Ten Hag’s whole “United DNA” thing is nothing but an excuse geared at buying time from Top Reds (such as myself). I am not buying it.
Perhaps this guy has a philosophy and some principles, but it just does not work. The 3-1-6 makes us disastrous in the build-up and even worse in defensive transitions. We keep repeatedly conceding the same type of goal (from cut-backs). The man-oriented press has been a problem that remains unfixed from the start. While we had beasts we could defend large spaces such as Cas, Varane, AWB and Shaw, almost every team has now figured out a way to drag players out of position and play through the middle with ease. Meanwhile, our forwards are not getting clear-cut chances due to the absence of patterns of play or wide rotations.
Ten Hag’s defenders might predictably blame the players. But who’s players are they? You had three windows to build a team in-line with your principles. The first window was fine. Lisandro, Antony and Malacia are by all means players suited to posession football. Weghorst and Sabitzer on loan, I can accept as stop-gap solutions.
The last transfer window was a joke. Onana and Mount can considered good signings for a possession-based system. Hojlund does not have good enough link-up play for that as a 9, but he could work as a wide-forward. But what does Ten Hag do instead? He says that United will play as a transition-based team, which renders his £100m signing from the previous summer totally useless as he does not have the legs or physicality for this.
Moreover, what kind of transition-based team tries to build up from the back in a 3-1-6 set-up? At least in the Ole days we had a traditional set-up with a double-pivot which actually invited the opposition press and created spaces either in-front or behind the opponent’s defence. Meanwhile, Ten Hag’s confused and chaotic philosophy gives our opponents the chance to both outnumber us in the first phase of build-up (shadow the pressing / cutting off passing lanes to the solitary DM), while at the same time having enough men back so that we cannot create overloads in attack.
Ten Hag’s whole premise this season has been that we rotate the ball in defence to bait the press and then play through it. Wolves figured us out the first game. They cut off the passing lanes and forces us to go long. Arsenal then stopped pressing our defence altogether and spotted that we will struggle to get the ball to the two 10s, so we just ended up hoofing it down the channels. Our ball progression was better under Moyes, Ole, Jose and even Ralf!
This manager is totally useless. He doesn’t even have a philosophy. He is confused and keeps getting bailed out by the fact that we have better players than most opponents. He can’t even recruit the right profiles for his transition system. For those who say he needs Licha and Shaw back for it to work, how did we fare at the start of the season when they were available?