading the hestitation to other players. When the front row is a 19-year old, a 20-year old and Marcus Rashford, and four attacking players struggling mentally for various reasons, it is likely to be vulnerable. Again, you could have a decent discussion about who is responsible for this situation, in either case, it can easily look different than planned.
So my guessing about your good questions, circulate mostly around the assumption that what we see is far from what is planned, and that there are so many factors that Ten Hag has changed from saying ‘this is not the plan, we didn’t follow the principles’ to ‘the players fought hard, this wasn’t bad’ in order to deflect criticism and protect the general mood and confidence in the squad from the press.
Again, I don’t claim to know all of this, or at least not the extent to which it explains how we look, and I’m no expert at all, but I’m not really surprised we look thoroughly disjointed for large parts of the games. I know Ten Hag has put out very different teams over several seasons which have not looked like that though.
I think that the refusal of Hannover 96 supporters to accept anything but consistently hauling in the biggest trophies has led to their dominant position in German and International football.
(Disclaimer: My white text option doesn’t work somehow).
Go and look at match day thread and see if you still think that!
Well one thing's for sure, you have a 3-story house so you're richer than most of us plebs in here
That’s fair enough, interesting answer.
We just don't claim to be a big club
I rather watch the matches and it is amazingly rare to see OT having a a go at the team for being shit. They can do whatever they want, the stadium will support them most of the time.
Very interesting. Hope you're right again.He is gone, mutual agreement, end of season.
Nagelsman offered terms.
Can't see Zidane ever taking Utd job,the others have a chance of managing us at some point. Hopeful that Nagelsmann gets the job IF we do make the change in the summer
Going to the match is supposed to mean going to support your team, I used to go to OT in the 70's and 80's when we were often much crapper than we are now and the support was just the same, online though it's a different beast,We just don't claim to be a big club
I rather watch the matches and it is amazingly rare to see OT having a a go at the team for being shit. They can do whatever they want, the stadium will support them most of the time.
Yes I can do it!
We weren’t even fighting for 4th that season.
Couldn't remember clearly anymore. We did have decent CL run, though.Ridiculous. They are all older than Casemiro and Varane and Erickson; and probably slower than them and no where near match fit. We've got to get away from this recruitment policy.
I’m not sure fans walking around claiming to be a big club is necessarily what makes for club success.We just don't claim to be a big club
I rather watch the matches and it is amazingly rare to see OT having a a go at the team for being shit. They can do whatever they want, the stadium will support them most of the time.
The support has been like that for most/all of Ferguson’s era, it didn’t prevent us from being successful. Liverpool similarily. Emptihad has never had neither support nor protest when dominating the league.
In fact you could look at the periods when United have had the most loud protests against the club (directed towards the Glazers, not the players) and see that they have coincided with particularily barren spells, which makes you wonder
To be fair arguably the loudest period of protests against the Glazers was from the initial takeover to the Green and Gold protest, which coincided with the most successful period in the clubs history.
I was the same, but because of the unparalleled success of the Fergie years, we were spoilt for a long time and this has affected how most fans feel entitled that we should compete for the title every season. This last 10 years is actually the norm over the whole Utd period. Let’s hope Ineos can at least give us some semblance of Fergies dominance.
Hope you’re right (or at least your source is).He is gone, mutual agreement, end of season.
Nagelsman offered terms.
It fits with the INEOS MO of wanting relatively young managers, like previously reported as well as proof of that in Farioli at Nice (34 y/o) and Magnin at Lausanne (44 y/o)
And honestly he’s probably the best realistic option out there. He’d have been my pick anyway.
Keep an eye on it , I was told they are making the change , they had always planned to make the change and they view the club as completely broken from top to bottom (coaching , staff etc) they want a completely new slate regardless of how ETH does this season.
I disagree. I am a long term fan, I watched many dreadful games at OT but some good ones too. I caught the Docherty era, Sexton, Atkinson etc. Its not being spoilt to expect a bare minumum of exciting, attacking football, which the Doc and big Ron generally delivered. Given our financial power and status as one of top 3 clubs in world, we should be competing for the big trophies. A lot of that sits with the owners, but it doesnt excuse managers who cant at least deliver some decent football. Its this sort of attitude and blaming 'entitled' fans that has allowed Glazers to get away with it for so long.
Hope you are right as I am very close to starting an ABE (Anyone but Erik) group
Well by this stage Ineos have a fair idea how well he's done this season.
It's common for new owners to change manager once they takeover. The majority of them want 'their man' in place. And I don't imagine Ten Hags done much this season to change their minds if they were and are planning a change.
He was.
Interesting
Why are you only suggesting men for the job?
White men too. Disgraceful behaviour
Interesting thought. Which women would you suggest? There is a lack of experienced female managers at this level (and even lower levels).
However if that happens we could get some hilarious moments, especially in interviews with stupid journalists. So far my favourite in that regard is Imke Wübbenhorst, who took over a 5th level team and was asked what she would do to warn their team that she is entering the cabin so that the players could cover themselves: "I am a professional. I'll select the starting team based on dick size."
It makes more sense for ETH to go based on the fact that the people who made the deal for him and worked with him for the past two years, in Murtough and Arnold, are no longer there now. The Glazers are shuffled into the background in terms of day to day football club operations now too.
So his ‘allies’ at the club is pretty much zero, and the way we’ve played this season and pretty much since winning the League Cup hasn’t been great.
And if INEOS have been watching us closely since the Solskjaer days, then they’re pretty clued up on everything.. especially when Brailsford is auditing everything at the club and reportedly going to some of our ex-managers for input (I imagine Ralf gave them some stuff that they’d find most interesting with his Red Bull background).
So his ‘allies’ at the club is pretty much zero, and the way we’ve played this season and pretty much since winning the League Cup hasn’t been great.
And if INEOS have been watching us closely since the Solskjaer days, then they’re pretty clued up on everything.. especially when Brailsford is auditing everything at the club and reportedly going to some of our ex-managers for input (I imagine Ralf gave them some stuff that they’d find most interesting with his Red Bull background).
Manchester United are a rich club who've somehow inherited the fanbase of a lower midtable. It's one of footballs strange phenomenons.
That's underplaying the role of the fanbase i
- they don't just accept it, but they are one of the drivers for the clubs constant erosion of standards.
I may have misremembered, but as I recall the bulk of the first protests on Old Trafford was in 2005 and some way into 2006, a season which we came second and were knocked out in the group stages of the CL, but yea, fair enough, it was improvement on the previous two seasons and there where noise from the Black Banners/Green and Gold/FCUM split well into the next years.
I get the same feeling immediately after a game especially after a bad performance where I carry on watching just to see what he has to say and almost always come out of it underwhelmed. But thinking about it a few days later, it's clear what is said to the media is as much about politics and keeping up morale as it is about anything else.
I think he realises there isn't much room for manoeuvre with regards to his position and needs his players on side. He will also surely be aware of how vicious and toxic the media are so maybe he's trying to starve them of content and soundbites.
Also, realistically, I'm not too sure there's much upside in him slating our performances in the media right now. There's a small chance they will react positively but I don't think the players are not trying, I just think some are tactically inept, others can't handle the physical demands, some have been run into the ground and a last group is barely match fit/playing through injury. They're also more likely to turn on him as has been the case many times before. I still think he can communicate a lot better but he's not english and in grand scheme of things probably insignificant. I can't be completely sure but I would imagine he is well aware when our performances aren't great.
If Erik does get the boot I think one of the main reasons is his blind faith in Antony.
Every manager has bought a lemon but repeated failure to recognise the mistake cannot be tolerated.
Every manager has bought a lemon but repeated failure to recognise the mistake cannot be tolerated.
As it stands, moving him on is a free hit for INEOS. If he goes then it's unlikely that they'll be criticised. Some fans will be pleased that they've been decisive. There's a risk that if they're seen to back him, he is, to some degree, their man and they wear the criticism if he performs poorly again.
Also, with a year left on his contract, where does that leave the club in terms of recruitment? Unless he improves things significantly, they won't renew. This summer is then a potential false start. Even if ETH has a reduced role in transfers, the recruitment will be with his ideas and plans in mind. Are they going to tear it all up again next summer for a new manager?
Seems to me that with a squad rebuild planned, and I suspect with numerous big names off in the summer, they either back ETH long term or move him on.
NO WE DONT