We have.
Erik ten Hag - Manchester United manager
- Thread starter sewey89
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
I think so, but he seems very effective coming on as sub at 65ish minute, always makes us sharper.
Rashford is not an effective sub, he usually sulks and refuses to press or help in defence.
If he's going go do anything, he'll do it as a starter for sure.
Garnacho is very eager and explosive when he comes on.
So I think it's a matter of who is the better option to come off the bench.
I might be wrong though, but this is how things seem to be for me.
Doesn't really matter, Garnacho is weapon that's currently best used as a substitute, in that role he has the capability to win us a game, as a starter he doesn't, he's also a young lad learning his defensive responsibilities, we already have enough problems with the left side of our defense without adding to them
So we haven't really "tried it" by starting him have we?
My question is how more shite performances does Rashford have to churn out for Garnacho to actually start more than one PL game? He's had about 10, should it be 15? 20?
Given hes only started one game, there is no basis to confirm this.
Garnacho should definitely be starting more matches, it will help his development and it let’s Rashford know there is competition for places.
Let's not pretend it was a comfortable 3rd. If Liverpool got their act together a tiny bit earlier than they did, there was a real chance we'd have finished 5th. Even when they did eventually get their act together late last season, there was some stressful points counting happening on the Caf to see if we would finish 4th.
Imagine we lost against Chelsea in the penultimate game, the table would've been:
Newcastle: 70
United: 69
Liverpool: 66
going into the final day.
Every stat out there says we're playing like a 5th / 6th placed side, I don't think that's changing even if we get our defence back.
The game we won 4-1 that should have probably been 8-0.
Finally, we agree on something.
It's crazy how people go on about Garnacho being unsuited to starting for us based off a couple of bad performances when the whole team stank up the place. He is still very much a young player who needs consistent game time to develop and establish himself at this level. He won't do that if the rug is constantly pulled out from under him because of a couple of understandable mistakes.
In contrast, Rashford has done very little for years and continues to enjoy the privilege of starting each game, as if it's required by law.
Surprised this has been bumped from the last 2 games. Yes it wasn’t pretty but we’ve been able to grind out 2 wins.
Continue getting points on the board and performances will come with confidence.
Continue getting points on the board and performances will come with confidence.
Sure yeah but it's one game. It's not that hard to imagine a loss esp. given we lost the previous two against West Ham and Brighton. Regardless of how Chelsea are doing at any given point of time, our games against them are typically 1-1s or 1-0s or whatever.
Ultimately the point is, let's not pretend we were comfortably 3rd last year, we weren't.
You can't really create a scenario that didn't happen to make this argument. It's was a 3rd place spot that was hard earned, yeah Chelsea and Liverpool were shit, Spurs were crap and Newcastle dropped off. But the table never lies, you finish where you deserve to finish.
Right now it's form that looks like 5th/6th, but the reality is that Utd sit 6pts of the top with a threadbare squad. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that performances and results will improve once injured players return to the side.
There's still 29 games left, there's a lot that can happen between now and next May.
Let's be honest I bet even pellestri could muster the same stats in that same amount of time if he played as much as Antony does
This is the crux of my disagreement. The table does lie - quite a bit. The table is just one statistic (obviously the one with the highest impact) but reading the table and ignoring all else is like watching a game where a side with 20% possession nick a 1-0 winner at the end after the other side missed an open goal 3 times. To extend the analogy a bit more, people are pretending as if the match was a 4-0 drubbing when it was a close 2-1 win.
feck sake I hope to god that stat isn't true
At the end of the season it usually evens out. But right now it does lie a bit, yes. That's what the xPts table is for. Sadly, it still doesn't look great because it correctly shows Newcastle and Chelsea deserving higher positions, but we are where we belong.
https://understat.com/league/EPL
Fergie had dinner with him in New York. Pep turned it down and joked he didn’t understand fergie. I suspect that the plans to take him to city were already in place
We were. It was the hysteria that made out we were struggling to win games and letting Liverpool back in it
75 points is a comfortable too 4 place
We went into the final two games of season needing 1 point at home against struggling Chelsea or Fulham with nothing to play for, and we won the first one in cruising mode.
It was a comfortable top 4 finish unless we come up with imaginary scenarios that were not remotely close to happening. To be fair despite Liverpool mounting a late challenge it never really looked like we were going to drop out at all.
And I'm talking from a POV of someone that doesn't rate ETH at all and think he's largely done a bad job at United. You definitely won't see me clamoring about stunning League Cup win after beating such giants on our way to glory, or an amazing league campaign where against all odds we finished 3rd, however I wouldn't re-write history and claim that we somehow struggled to get into CL.
I agree the football is awful, but which club sorted their team out in a month or so for the long term?
Arteta took multiple years to achieve anything where he was almost sacked three times.
Klopp was couple of years before he won his first prize.
Guardiola bought his succes, but is also the best manager around and his former Barcelona mates joined City a couple of years earlier to set the right structure.
Brighton is everybody’s love child but finished below us last season and is only 1 point in front of us this season.
Spurs are doing great right now but Postecoglou is still in his honeymoon time at the club and has no European football to focus on, let’s see how he does over a bit longer period.
Newcastle had a great run last year but at this time only 1 point in front of us.
Aston Villa, let’s wait and see. Emery is a hugely experienced coach but almost always at the underdog clubs and never at the big clubs.
Chelsea haven’t had a lot of success the last couple of years.
Last season everybody was very positive of Brentford and Frank, but they are only 14th in the league at the moment.
Moyes won a European Cup with West Ham last year but struggled most parts of the season and is 1 point behind us at the moment.
I agree it looks awful what United and Ten Hag are doing but not every club is doing so much better in just a month or so like you say. We played just 9 games with a lot of injuries, 29 games to go in the league.
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Just promote Shea Lacey to the first team and give him a chance, surely it can't get any worse?
It doesn't really lie, where you finish is where you deserve to finish. Like everyone else around you.
If you have a negative xg, you didn't take your chances, you didn't score enough goals and that leads to you not winning enough games and you finish 6th or 7th. That's not a lie, that's where you deserve to finish.
If like Utd now, you don't create enough chances and don't score enough goals to win games comfortably at the same time give goals away for fun and lose games you should have won and you find yourself in 8th place. That's not a lie.
Xg, xps etc etc... it's what might have happened, not what did happen.
Utd finished 3rd, it was a hard earned 3rd at the end of the season, but it was still 3rd place. Liverpool finished 5th and deservedly finished 5th, because of their poor form early in the season and because Newcastle and Utd had better results and accumulated more points over the course of the season.
Least of our problems is wingers cutting in.
Our main problem is midfield. We don't attack as a block or defend as a block.
Its a ping pong game. Pep has operated in wingers who cut in yet they score goals. Pep even operated without a striker and won a title.
433 is not an issue at all, issue is we have very poor midfielders who are getting old as we watch while they deliver absolutely nothing meaningful.
We are just a poor football team especially from midfield to striking area. This has been the main issue since 2013. We have not had a coach who has known how to play sustainable attacking football.
Only Ole has been able to make us score 70+ in a season in the league since 2013. It was ONCE.
Never have we scored more than 75 goals.
City in comparison have scored over 90+ goals in 6 season since 2013. 3 times they have scored over 100 goals.
ETH has been unable to coach the team into an attacking beast, same as other before him were unable.
The whole team set-up is wrong, especially the midfield area.
Sadly I think Amad is closer to a no.10 than a winger capable of supplying the front man.
Sadly we are not Barcelona! They are not afraid of giving youth a chance!
I have given up.
I dont belive in the players, and im starting to doubt the manager.
Our star players are either getting old or are not as good as people think they are.
Its that simple.
I dont belive in the players, and im starting to doubt the manager.
Our star players are either getting old or are not as good as people think they are.
Its that simple.
Was looking at our results and we've been dreadful but if we had just got past Palace (I know, pathetic), we'd be on four straight league wins and very much in the CL spots race.
The issue is that our poor play should logically stop us from getting good results against the good teams like Arsenal, Spurs and Brighton.
The issue is that our poor play should logically stop us from getting good results against the good teams like Arsenal, Spurs and Brighton.
Maybe. But Chelsea look miles better than us and really outplayed Arsenal for large parts of the match. We, on the other hand, really struggled against a team that is bottom of the table and have absolutely no chance of staying up. I wouldn’t mind having some sort of attacking identity, being in 10th, but looking like something better.
I don't think you are completely wrong, but I also feel Gullit has a point and actually both of your arguments align more or less - if viewed from a certain perspective. It indeed is a ping pong game and you indeed don't work as a block. But that can actually be explained by what he mentions - both the wingers and the striker try to score themselves. That means that the midfield has to create the chances (because the wingers don't create). That means they have to push up high to be able to make the play and link with all three players looking to score. Due to this it makes sense that Bruno is often playing very high and that other midfielders also play high up the pitch (I think Casemiro was often criticised for pushing too high recently?). This high position makes it difficult to act as a real block against the ball.
A better distribution of tasks along the team would likely result in better football. Ironically fielding to many players looking to score seems to be part of the reason why United score so little.
Why is he being so stubborn with the formation? Why don’t we try 3-5-2 from time to time? It’s like we never have a backup plan.
I’m just taking the piss out of a previous poster
He's Dutch.
What he needs to start doing is dropping players who aren't performing. Rashford's performances have been dire, his goal return even worse. Same for Antony. Bruno has been useless.
Pep has shown a willingness to drop key players. He's dropped De Bruyne when he's not been playing well. Our players know they'll always play next week, no matter the shit they serve up.
Why the manager is so trusting of players that have time and time again had countless managers sacked I'll never know.
So now Fergie had the authorization to offer the job of managing United...
We cant all be the reasonable, gel like manager that is, for instance, Sam Allardyce.
I do feel ETH is a special. What he did with that Ajax in 2019, currently a small club in the international scheme working on a budget of PL relegation teams like Bournemouth was very impressive, and no Allardyce park the bus ball either. How he handled the Ronaldo situation was very mature. At times current Man United plays incredible football. If Onana gets Martinez and in form Caesmiro in front of him, this team will prevail and produce the goods, of that im sure.
I am sure he was buttering him up and seeing if it’s something that he would consider then a formal offer would have come from the club if a positive response was given. Not that hard to understand and it’s well documented. However the Pep structure was already in place at city at that stats so hey ho
This is something that has baffled me, because Ole did it as well. Does he think that by dropping players they will turn on him, or it will hurt their mentality or something. We did see that RR tried the Iron Fist dropping players and the dressing room turned on him really quickly. Is EtH scared of this happening again?
He hasn't got enough good players, admittedly partially due to his largely poor recruitment, plus we don't have a system where a player comes in for someone else and knows what they're supposed to be doing. He can drop Rashford and Bruno as a gimmick for a game or two to give them a kick up the arse but the reality is we're fecked without them if we have to do it for multiple games because the likes of Pellistri, Martial, Amad and Van de Beek (who are some of the main alternatives) aren't any good.
There are more than a few players still at the club who downed tools for 3 consecutive managers. They're all acutely aware that the manager is the easiest thing to change if results aren't good.
I'm not saying that's definitely what's happening here but if you've got someone with a fragile ego and a choice between admitting they've got to put some mental and physical work in to change their habits and get better vs. just having everyone blame their boss and getting a fresh start with a new one they're going to pick the latter option every time.
I have plenty of faith in him. I saw enough last season to know that he's capable of pulling the best out of players.
Giving him responsibility over transfers is just bad ownership, and makes him an easy scapegoat when they don't work out.
We have an injury crisis, an underperforming squad, players low on confidence, enough drama for the club to have it's own soap opera. It's frankly ridiculous that this club goes through as much as it does and we expect people in it to just keep going without distraction when there are so many uncertainties.
Once we get our core of players back and put all the noise behind us, I imagine things will be a lot better.
Giving him responsibility over transfers is just bad ownership, and makes him an easy scapegoat when they don't work out.
We have an injury crisis, an underperforming squad, players low on confidence, enough drama for the club to have it's own soap opera. It's frankly ridiculous that this club goes through as much as it does and we expect people in it to just keep going without distraction when there are so many uncertainties.
Once we get our core of players back and put all the noise behind us, I imagine things will be a lot better.