Is Ole’s football really any better than José & LVG’s?

Lee565

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It looks like mindless running around off the ball and a lack of passing options on the ball all too often
 

Jimbam

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Are we sure that Telles and van de bek are football player;
I don't think so.
Ole is a miserable coach.
He can,t improve us.
Fire him.
 

passing-wind

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I personally think OGS has done an admirable job with the squad he had to work with.

The squad is far from good enough to compete with our cross town rivals for the premiership.

Nothings changed still two or three world class players away from mounting a serious challenge.
A good squad isn't needed to play good football. The facts are Solskjaer has the best set of players out of every manager since Sir Alex retired and there's a clear picture that he's showing a managerial ceiling with how far he can take them.

We have one of the best squads in the league in depth and quality. Whenever I observe games it's never the lack of quality that is the distinctive weakness it's the poor collective play which is on the staff / coaches. That's why the team cannot surpass a semi final and it will continue to be a sticking point until the manager is likely replaced.
 

FujiVice

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For all their faults, I dont think LVG and Mourinho would have rested their best two before an international break.
 

Ludens the Red

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Honestly, after these last four games. West Ham, Milan twice and Leicester.
Someone please come in here with a straight face and say “the football is much better” than it was under Lvg and Mourinho.
 

Shnabb

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There is obviously a physical explanation for the bad football we are seeing. We have played five matches this month before tonight's match. Leicester has played three. When the best teams are so evenly matched a small physical decline makes a big difference.
 

Tyrion

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We have been missing sitters .. if we get a clinical striker .. maybe the draws will be wins
Hmm I think with everyone fit we could of maintained a good record and wouldn’t of fell behind city by as much or at all. You also need a striker which we just don’t have. We’ve played some good stuff this year at times and it’s definitely getting better or was until pogba

Pogba was a big loss and I think only him and Bruno have the skills to break down the park the bus teams.
Maybe but every team misses chances and has injuries. I don't think we've been unusually bad at this.

I disagree, there's an imbalance in the team right now that we are winning inspite of. The entire right side is pretty much unproductive and other than Pogba who has been injured for a large portion of the season, none of our midfielders are comfortable recieving the ball and playing progressively. I cannot imagine that our ability to dominate the lesser teams won't be enhanced by upgrading these positions. Regardless of whether it's a big or small team, we struggle against any team that gets the opportunity setup defensively against us. This is partly down to our patterns but also because of our limited offensive weapons. How many times have we heard the phrase "we need to move the ball quicker"? The better your players are technically, the easier it is to accomplish this.
I agree that there are issues in the team and maybe if we had different players OGS would play differently but I don't think there is much of a plan when we're against defensive teams.
 

Tyrion

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I really don't know why this keeps coming, given that the record massively disproves the point. The simple fact is that we win almost all of our games against weaker teams who play a low block. Obviously it can be debated which opponents fit into the definition of a weaker team that plays a low block, but if we exclude big 6 + Leicester, and Everton this season, the following is true: Since Bruno's arrival we have lost precisely TWO such games in the PL - against Palace and Sheffield United. Additionally, we have draws against Palace and West Brom this year, and against West ham, Southampton, Everton and Wolves last year. That's it. The rest of them, we've won.

It's complete BS that "we're usually poor against settled teams".

Also, it simply is not correct that we rely on counterattack goals, and struggle to score from established play.

This season, we have (CL+PL):

Penalties: 12
Corners and free kicks: 9
Counterattacks: 21
Established play: 30

And, counterattack goals were more preponderant in the CL games than in the PL.

If we consider Palace, Newcastle, WBA, Southampton, West Ham, SHU, Wolves, Burnley and Fulham weaker teams who play a low block against United, our goal distribution against them in 14 games where we have scored at least one goal is like this:

Corners/free kicks: 3
Penalties: 3
Counterattack goals: 8
Established play: 20







Here's what our goals have been against weaker, low block teams:

CRP: 1 established
NEW: 1 off a corner, 1 established, 2 counter
WBA: 1 Penalty
SOU:
Assuming those stats are correct, the reason that idea keeps coming up is because it matches what we're seeing. Most big teams will win most of the games against weaker teams otherwise they'd be midtable. They'll also have most of the possession so many of their goals will be "established". I'm judging United relative to the other teams that we should be aiming to compete with (Liverpool, City, Chelsea).
 

MrBest

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People have short memories, the LVG period was awful, i remember tearing my eyes out and even creating a petition. Jose was pretty bad, but he won us two trophies. Ole's time has been a story of good and terrible spells. We seem to do well (results, not perfmances) for 10 games then terrible for 20. We have no consistency and no passion. Team selections usually consist of Ole's favourite and most trusted players and Ole has no plan b. I have been a firm Ole outter for a while because of this issue but right now I would take new coaches over sacking Ole purely because Carrick and co at the helm of coaching is just miserable, they all look clueless on the touchline. I still have no belief or evidence that Ole can be a success manager winning trophies so at the end of this season, I'd love to say goodbye but this just will not happen.
 

Frank Grimes

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We seem incapable of any pattern of play in the final third. If we're not passing the ball backwards to our defenders or sideways in midfield we can't string more than 3 passes together. Such a poorly coached team.
 

Asger

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Difficult to play good football with players that can’t pass. All our midfielders and attackers are very poor at it.
 

SirScholes

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Maybe but every team misses chances and has injuries. I don't think we've been unusually bad at this.



I agree that there are issues in the team and maybe if we had different players OGS would play differently but I don't think there is much of a plan when we're against defensive teams.
Agreed but we are also second so not doing that bad compared to say Liverpool.
 

swooshboy

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We seem incapable of any pattern of play in the final third. If we're not passing the ball backwards to our defenders or sideways in midfield we can't string more than 3 passes together. Such a poorly coached team.
This is it. It almost doesn't matter who we play in different positions – they all seem incapable of passing it accurately. After two passes, the next one is slightly mis-placed...which causes the next one to be even worse...and then we lose the ball.

I see zero movement of the front players – no runs into space to stretch the defence. They also seem to have no idea where each other are on the pitch. Our midfield never seems to make themselves available for a return pass. If they have the ball, all they want to achieve is passing it to someone as close as possible and put the responsibility on them to create something.

People criticise VdB, but I have seen nothing from Bruno the past several games. He was less involved when he came on yesterday than VdB had been. The commentators even said "Here come the cavalry" when we made those 4 subs...but nothing changed in how we were playing.

This is not knee-jerk after one game, but we do not seem to have a style of football. Aside from counter-attacking, we don't look like we have a clue what to do, except pass it sideways or back to our defenders, as you said. It is mind-numbing watching our games and so frustrating – and it has been for a long time (with a couple of exceptions).
 

Jackal

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Are we sure that Telles and van de bek are football player;
I don't think so.
Ole is a miserable coach.
He can,t improve us.
Fire him.
Ole has no intelligence.

Any other manager would have gotten us through last night under the same harrowing statistics.
Let's start with the defence - Leicester have 2 pacy strikers and Ole decided to start our slowest CBs together, paying no mind to the damage the opponents could have cost us.
To compound the aroma of shit, he also played Matic in the midfield. A centre-half pairing of Bailly and any of Maguire/Lindelof would have coped better. Insure them with the energy of Fred and McTominay and we would have been much better to cope with Leicester.

Another glaring error was the selection of Telles. If there's no target man to aim the ball at in the attack, what's the point of starting Telles whose only strength seems to be the crosses in the box. Ole started Telles and the plan was to aim balls at the laziest striker in Europe(Martial). It's almost as if Ole couldn't care about the game even after it was revealed at half time that the opponent in the next round is Southampton. The in-game management was also horrendous. United were chasing a game and Ole removed Pogba for Fred(who had been atrocious all game).
 

The Brown Bull

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Honestly, after these last four games. West Ham, Milan twice and Leicester.
Someone please come in here with a straight face and say “the football is much better” than it was under Lvg and Mourinho.
They can't. It would be a lie that Trump would be proud of.
 

VivaRonaldo85

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The odd freak performance aside such as City away, I can’t recall the last time I thought, “wow we were outstanding and looked a brilliant attacking outfit”. Every game feels like a sigh of relief when we win and a shrug of the shoulders and acceptance when we don’t win given how poor the quality is throughout.
 

Schmeichel's Cartwheel

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The odd freak performance aside such as City away, I can’t recall the last time I thought, “wow we were outstanding and looked a brilliant attacking outfit”. Every game feels like a sigh of relief when we win and a shrug of the shoulders and acceptance when we don’t win given how poor the quality is throughout.
Yeah. We’re boring way more often than we’re entertaining aren’t we. There’s been a few games, Leeds probably being the highlight, but I reckon about 75% of the time we’re a pretty ugly watch.
 

Leftback99

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The odd freak performance aside such as City away, I can’t recall the last time I thought, “wow we were outstanding and looked a brilliant attacking outfit”. Every game feels like a sigh of relief when we win and a shrug of the shoulders and acceptance when we don’t win given how poor the quality is throughout.
The thing is other than City this season I can't remember the last time I watched anyone this season and thought that.
 

Champagne Football

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His hands are tied. It's possible he didn't want Fred to begin with, but was told by the Glazers that Fred must play seem as they spent 50 million on him.

His first choice midfield target was Jude Bellingham last summer but Dortmund offered double the salary, and a far bigger guarantee of first team football, so there was never any chance he was coming here.

So Ole has struggled to get the players he has asked for - Haaland, Sancho, Bellingham etc So he's had to simply do with what he's got. So we've been left without a proper box to box midfielder and a proper Man Utd style defensive midfielder for many years.

But with a bit of patience waiting for Garner and Mejbri to develop, while hoping Van de Beek comes good, then we can start eventually controlling midfields again.
 

Waynne

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People have short memories, the LVG period was awful, i remember tearing my eyes out and even creating a petition. Jose was pretty bad, but he won us two trophies. Ole's time has been a story of good and terrible spells. We seem to do well (results, not perfmances) for 10 games then terrible for 20. We have no consistency and no passion. Team selections usually consist of Ole's favourite and most trusted players and Ole has no plan b. I have been a firm Ole outter for a while because of this issue but right now I would take new coaches over sacking Ole purely because Carrick and co at the helm of coaching is just miserable, they all look clueless on the touchline. I still have no belief or evidence that Ole can be a success manager winning trophies so at the end of this season, I'd love to say goodbye but this just will not happen.
I woke up every morning hoping to see headlines of LVG being sacked. It got so bad I started dreaming of it and that's not an exaggeration at all.
I'd take Mourinho or even Ole's football over LVG any time of the day or week.
There's not a form of torture more painful than watching Man United under LVG.
 

CG1010

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No it hasn't.
Yes, it has. And I believe you would agree with me too if you were made to watch full games randomly from LVG / Mourinho's times and then compared to post-Bruno times. There are detailed statistics someone posted earlier in the thread if you wanted to look for more objective criteria.
 

CG1010

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Honestly, after these last four games. West Ham, Milan twice and Leicester.
Someone please come in here with a straight face and say “the football is much better” than it was under Lvg and Mourinho.
Not in these four games but football isn't about just last few games.
 

CG1010

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No it’s not, hence why this discussion has gone on for so long. We also had games against Palace, Sheffield United and West Brom and many many more.
The fact of a discussion about something taking place is no proof of one side being true. And when you say, "so long", this thread was created 19 days ago! As I posted before in this thread, this is a due to the goals drying up in last couple of months as a result of our attacking players being out of form, and generally a more defensive approach taken by Ole, possibly due to us leaking goals. Before this, this was nowhere the dominant narrative and people actually enjoyed watching us apart from those who prefer a Pep style system football ( I don't). You can in fact check neutral's opinions about us.

And to the extent it is about actual footballing actions that can be measured by stats, as I said the comparative stats were posted in this thread. Do refer to them.
 

Ludens the Red

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The fact of a discussion about something taking place is no proof of one side being true. And when you say, "so long", this thread was created 19 days ago! As I posted before in this thread, this is a due to the goals drying up in last couple of months as a result of our attacking players being out of form, and generally a more defensive approach taken by Ole, possibly due to us leaking goals. Before this, this was nowhere the dominant narrative and people actually enjoyed watching us apart from those who prefer a Pep style system football ( I don't). You can in fact check neutral's opinions about us.

And to the extent it is about actual footballing actions that can be measured by stats, as I said the comparative stats were posted in this thread. Do refer to them.
By saying “football is more than just the last few games”. You were implying this poor football wasnt a problem previously. It most definitely was and most definitely has been discussed endlessly. This thread being made was purely a breaking point and created a more centred discussion.

You are recreating history massively. During that spell where we ‘scored a bit more’ people were still criticising our performances. Gary Neville described them as “manic”. Most neutrals think our football is shite. Please direct me to a post where a neutral states they “enjoy watching United play”. A large amount of our fans can’t stand the way we play and haven’t all season. Me obviously being one of them.

I don’t need to go through the thread to see “detailed stats” Ive made a number of posts on here comparing our possession and goal scoring stats from Ole to Mourinho and they are almost identical. Anyone coming up with anything that shows a large difference is supplying fake information.

Edit - I’ve just seen you’re choosing ‘post Bruno stats’ . :lol:
Because everything that happened during Oles reign before Bruno doesn’t count?
 

RashyForPM

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From the articles that I’ve read written by the likes of Carl Anka and Laurie Whitwell, and especially from what we watch week in week out, it’s clear Ole doesn’t have any specific attacking plan. He simply puts our attackers in England the right position and allows them the freedom to do as they please. “Express yourself boys”.

Because we have such top attackers, we score a lot of goals. We scored loads after lockdown last season because we played a front 5 with only one holding midfielder. You don’t even see him mention football phrases like ‘inverted winger’ or ‘positional play’, which Pep, Klopp, Pochettino etc all do very frequently. Obviously this isn’t a barometer of anything, but it does somewhat prove the assumptions made about his coaching. It’s obviously not impossible to win this way because if we play throughout a season like we did post lockdown, we’d win loads of titles. However, it means the manager can’t help our players when we play badly, so it obviously makes it harder to win. Look at City, Bayern etc; Pep and Flick make sure that even when the players have shockers, they never look clueless.

However, to the point of this thread, Ole’s football is still far better than LvG and Mourinho’s. They played genuinely awful football. I don’t need to write paragraphs to describe their football. All I’ll say is, both played methodical tripe where our players were treated like Sunday League footballers just starting out in the game.
 

Ludens the Red

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I don't understand why someone would use stats to prove how boring or otherwise our style of play is. How does a fan watch a match and think whether he was entertained or not will be determined in the days and weeks to come as the full story emerges as to how entertaining or otherwise the match was and how well or badly we played. The whole thing just exemplifies the insane rabbit hole we're in with football where stats have gone from mildly interesting pieces of trivia to the thing people genuinely seem to base their opinions around now. It's bizarre.

Honestly if you see us play 6 games and you like what you see during those games, or you don't like what you see or you sometimes like what you see and otherwise don't - isn't that you bring to the table in these dicussions?

"I thought I was entertained by football in this period but looking back at the stats I can clearly see how wrong I was, I will now seek therapy to ensure that any thoughts of pleasure are suppressed as these figures clearly prove what a fool I am"

Honestly a thread, effectively, about whether we play better football now or before (or indeed in the future) is entirely subjective and yet - stats, stats, stats, stats, stats. Some need to learn to form an opinion for once. This is my theory behind why some people aren't bothered by the impact of VAR on flow of the game, because the spectator enjoyment isn't important to them. They'll just glance up occasionally from their phone knowing they can find out how well it went after the game by finding out which player had the better pass completion rate in the final third than anyone else.
Good post. fecking xG.
 

Siezard

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With Bruno, Ole's squad is better than the rest. Without Bruno, that's a difficult question to answer. But then again, don't forget all the players are getting wiser and better with each year except for a few.
 

Verbalkint

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With Bruno, Ole's squad is better than the rest. Without Bruno, that's a difficult question to answer. But then again, don't forget all the players are getting wiser and better with each year except for a few.
About Bruno, no clue why Ole even rested him. Before international break. We saved him vs Leicester City for Portugal? Crazy, no?