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Ok, right, yeah. My bad.
I think Dalot has been fine this season. If we have a right sided CB behind him who has the ability to defend the channel in 1v1 situations, then Dalot won't be as occupied in defensive transitions as he is currently. I think we can upgrade at RB but that upgrade shouldn't come at the expense of signing a CB or midfielder. And the priority for this season was striker and GK and I think the priority for next season could well be a CB and midfielder.
That's really just a damning indictment of our scouts. Arguably the one and only signing in the post Fergie era to have an indisputably positive effect on the team and they tried to block it. Where were they when we needed them to block the signings of Bailly, Lukaku, Antony, Van Der Beek and Sancho?
Pretty certain you’ll be wrong on this
What was the purpose of signing a #10 when it made more sense to sign a deeper lying midfielder to play with the existing midfielders in the team?? It's not a surprise that we can't develop a playing style with a narrow minded approach to recruitment.
Bruno has been a ‘successful’ signing in many respects. But in a temporary sort of fashion. What Adnan has mentioned is that the signing lacked longer term consideration about the development of the team. Bruno has helped us to win games. But he doesn’t really help us ‘play better’. And ultimately, he/we won’t win enough games to win big titles anyway, not without actually addressing what we need to do to actually ‘play well’ and like maybe try being the better team on the pitch in the majority of football matches we play, as opposed to the second best/equal best that we are more often than not, irrespective of result.
The purpose was presumably to improve the team to a point where we secure CL football. Which was duly achieved, thanks largely to an incredible personal contribution from Bruno. At this point our amazing scouting team had the opportunity to sign some really top players - who might be holding out for CL football - and build from a position of strength. If Bruno is as poor a player as you seem to think then these world class players signed by the brains trust in charge of transfers could have seen Bruno relegated to a squad player. A versatile attacking player who can make something happen in the final third when he's brought on off the bench. Even his harshest critic would agree that this is something he'd be well suited for and all the top teams have big names like Bruno on the bench. How did that work out?!
I didn't say Bruno is a poor player but rather aI asked you a simple question which you seem to have deflected by having a go at the former heads of scouting who have been sacked.
Why do you seem to think it was a binary decision? Bruno was a very good player, who was available and had a very positive and immediate impact. He was a successful signing. Serious clubs are capable of working on more than one area of the squad at the same time. There was nothing stopping us signing one or more world class deeper lying midfielders as well as Bruno, either back then or more recently. The fact we haven't yet done this (despite spending hundreds of millions of pounds since we signed Bruno) is completely irrelevant to your opinion on Bruno but doesn't reflect well at all on the people in charge of improving our squad.
This is very true. But typically of us, we underestimating the gap between our team and the likes of City. It wasn’t a band aid job.
There was no need to sign a #10 when Pogba was already at the club and Solskjaer wanted to keep him by all accounts. Pogba was was best utilised at club level as the most advanced midfielder in a 3 man midfield at Juventus. And when you make a decision to sign a #10 on top of trying to keep Pogba and also want to play in a higher defensive line, then you've created a problem which will eventually rear it's head and cost you.
Pogba was horrible in advanced positions. Way too slow on the turn and always wanted far too many touches before releasing it. Like watching a brontosaurus being swarmed by velociraptors. So it was no great surprise that Bruno immediately improved us massively as soon as he took that role. I honestly have no idea how we could have made best use of Pogba, he was almost good in loads of positions but never made one his own. Despite multiple managers bending over backwards to accommodate him. The only real positive about Pogba is that he's no longer our problem.
Pogba was definitely slow on the turn but he was a far superior to Bruno at carrying the ball in a midfield three. But that's not the point, the point is what was Solskjaer trying to do by creating a midfield composition with both Pogba and Bruno in it?
I guess he thought Pogba + 1 could play at the base of midfield. That was how he was being used for France anyway.
Pogba was being utilised by France in a deeper role with Matuidi covering one side and Kante the other. His job was to create and Deschamps was intelligent enough to have athletic players like Kante and Matuidi (fullback) to plug the gaps out of possession.
For the majority of the first half of the 19/20 season, Pogba was on one of his many lengthy injury lay offs in Dubai. Before covid hit, the presumption was that he wouldn't return from injury until April/May and then he'd join Zidane's Madrid in the summer. The signing of Bruno was partly due to planning for life without Pogba.
Presumption from who? Probably mouth-frothing interneters - but it appeared that wasn’t the case for Ole. He seemed very keen for him to stay, and immediately integrated him back into the team (well, after one game when he started him on the bench against Spurs and he came on and changed it). Real Madrid were supposed to sign Van de Beek that summer, a move which was pretty much done if mot for covid.
Reliable journalists at the time were reporting that Madrid were preparing a bid for Pogba. If memory serves, it was only the impact of Covid on Spanish clubs finances that prevented them coming in for him that summer. Considering Ole played a 4-2-3-1 for most of his tenure, I can't imagine there was a plan to integrate both Pogba and Bruno in that system, as demonstrated by the fact that he would sometimes drop Pogba for the bigger games and never dropped Bruno (whereas he never dropped Pogba pre Bruno signing).
I understood Van de Beek to be Real’s primary target. Real made a bid for Pogba the previous summer, which was dismissed by us as derisory and I can’t imagine they would have had him as a primary target by January as he had been injured for a while by then.
Without any context, I thought we were talking about Mason Mount.
He won't as he isn't in the 23 players travelling squad, nor did he train with the first team today. He is with the U19s for their UEFA Youth League fixture.
It’s the system that is often wrong at United. Not the players. Although recruitment has also been fecked. But Bruno for example, Jurgen Klopp once said that he was the perfect midfielder. He could do everything. Run, press, tackler, shoot, pass. He desperately wanted to sign him and would have done if not for finances. And you can easily see how he would’ve fit in to his whole heavy metal football approach.
Must win games do not lead to the conclusion that we must play an under-equipped McTominay and declining Eriksen. Mainoo is no guaranteed prospect but he has to be given his chances.
damn. Was a wild 20 mins of hope.To this day the most confounding decision of the past 10 years of transfers for me is never targeting a true ball winner/Anchor DM to play next to our record midfield signing when that exact setup won France a world cup with Pogba pulling the strings. Just shows how fractured our squad building approach has been forever, simply buying "quality" players without every considering how they fit within the framework of a cohesive side.
Yeah if a game is a must win, the last person I want in the midfield is McTominay
I think he gets in on virtue of Hag being in damage control mode and McTominay being our biggest goal threat other than Fernandes (another player he will play at every opportunity he can)
Seriously what kind of post is this ? He just came back from injury last week. He got some academy minutes last week . It's literally just one week since he is back from a long layoff. Are you saying he should have played Tuesday Wednesday and Saturday?
Im not saying he won’t play. I’m saying he shouldn’t
Probably all the recruitment was compromised by quite a few factors. We didn’t have a manager with quite such a developed vision and detailed master plan as what we’ve got with EtH. Almost certainly EtH wouldn’t have signed Bruno but it’s hard to see it as a mistake because he delivered product (on a pretty spectacular scale).
Mourinho signed Matic to be that player and then after that we just stopped trying despite Matic clearly being past his best.
Yeah Matic was brilliant the first year but basically played every game and then his legs were gone.
Every game is a must win but the players havent been winning so why stick with the losing players when its must win?
Why are you asking this question? The players aren't getting dropped in any situation
We always wait for that mystical player that never exists.
Same as Casemiro
