That's an awful lot of bollocks.
Firstly having a keeper who will push up behind the defence is crucial to being able to successfully play a high line and press high. Utd are defending higher this season and have one of the highest rates of high turnovers in the league. Is that all on the keeper? No, but he plays his part is making sure the distances between players from back to front is maintained which is crucial to maintaining a successful pressing system.
27 goals conceded, means Utd have the 3rd best defence in the league. It's not shambolic compared to other teams. What is shambolic is the amount of chances conceded. 5th or 6th most in the league. You can argue about the quality of those chances agaisnt and whether teams should have scored more goals. But funnily enough this is part of the reason why Onana ranks so highly in terms of shot stopping and psxg.
You also really need to drop this mythical link you've created between the goalkeeper chance creation and scoring goals. They are not directly linked in the way you keep maintaining and nobody on here has claimed it be such. It really is such a weird obsession you have going on.
It goes without saying we now have an incredible "modern keeper", one whose ball playing skills are elite. But has this elite ball-playing keeper had the successful impact you allege he has had on our performances this season? Let's forget about our impressions and go straight to the facts.
The less said about what happened in the Champions League the better for Onana, so let's ignore his performances in the CL and focus only on the PL.
Our goal difference is -5. I'm not here to blame Onana for that, but we certainly can't look at such a stat -- a hard stat and not a derivative number such as xG -- and reach the conclusion that our new keeper has had anything like the positive impact on both our attacking play and our defensive play that many of us had hoped for.
As for 27 goals conceded being a number we should be proud of, the 17th place club (Everton) have conceded 28. Sure, we can point to Luton Town's 37 and agree that we're not as shit as Luton Town in terms of goals conceded, but that's hardly a benchmark we should be proud of. Why we've been so much worse defensively this season compared to last season is a complex answer, one which includes the key absence of Martinez, but I guarantee you that no one in the land looks at our keeper situation and thinks to themselves that we finally have a proper shot stopper.
But it's in the attack where the thesis for Onana falls apart. However you want to sugar coat it now, the argument for Onana when we brought him in was that his elite footwork would improve our ability to control possession and lead to higher quality chances. I've wasted too much of time already providing direct evidence to deaf that we were promised a "transformation", but since deaf ears are what they are let's forget that ever happened. It is still the case that even now the argument is that with Onana's ball playing skills we can press higher and with a higher press we will force opponents to submit to our will and win matches, possibly trophies.
Not only have we been inept defensively, we are inept offensively. After 20 matches we have a goal difference of -5. There are valid explanations, but the idea that Onana would in any way improve (from here on out we shall banish the word "transform", as though the claim had never been made despite the mountain of evidence) our play outside his own 18 yard box is pretty daft. Even Allison, whom I regard as the greatest keeper on the planet, isn't ball recycling machine. He's highly adept with his feet, but Liverpool rely on Allison above all else as a shot stopper and a physical presence in his own 6 yard box.
Command of the box? What every one us believed we were getting when we signed Onana, myself included, was a keeper who would be a massive upgrade in terms of command of the box. However, that has proven to not be the case.
We've brought in a keeper whose ball-playing skills are elite, but neither our defensive nor offensive performances have been anywhere near an improvement over last season, as evidenced by our -5 goal difference after 20 matches. Going forward we have no choice but to stick with Onana but knowing what we know now, just as know now with Sancho and Antony, we would have taken a pass on bringing in Onana.
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