I agree, and it would signal a intent to play a progressive brand of football.
Do we need a modern goalkeeper?
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik and Imran hold a long overdue conversation about United's awful league form with 1 win in 7. They discuss a disappointing draw at Bournemouth, a not so disappointing draw against Liverpool and a crushing defeat at Chelsea - Is time nearly over for Erik Ten Hag?
Then in a special second half of the pod, Nik welcomes Natalie ( https://twitter.com/natalie_17) to discuss the fortunes of Manchester United Women as they booked a place in the FA Cup Final after a historic first ever win vs. Chelsea.
Either a lot of long-range but excellent shots are getting in, or these stats are suspicious, because there is no way his shot-stopping has been below par for quite a while now. Criticise his crosses and all that, but there's game after game after game where he's been saving 1v1s, long shots, and even a few penalties.
As long as your goalkeeper can make simple passes out from the back and is actually good at what a goalkeeper is supposed to do like saving long range shots, claim corners/crosses & making themselves big in 1v1s then that should be enough. The best goalkeepers don't need to be playmakers just because Ederson is great at it. I wouldn't trade Mendy for any other keeper in the world and I doubt many would consider him a modern keeper.
Possibly true, possibly true. Wonder how many we've conceded from crosses this year. so his stats are based on not only his own subjective definition but his own subjective recording. People will go a long way to win an imaginary argument on the internet.Alisson and Ederson are better, and that is discounting the "extra fancy" stuff they do.
I don't understand how it's possible to get something like claimed crosses wrong. It's hardly a matter of interpretation/definition. Either the keeper manages to grab (and control) the ball - or he doesn't. Yet, this fecker apparently has "video evidence" that dramatically contradicts the official PL stats.
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Surely DeGea can be coached to pass from his goal area to one of our players standing wide of the penalty box? He does not pass because the players in front of him does not know how to create a good space for him to pass.
I don’t think basic passing is the problem, he needs to be a sweeper for Ralfy to use him. Can he be trained to do something so unnatural for him?
I think him being a bit rubbish with the ball would be fine if he could command his area and sweep in a higher line, which is quite important for a coach who wants to press high with the CBs on the half way line as the last line. But he's not good at either, and just watching him play without using stats is more than enough to make that claim imo. His ball playing ability would come under more scrutiny under a coach who looks to exert zonal and positional control via ball possession. So I don't think he needs to worry about that just yet.
You either want to play progressive football or you don't.
I don't think Henderson is the answer to the De Gea problem, thankfully there's a whole world of goalkeepers out there.
Yes we do. De Gea invites far too much pressure, doesn’t command the box & his distribution isn’t good enough.
I really like the Brighton keeper.
I really like the Brighton keeper.
Yeah he’s a big dude and really covers the net too..
I don’t even think his ball playing is a massive issue, it gets a little overstated. On the whole he’s actually pretty good on the ball with his passing. The bigger issue for me is his sweeping and claiming crosses. I still think he makes our CBS look far worse than they are just because he refuses to leave his line. He also doesn’t come under enough scrutiny for that either, I mean Maguire got absolute Pelters earlier in the season against Atalanta I think and De Gea should have been coming out and claiming that before anything even happened. His shot stopping alone isn’t enough.
He passing is mediocre at best and his claiming and sweeping is poor. Does any one here think that a defense that has the same goals against as the poorest teams in the league doesn´t have a goalkeeper problem?
And if not why? DDG is one of the biggest reasons for our defensive woes his backline doesnt know what he does and if he does it.
If you're referring to the first chart posted by Adnan, it looks like the stats are from fbref and use performances from the past 365 days. Last season DDG's shot stopping was one of the worst in the league so it will be picking up some of those performances too. On fbref this season DDG is currently 3rd for PSxG+/- and 4th for the same per 90 minutes so he's doing a lot better this season than last when it comes to shot stopping.
https://fbref.com/en/comps/9/keepersadv/Premier-League-Stats
I think it's hard to tell on the issue of passing out from the back. I've heard people blame DDG, Maguire and the midfielders. I think it's entirely likely that it was the coaching because we never seemed to have a plan to make the spare man to allow us to get out. I don't think it's that complicated to do.
DDG is terrible at passing out from the back but yeah there is definitely a tactical issue.
Ole seemed intent on using McFred as a deep-lying double-pivot, and the whole point of a double-pivot really is to show for the ball from the defenders and move the ball effectively to beat the press and/or retain possession. Now, that is a very specialist skill, and requires excellent technique, vision, close-control, two-footedness and awareness. Neither Fred nor McTominay are really suited to doing it. Add in the fact that AWB is awkward on the ball at times and what you got was a ridiculous situation where Luke Shaw and Harry Maguire were our two 'most passed to' players and the most common pass made was Maguire to Shaw (there's a video on here somewhere where the stats behind this are explained)
It sounds like Rangnick is going to do away with the double-pivot and get the ball forward faster, enabling our midfield three to play more aggressively and facing the opponents goal, as Liverpool have been doing under Klopp. This should play to the strengths of McT and Fred, plus Bruno Fernandes in the AM position. We have already seen Fred play this role effectively for Brazil and have some success with it so far in two games under Carrick.
Once again, I think our problems stemmed from confused thinking from Solskjaer. He wanted a double-pivot, for reasons that only he could understand, despite it not suiting our style or the personnel.
"We're conceding a lot of goals so the goalkeeper must be at fault" is extremely weak logic. You can quite obviously concede a lot of goals without the goalkeeper being in any way at fault, that should be self-evident.
Aside from the nightmare displays that individuals like Maguire have put in entirely off their own bat, we already know a huge amount of our defensive issues this season came from an inability to deal with defensive transitions. It would take a pretty distorted view of how football works to pin the blame for that on the goalkeeper when we can actually see the initial problems occurring much further up the field in our poor shape and lack of a coherent pressing/counter-pressing approach that allows teams to repeatedly walk through us.
It would be pretty remarkable if after months and months of people being proven right about how poorly coached we are we then just opted to ignore that and bullheadedly claim the goalkeeper must be the prime issue or even close to the prime issue.
As it happens I do think De Gea is an issue generally as his chance prevention skills (sweeping and claiming) aren't good enough. And in a fully realised top level team he will likely (or rather almost certainly) be dropped in favour of a better rounded goalkeeper, who could prevent a lot of the opportunities De Gea faces from occurring. But if we look at this specific season it's pretty clear that despite those faults De Gea has been one of the best performing members of our back five (not least because other members of that back five have their own shortcomings irrespective of who the goalkeeper is) and our prime problems defensively have been rooted in what occurs in front of the back five.
If you swapped De Gea for Alison or Ederson then in general we'd be a better team. But in terms of this season specifically, we'd still be in this same absolute shit-show regardless. They're goalkeepers, not miracle workers.
Aside from the nightmare displays that individuals like Maguire have put in entirely off their own bat, we already know a huge amount of our defensive issues this season came from an inability to deal with defensive transitions. It would take a pretty distorted view of how football works to pin the blame for that on the goalkeeper when we can actually see the initial problems occurring much further up the field in our poor shape and lack of a coherent pressing/counter-pressing approach that allows teams to repeatedly walk through us.
It would be pretty remarkable if after months and months of people being proven right about how poorly coached we are we then just opted to ignore that and bullheadedly claim the goalkeeper must be the prime issue or even close to the prime issue.
As it happens I do think De Gea is an issue generally as his chance prevention skills (sweeping and claiming) aren't good enough. And in a fully realised top level team he will likely (or rather almost certainly) be dropped in favour of a better rounded goalkeeper, who could prevent a lot of the opportunities De Gea faces from occurring. But if we look at this specific season it's pretty clear that despite those faults De Gea has been one of the best performing members of our back five (not least because other members of that back five have their own shortcomings irrespective of who the goalkeeper is) and our prime problems defensively have been rooted in what occurs in front of the back five.
If you swapped De Gea for Alison or Ederson then in general we'd be a better team. But in terms of this season specifically, we'd still be in this same absolute shit-show regardless. They're goalkeepers, not miracle workers.
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You're arguing against your own logic. You're saying it's stupid to blame the GK because we have conceded so many goals, highlighting our inability to cope with defensive transitions, stating how poorly coached we are (both of which I agree with) and THEN blaming Maguire. The problem was Solskjaer. Simple as that. It was all tactical.
However, I do think De Gea's impact has been massively overstated this year. He has been OK and made one or two good saves but the rest you would expect him to make. In the words of Roy Keane...'that's his job' He has already made big errors in conceding two goals against Atalanta, the Silva goal against City, at least one of the goals against Watford, and that's just off the top of my head. To not even be at Christmas and think our GK has conceded at least four bad goals is not great when shot-stopping is the only thing his proponents claim he is good at.
The statistics back up the view his impact has been hugely overstated.
His xGA vs the actual GA is basically 0, so that's neither a negative nor a positive contribution (purely based on shot-stopping). He has faced the 6th-least shots in the league, yet conceded the 2nd-most goals and his 'percentage saved' is bang in the middle of the pack in 9th.
Yeah, it's one of those cases where you can see a player improving or worsening depending on the coach. De Gea improved his all-round game under Hoek and steadily regressed in the years after his departure to just become a shot stopper as he was before. And as you said, it seemed to match with the difference in style and instructions.
It's not a black and white either/or.
The primary problem is the coaching. But within that individuals can still make their own mistakes. If De Gea fumbles a shot into his goal, he obviously has to take a large part of the responsibility for that goal. Just as if Maguire, AWB or Shaw make unprompted errors, they take responsibility too. And this season we've conceded quite a few goals where individual errors have been made, which is obviously more likely to happen when you're badly coached as players are under more pressure and put into worse situations. So when I'm talking about the things that aren't De Gea's fault, it's fair to point to both the coaching and other people's individual mistakes. It's not like I'm saying Maguire or AWB are more at fault than the coaching either.
And in this particular season, with quite a few members of our back 5 in poor form, De Gea doesn't have to be particularly outstanding to be one of the best performers from that bunch. But that doesn't mean he hasn't been one of the best performers from that bunch either.
Relative to the rest of the team, he's having a decent season. That doesn't mean he isn't an issue generally but it does make it strange to name him as one of the main culprits for the problems we've faced. He might be an issue but off the top of my head there are managers, coaches, midfielders, right-backs and centre-backs as much or much more to blame this season.
DDG needs the right goalkeeping coach, who was the guy LVG brought in??? He took his game to another level.
His throwing also improved immensely under LVG. He started making those QB like throws to start our counters - another thing he just doesn't do anymore.
His passing when he first came to the club was excellent. He'd regularly play cross field balls to find the full back, but that was gone within 6 months of him joining us.
He was an amazing talent though, and he became great for us. But I feel like he could've become even more had he developed under the right coaches.
I think some of what your saying is true, there has been to big a gap between defence and attack all season making it far to easy to play through our midfield who are left with too much ground to cover, basically whats been happening the front 4 press, but the defence drops back or when the front 4 move forward from a lower posistion to press the defence doesn't move forward with them.
Almost every time its the defensive line that is in the wrong position always to deep and because of it we have deal with dangerous attacks don't win the ball back high up the pitch and lose control of the game, come under more defensive pressure than we should and then concede more chances.
De gea has to accept some responsibility for that because to a certain extent its his job to set that line in communication with his back four, there have been some fleeting moments in games where we have had a high press with a high line and its looked good but its never lasted, the defenders always step back for no apparent reason and I'm convinced its de gea asking them to get back or perhaps not actively telling to stay high. Because he's happier if there deeper, less work to do outside his six yard box which he's not comfortable with.
His command of his area, his sweeping abilities and communication aren't good enough for us. Literally his only positive skill as a goalkeeper is excellent shot stopping/reaction saves. Everything else is very poor.
Currently alot of rumours that Donnarumma is not happy at PSG.
That's a great point to be fair. Most of the time we just lament that his form was not great the past couple of seasons or that he is past his best but it does get ignored that he could have developed much better.
Please, not the Raiola circus again!