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Can’t get my head around it. 85m could’ve gotten us almost anyone..
By what standards? Sancho’s? Man hasn’t registered a single goal or assist.
It’s the system. It doesn’t work. I think today’s setup is very negative. It’s not a good sign we continue playing this kind of football.
Now that we have a proper CF, if Antony forges good partnership with Hojlund and racks-up good amount of assists, he will be ok for us.
I don't think he often does put in good passes in the final third, although he did put a good one or two in this season (I forgot which game exactly). I think he just lacks creativity and vision. He can perform to that ability every once in a while, but because he lacks in those 2 areas compared to most good attackers, he can't consistently achieve the same creative output in the final third.
He definitely lacks the confidence to take them on because he feels they’ll outmuscle him / knock him off the ball. But there has to be a way around it as like I said there are times when you just can’t get the ball off him - for example his ability to help us keep the ball is miles better than Rashfords - so you can see what he does do well. But once he’s in attack he stops thinking or acting like an attacker needs to - put in a drilled cross, switch play, cross to the far post etc Personally I think passing and crossing is what he needs to work on most - once you are a threat with your passing given his ball retention you become a completely differently porposotion for opponents to deal with.
That sums it up well and I never really thought about it that way - in how much the two flanks contrast. Rashford produces stellar moments in the final third but let’s be honest here, the bloke spends 85 minutes of most games playing poorly. Even Martinelli who isn’t even that good in his general play is twice as good as Rashford in the quality of overall play. Rashford just has the ability to turn it on for a goal / assist in that one odd moment and hurt teams big time. Antony does everything well that Rashford doesn’t - brilliant defensively, controls the ball effortlessly, never gives it away - but as you say he is clueless in the final third.
Plays too much FM I think, he's good in one of those
For that he would need to learn to pass it on the ground or in the air and he has shown no quality whatsoever when it comes. He has showed a weird tendency to lift his passes up instead of whipping his passes. I don't think we'll get the best of Hojlund with a creativity dark hole like Antony
Yup. Antony is remarkably uncreative. He can retain possession in the middle of the field, occasionally get into the channels (though it seems like he can't outrun anyone and rarely beats a man one on one), and cut in on his left foot. Once teams began taking that option away from him, he doesn't seem to know what else to do. There's not much else to his game. He rarely gets a through ball right and his crossing seems aimless at best. Almost any of our more recent right sided players would be a better fit than he is.
Who was better? Højlund perhaps when he came on.
Can you please explain what Antony did that was so good? What chances did he create?
Dalot, Lindelof, Martinez Casemiro, Eriksen. I would even say Rashford
Rashford was excellent - miles above Antony and better than either Arsenal winger by a distance as well. AWB was also very good. The only starters who weren’t definitely better than Antony were Martial and Bruno.
A player combining the qualities of Sancho ( composure, ability to pick out a pass and play one-twos) and Antony( tenacity, ability to carry the ball, wriggle out of tight spots and defensive acumen) would be an ideal player. But like you say, in typical fashion we have these 2 who can only do half of it and hence we are stuck with 2 ultimately ineffective players.
Passing the ball to Antony is like putting your money in a low yield savings account.
I would not say he was better than Arsenal wingers, not Martinelli who was a constant thread and got balls into the box. Overall I agree he was better than Antony though
To be fair he wasn't given much service.
Where does this theory that Antony never gives the ball away come from? He ‘retains possession’ when he stops it and passes it back where it came from, but the moment he tries anything more ambitious than that, it’s often unsuccessful.
There's a reason he isn't given much service. He loses it almost every time. There was a time he was given the ball to start a counter. At the point he got the ball, he was ahead of Zinchenko and Saka, yet once he got the ball he stopped and tried to do one of his pointless dribbles which got Zinchenko and Saka back into the picture and killed the attack. Rashford was visibly frustrated at it and I was too.
Antony is not a dribbler.
This is spot on, unfortunately. Trying to picture Antony providing an assist to Hojlund is incredibly difficult as his passing along the ground isn't good enough and his crosses are invariably overhit.
And so it begins, the slow revision of a player who has left United, we knew was average and will become better and better the longer he is away from the club.
There’s more creativity in Antony insults than in his actual game.If players are avoiding passing to him then he shouldn't be in the team. What's the point?
That's quite generous towards Rashford - he scored fantastic goal, but was far too selfish after that, taking several shots when he could have slipped in a teammate.
Most of his good defensive work (yesterday at least) was as a result of Antony having given the ball away in the first place though and not through trying to be proactive or creative. Just sloppy basic passing errors often under no pressure. A player of his style just can’t afford to be error-strewn in possession.
Will give you he's good defensively but the rest is a load of shit. If he's not taking pot shots from stupid angles, he's over hitting crosses to messing up simple 5 yard passes. Absolutely baffling that someone can watch Antony week in week out and draw that conclusion, he might not be Rashford or Garnacho we're they run into a crowd of players but the end result is the exact same.
