The plan off the pitch has always been clear - youth, work rate, local/British/gets the club.
It's the plan on the pitch which has often been murky and more often not appeared to resemble that which you'd expect from a top quality manager. The tactical blueprint on the pitch, leaving aside the times when it has disappeared, has seemed to be have quick transitions and play at a high tempo. Which is all well and good but as I've said before I'm not seeing the core principals of intricate control, short passing exchanges, possession retention etc that needs to be instilled in any quality team.
Last two games have been impressive but have to see more to believe in the plan.
I think the focus so far has been on work rate and tactical discipline and hopefully we can become better at this, but i doubt we will become very good at it, not with this group of players at least. I think the best we can hope for is getting adept at holding on to the ball using low risk passes, but i dont think we will ever see McTomminay, Rashford, James et al playing triangles inside the opposition box because that is not really their forte.
Even under Fergie we rarely played anything resembling possession football and if you look on any video of "100 greatest Manchester United goals" pretty much all of them are some kind of counter attacking goal or long range strike. What we did have though was fear and respect. Teams where terrified of having a go at us back then, because they knew if they gave us the slightest bit of room we could punish them hard. I saw Bournemouth vs Liverpool on Saturday and i saw the same kind of fear in Bournemouth, they were terrified of pressing Liverpool so it then became super easy for Liverpool to keep possession.
Villa and Sheffield showed us no respect, they pressed very high and very hard all game. The difference between those games and Spurs/City where that our passing game was not up to scratch. We
tried to do the same in those games, but time and time again we lost possession in our own half because we attempted a high risk pass and they snuffed it out. Vs Spurs and City though, or passing was crisp and precise, which meant we cut them open again and again.
I think our style has been evident for a long time, the problem has been that when we dont pull it off we look like clowns, but when we do it right we look scintillating
We do need to get better at parked buses no doubt, but the problem so far has really been more that we cant hang onto a lead vs the smaller sides. We often score first, which should be ideal for us because it means they have to move further up the pitch which is what we want, but instead of making is 2-0 we have fecked up in defense and it has become 1-1 instead.
Yes, our ball retention, especially when we are leading, needs to get much better. If we get better at passing it around we can tire out opponents who press us. And our offensive passing needs to be on the level we have showed the last couple of games. If we can manage those two consistently, we will also win more consistently.