No disrespect, but is Bruno really the best player on this team? Then give him the BP, which I disagree with and give the armband to someone who will lead. Bruno is part of the problem here. I am hoping they can build him up and get some money back. Time in and time out he makes horrible passes that stagnate great progress. This is not a guy you want on your team if you want to be at the top of the field. In fact I could put together a highlight reel on a game by game basis of his horrible passes and brain farts that would be 10x his productive ones.
Do not gauge what a championship team is by what is on the field at present. There are some pieces that can fit, but they are still at least 3 or 4 away from really competing. The fact that Manchester United do not have at least 3 high level strikers is embarrassing. I'm not saying the 3 best in the world, but at least 1 in the top 10 and maybe 2 in the top 30.
The thing is, you need to see progress here. That means challenging for a top 4 spot. Anything less is a failure. ETH needs to watch games from SAF tenure, see how things work, understand what a true offensive team looks like. This sit back transition thing does not work with this team. They need to use the great offense = good defense strategy that was emblematic of this team for decades. Ever notice how many backward passes there are? I would bet they lead the league going in the wrong direction. I get the reset, but that reset needs to be followed up with some forward flow. We have gone through a decade of pain that should not have happened. I put all this on the Glazers, who chose Woodward and he had no right to be involved in football operations anywhere. This team is just not at the level they should be, part on players, part on management. ETH is on a very short string right now. A couple of losses in a row and he can go and win his trophy's elsewhere.
That's up to debate. I personally am not a huge fan of Bruno, but I also feel like I might underrate him as a result. In the end he's been one of the more consistent factors. But then again, so has McTominay. I didn't like Tadic either, but on the other hand he was the MVP of possibly the strongest Ajax side of all time (times are incomparable of course, as with life, even football is continually changing).
I don't really care enought about the class of Man Utd or who would be Top 10 or Top 30 striker. They tried getting Osimhen and - more clearly admittedly - Kane before, but as with other team and competitive sports, there are dependencies. Instead Hojlund became an option and they went for a potential instead. Now the other option up front is Zirkzee, another work in progress but of a different mould. If that works, it would be great, but if it won't, then they have to try another way, again.
This team is not done and the more times the turnaround fails to be seen through, the bigger the next turnaround will have to be. United still has the name - sort of - but not everything every manager has done since SAF was horrible, it just was... not quite. Maybe some could have used more time, perhaps some preferably less. In the end it's a guess where you try to increase the odds of your 11 beating another 11 and hoping those odds pay off often enough to end higher than another on list built on dependencies of form of the day, opponent form, opportunities increasing/decreasing during the game and basically luck in all of that coming to fruition.
Honestly it's still unclear whether ETH and MU are a match. He is a good coach, MU has options, but with more or less luck, it's also been hit-and-miss basically the entire tenure, with (at least relatively to other times) more misses than hits, unfortunately. Whether all this post-2013 era is down to the Glazers... there's been worse owners with better luck. Don't think they built a structure to increase the odds enough, but in the end it's all odds.
Still think it should work out with ETH, but there's plenty reason to consider possibly better odds elsewhere. The team is increasing in quality again, but is it enough? Will Ugarte, Casemiro and Mainoo figure out more control? Will Bruno actually fit in as a smooth gear again, or will he stay the flapping engine of the entire car? I hope the former is still possible, but becoming a leader and forerunner of a team and then getting downgraded doesn't always lead to great team dynamics. Hopefully it's possible, but ETH with Bruno so far, Rashford to a lesser degree, Tadic before and arguably Blind during multiple moments in his ETH-Ajax career. He sticks to his leaders and sees more chance of building the strength in the others, rather than taking a leader away. It's common among many managers.
Simeone always did it too. Gabi and Tiago were a mainstay in his early tenure while they were also inconsistent. Then again, those were the most successful years and the teams were very clearly a team. There's always outsiders, but generally it seems to work. Again, ETH-Ajax was one of the best and consistent Ajaxes of all time, causing the beatings of Top5 League opponents, let alone of the likes of Madrid and Bayern, to become an actual chance instead of the big upheavals they were at the start.
But now it doesn't work. At least not yet. You almost hope Bruno himself would want to leave, because ETH won't send his leader away - not as long as he won't go Cristiano or Sancho - and the board can't just say the star has to go either. He's not underperforming enough for that.
So, part of where I was coming from was that part of this is us currently having to deal with Bruno, and finding ways to do that. Whether it's actually possible, we will find out down the road. Same thing for Zirkzee and or Hojlund becoming that "top 10-30 striker" and whether the MU amount of points will prove enough to be more than #5. Maybe the whole competition will crash and the champion will have points in the 70s like some of the good ole SAF days.
