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

devilish

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Ole is an excellent man manager and an average tactician. LVG and Mou were horrible man managers and their tactics were obsolete. That makes Ole a better manager to them but that doesn't mean he's good enough for us.
 

Cast5

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Absolutely we are, anyone who enjoyed the football under LVG & Mourinho more than under Ole needs to go to the doctors to check if they have dementia, we were terrible to watch under LVG and were routinely played off the park by many teams under Mourinho who were miles worse than us, at least when we don’t win against lesser teams under Ole more often than not they’re parking the bus and we’re having a go.

Endless Ole out threads on here after draws, positive ones after a run of wins is called “gloating” on a United forum, very strange indeed.
 
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OnlyTwoDaSilvas

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It reminds me of LVG's football. Occasionally it clicks, and it's good. But most of the time it's dull, with a couple of moments here and there which are sometimes enough to win us the game. Under LVG we went through a few different phases. We had a phase of a few months in the 2nd season where we typically had all of the ball, but also barely created a chance. It has felt like that period quite a lot this season. I still prefer watching us under Ole, we generally take a few more risks and move more, but there still seems to be little idea on how to get through a team.
 

Rood

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At its best Ole ball is better than anything LvG or Jose managed and at its worst (last night) it's still on par with LvG at least
 

ForeverRed1

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Unfortunately we’re a moments team. A team with a lot of very good players that can create moments. If you think back through the season, so many of our points have come from individuals. 1 goal margins everywhere.

As a team tactically we are waaaaaaaay off. We also look knackered yet he insists on rinsing the same players game after game! What’s the point in having the best number 10 in the league if he’s Exhausted. If he gets injured what are we going to do?

Im oles biggest fan (nicest guy in football and club legend etc) but there is so much wrong with the team and has been all season in all honesty.

you could argue he hasn’t been backed.. but the players he has at his disposal, we could play better than we do. Once the individual players don’t play... we’re clueless and exposed. No pattern of play.. no direction, not cohesive in the slightest.

The question that’s got to be asked is what is oles ceiling and has he reached it? Is he a pep or a Klopp? I just can’t see it, I think what he has done here has been good for us.. but I’m just not sure he’s going to take us up another level.

so no, I don’t think we’re better. Not in footballing terms. Possibly the dressing room is better and the mood around the club, but not footballing terms.
 

Judge Red

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In fairness to Ole, Old Trafford has been noisier this season than the LVG days.
 

TrustInJanuzaj

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I think it is better but its a very low bar. In the second half of last season in particular I think we played some brilliant stuff and I had mates messaging me saying they were excited to watch Utd play. That's something we never even once achieved under the previous managers. Having said that, we have gone backwards massively this season and I don't really think we have played well at all for the entirety of the season, with a few good performances sprinkled in. Ultimately, this isn't the progress that I thought Ole would make. He did a great job to stabilise the club and I really enjoyed last season as well as some of the progress he made with the squad, however, it now appears as though he's retreating into his shell and getting more nervous to make the big calls. His football is getting more cowardly and he seems afraid to take big risks.

I do think a big part in the drop in quality this season is the loss in form of Anthony Martial. People won't like to hear that on this forum as he's not well liked as a player but the truth is he was phenomenal for the second half of last season and the entirety of our play went through him. With his dramatic fall in form, it's basically as though we have sold one of our best players and we have absolutely no one that can replace what he was bringing.
 

TrustInJanuzaj

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I've stopped watching our matches because of our football (and the results). I never reached this point with LVG and Mourinho (although disliked them both as well), so I don't know what that says about Ole. Either my patience has run out or Ole is even worse than his predecessors.
It has to be your patience as we are clearly nowhere near as bad as during those times.
 

Schmeichel's Cartwheel

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At its best Ole ball is better than anything LvG or Jose managed and at its worst (last night) it's still on par with LvG at least
LVG taking us to Anfield & making them chase shadows is my favourite United performance post Fergie. So I have to disagree.

When his possession football worked it was fantastic. It just wasn’t often enough. His top level was easily better than anything Jose or Ole has done imo.
 

RashyForPM

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While I think on the whole, Ole has given us slightly more entertainment than his two predecessors, people shouldn’t speak as if both never got it right at times like Ole too. LvG’s 6 game winning run in 2014, 3 game winning run against big 6 sides in 2015, going top in late 2015 etc. Mourinho’s 2016-17 season was full of brilliant football and poor finishing, and we started the 2017-18 season playing like City are now. I was sure we would win the league that season after our first few performances.

So actually, Ole has only improved the style of play by a tiny bit, and the results are as bad as under LvG, and worse than Mourinho’s. What do people who desperately want to keep him see?
 

AngliaRed

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A trophy with both Jose & LVG

A few semi finals for OGS.

You could also argue that Jose had a worse team than the one Ole has now. In fact he did!

Trophies are What’s remembered in years to come,not style of football or who’s a better man manager.

All that been said, the players are much happier with Ole than when Jose was boss!
 

Zen86

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LVG and Jose football was systematically terrible by design. Right now, we’re just playing shit.
 

Rood

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LVG taking us to Anfield & making them chase shadows is my favourite United performance post Fergie. So I have to disagree.

When his possession football worked it was fantastic. It just wasn’t often enough. His top level was easily better than anything Jose or Ole has done imo.
I don't agree but I actually always liked LvG and wasn't as against the possession style as many, but it was usually literally 1 game where it really worked.

Whereas Ole's top level lasts more than just 1 or 2 matchea - he's had a few sustained runs of very good form, although it is often followed by a poor run like we are currently experiencing
 

Di Maria's angel

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It isn't perfect by any stretch but by and large we've been better at creating against teams who sit deep on us. Obviously we are suffering without Pogba in the side.

We'd have also scored a lot more goals if our forwards weren't so wasteful. Rashford and Martial have squandered multiple good chances this season. We have to improve in that respect but there was never even the intent with Mourinho.
Sorry, don't agree. Of the 53 goals we've scored, 15 were accumulated in 2 games. 38 in the other 25 games this season just goes to show how defensive Ole is.
 

roonster09

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I don't agree but I actually always liked LvG and wasn't as against the possession style as many, but it was usually literally 1 game where it really worked.

Whereas Ole's top level lasts more than just 1 or 2 matchea - he's had a few sustained runs of very good form, although it is often followed by a poor run like we are currently experiencing
Van Gaal's good run was as short as Cleverley's good run of form, around 3-4 games.
 

Siorac

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We'd have also scored a lot more goals if our forwards weren't so wasteful.
This is a myth, nothing more. Our xG is somewhere between 42 and 45, depending on the source and we scored 53 goals. We are 6th in shots/90 minutes but 3rd in shots on target/90 minutes, 4th in shots on target/goal.

We're actually one of the more clinical teams in the league.
 

Mickeza

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Ole is an excellent man manager and an average tactician. LVG and Mou were horrible man managers and their tactics were obsolete. That makes Ole a better manager to them but that doesn't mean he's good enough for us.
This is a fair analysis. If we give him a squad that’s the best in the league I think he’d win the league. Keeping players motivated is most important in that instance. He’ll get 90% of what’s possible out of the squad. Nobody in world football would have finished higher than 3rd last year or 2nd this year. He gets to semi-finals routinely and we’ve been beaten by good teams. He clearly isn’t a bad manager. He isn’t underachieving with what we have. However, he isn’t going to elevate the team to first unless we spend big. But that’s an odd stick to beat him with because outside of Klopp who would? Unfortunately the two best managers in the world are currently at our rivals. One of those clubs also has an oil state backing them. This “sack Ole and we’ll be fine” narrative is bollocks. Whoever is in charge will need significant investment to compete - investment I doubt we have the stomach for. Our attack is supposedly the best part of our side and currently it has a 34 year old injury prone Cavani as first choice striker who has scored about 12 goals in the last 20 months and Dan James as our best right winger. It’s absolute delusion to think this team should be challenging.
 

largelyworried

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LVG taking us to Anfield & making them chase shadows is my favourite United performance post Fergie. So I have to disagree.

When his possession football worked it was fantastic. It just wasn’t often enough. His top level was easily better than anything Jose or Ole has done imo.
That run of peak form lasted precisely 4 games - the 3-0 vs Spurs, the 2-1 vs Liverpool, a 3-1 home win against vs Villa and a 4-2 vs City. I remember Gary Neville excitedly proclaiming "the penny's dropped!" on Sky Sports during that spell. We followed up that up with 3 straight defeats where we didn't score a single goal, including a home defeat to West Brom. So while that run was unquestionably excellent, to my mind it was so short that it was more of a freak than anything else. We never reached those heights before or after with LVG.
 
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Offside

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These past few weeks have really tested me. One dogshit performance after another. We really need to find our form again otherwise we won’t even make the top 4. If that happened after the brief title talk in January then Ole would need to be given the boot. Anything other than a top 3 finish would be unacceptable.
 

Born2Lose

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Uhmm... Mourinho's last game was going to Anfield playing the most defensive football a United side has every played there. There was no attacking intention at all, it was simply about not conceding.

How anyone can forget that game is beyond me.
 

horsechoker

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Uhmm... Mourinho's last game was going to Anfield playing the most defensive football a United side has every played there. There was no attacking intention at all, it was simply about not conceding.

How anyone can forget that game is beyond me.
Short memories.

The grass is always greener on the other side, even when there wasn't any grass.
 

Di Maria's angel

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This was on my twitter feed


I'm not sure I've seen a team consistently play like shit and win games. Brighton, Newcastle x2, Wolves, Villa, Fulham, West Ham are just off the top of my head. Not to mention we lost at home to Arsenal for the first time in how long? That said, the worst Arsenal in forever. We also conceded 6 goals to a Mourinho led Spurs who have no interest in the crossing the halfway line. This is a bizzare season and I've no idea how we're still 2nd, and even more bizzare, how on earth were we top?
 

Di Maria's angel

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Uhmm... Mourinho's last game was going to Anfield playing the most defensive football a United side has every played there. There was no attacking intention at all, it was simply about not conceding.

How anyone can forget that game is beyond me.
We replicated that performance around 6 or 7 times this past month including our visit to Anfield - where we showed an incredible amount of respect to the worst performing Liverpool side in at least 3 or 4 years.

Games in which we've played to draw: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, West Ham and Sociedad off the top of my head.
 

OleBoiii

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Yes it's better. There's generally more energy, pace, movement and goals.

The main problem is lack of player quality. On paper we're still a typical top 4 team. People are losing their minds, but the fact is that we are right about where we belong. A title challenge with this team would have been way above expectations.
 

Born2Lose

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We replicated that performance around 6 or 7 times this past month including our visit to Anfield - where we showed an incredible amount of respect to the worst performing Liverpool side in at least 3 or 4 years.

Games in which we've played to draw: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, West Ham and Sociedad off the top of my head.
Not really, Pogba scores a chance a world class player should and we win that 1-0. There's a difference between counter attack and Mourinho's medieval parking of the bus.
 

Dansk

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Bruno's individual brilliance and Pogba's wantaway form has papered over the cracks quite a bit. Without that, we'd be flailing somewhere down around 6th or 8th place. This squad is not robust at all. The team as a whole is pathetically poor, to be quite honest, and is saved time and time again by individualism. As soon as that dried up (Pogba injured, Bruno's form dipping), we've been back to mid-table form and painfully unattractive football.

I'm not at all convinced that Ole gets much credit for Bruno's performances, and certainly not for Pogba who blatantly just wanted to advertise himself to prospective buyers. The things we actually know the manager is responsible for - team cohesion, tactics, player selection, etc. - have been resoundingly unimpressive. We play like a team that doesn't train at all.

Most weeks it's like watching a national team's first game in the qualifiers for a tournament, when players who haven't seen eachother since last year suddenly have to work together. Well-coached teams know where their teammates are, what they'll do, where to place a pass in order to execute a sequence of play that was drilled into them in training. We don't do that at all. Players are constantly passing to nobody, caught off-side, stuck with the ball against three opponents because noone is available to pass to.

We have some very good players on the team, but they aren't playing well together. With a select few exceptions, they're playing at 75% of what we've previously seen that they're capable of. Moments of individual brilliance have saved us time and time again, and when those don't happen, it's a dependable 0-0 affair. In all the aspects of the game that the manager is responsible for, we're comically awful. We've had so few games under Ole where the team added up to the sum of its parts.
 

Di Maria's angel

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Not really, Pogba scores a chance a world class player should and we win that 1-0. There's a difference between counter attack and Mourinho's medieval parking of the bus.
The comment above your post is all you need to read. They've all failed. Ole, so far, the worst - at least the other two won trophies.
 

hobbers

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At its best it's been better, but not much better than under the previous two. The defence are going backwards, no debate to be had there. Martial isn't even a shadow of his former self. Rashford is currently going backwards. Bruno is burned out from trying to carry everyone else for a full year of football.

And having said that, the number of abjectly rubbish performances this season has been higher than either season with LVG and Mourinho's first two - not including his meltdown.

Going through every dismal game this season:
Palace 1-3
Brighton 2-3 (deserved to lose by 5)
Spurs 1-6
Chelsea 0-0
Arsenal 0-1
Basaksehir 2-1
WBA 1-0 (VAR win, zero chances created otherwise)
Southampton 2-3 (Awful for 80 minutes and deserved to lose)
The great CL bottling at Leipzig
City 0-0
The fourth semi in a row bottled
Liverpool 0-0
Sheff Utd 1-2
Arsenal 0-0
WBA 1-1
Chelsea 0-0
Palace 0-0

Now try and find me even half as many games this season where anyone could objectively say that we played really well. Good luck with that.

It's been an awful, awful season as far as the quality of our football has been concerned - anyone denying that at this stage is wildly deluded - and it is a miracle every other team bar City has fallen off a cliff at the same time as us.
 

tomaldinho1

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It reminds me of LVG's football. Occasionally it clicks, and it's good. But most of the time it's dull, with a couple of moments here and there which are sometimes enough to win us the game. Under LVG we went through a few different phases. We had a phase of a few months in the 2nd season where we typically had all of the ball, but also barely created a chance. It has felt like that period quite a lot this season. I still prefer watching us under Ole, we generally take a few more risks and move more, but there still seems to be little idea on how to get through a team.
With LVG I think we had a lot more confidence in his defensive system (Tuchel is doing a similar thing with Chelsea re setting up a structure where you stop leaking goals through possession based football) but then we never made the attacking jump 2nd season and were just too robotic and rigid in attack - games like Juanfield, 4-2 win versus City, 3-0 Pool, 3-1 Pool (Martial's debut) gave some hope of what could come and I think it was worth trying that type of coach (although we should never hire someone who has been out of domestic football that long again) and, at least, I feel he left the team with better technical players at a good age (Herrera, Shaw, Martial, Blind, Memphis along with the younger players he'd given game to like Rashford) and got the most out of guys like Smalling and Mata. He wasn't massively successful for us although top four and then FA cup is not a disaster but we were then well poised for someone to come in and build on what he'd done whilst modernising his attacking methods. Why we then hired one of the most pragmatic and risk adverse manager in Mourinho is a mystery.

Ole seems torn between leaving the Jose blueprint behind, we still set up a similar way and our possession stats are almost identical even 2.5 years after Jose left, and properly going for it and placing an emphasis on goals - that's the issue for me it's like we're trying to play a more attacking game but refusing to leave behind a predominantly defensive formation, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other and you can see the imbalance when we play and the chasm of space that usually exists between our attack and the rest of the team.