Making significant changes in an FA cup semi final

Mcking

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Obviously securing UCL qualification is important, but is a qualification that we aren't even certain of securing worth giving the team less chance of winning an FA cup semi final?
Personally I think the best team and the best performing players should always start in a game of such magnitude.
 
Mcking said:
Obviously securing UCL qualification is important, but is a qualification that we aren't even certain of securing worth giving the team less chance of winning an FA cup semi final?
Personally I think the best team and the best performing players should always start in a game of such magnitude bar.
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Did you have the same feelings 2 hours ago? Most of this forum didn’t.
 
Personally I’d take top four over the fa cup. Winning things is nice but losing ucl two seasons running will really hurt our ability to attract top players
 
Getting into the CL,winning the FA cup and winning Europa league.
All three would have been great, but if I had to sacrifice one, I know what my choice would be.
 
Wish we’d have played the reserves tbh!

why romero didn’t play either is a slap in the face too.
 
Jinn said:
Getting into the CL,winning the FA cup and winning Europa league.
All three would have been great, but if I had to sacrifice one, I know what my choice would be.
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I don't think we had to sacrifice anything. If we carry today's intensity into the last two games, then I don't see how the decision was the right one.
 
Mcking said:
Obviously securing UCL qualification is important, but is a qualification that we aren't even certain of securing worth giving the team less chance of winning an FA cup semi final?
Personally I think the best team and the best performing players should always start in a game of such magnitude.
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Top 4 is more vital than an FA Cup final place, I feel Matic, Bruno and Marcus shouldn't have started either. I was happy to throw that game if it meant meaningful rest in order to play our best against West Ham and Liecester
 
We should have made more changes. The unfortunate fact of the matter is top 4 means a lot more to this club than the FA Cup does this season.
 
It was a tactical change as well which was not totally wrong. I can understand the team apart from James. Would have played Martial up front with Rashford.
It all failed due to De Gea and the Bailly injury.
 
My only criticism of the selection is that Romero didn’t play. Otherwise we were matching them with a set up that has had success against Chelsea previously.
 
RyRy11 said:
Top 4 is more vital than an FA Cup final place, I feel Matic, Bruno and Marcus shouldn't have started either. I was happy to throw that game if it meant meaningful rest in order to play our best against West Ham and Liecester
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We ended up playing all our main players and will be going into those games straight from a horrible defeat.
 
It was a horrible mixture of changing the lineup, changing the formation, and having 2 days less rest - a critical issue in this packed schedule.

Throw in that horrible Bailly injury totally throwing things off, and it was just a forgettable day all round.

Thank goodness we have a game in 3 days to instantly forget today.
 
When you are one step near trophy you play best 11. Simple as that.
Or throw away competion in round 3. Why do you bother if you will throw it away later?
Meh, pathetic stuff. Fans complain often how football became all about money and then when season comes near to end they don't care for "minor" trophies. All they care is holly 4th spot.
 
The worst was the formation and not letting Romero continue playing cup football because he deserved to play . The rest I'm not overly bothered about because if we best west ham on Wednesday then I wont care about today's result at all
 
We somehow managed to change our system and line-up whilst simultaneously not resting any of our key players, and having 4 of them go for 45+minutes.

If anything we should have gone full second XI... It wouldn't have been any worse.
 
sewey89 said:
My only criticism of the selection is that Romero didn’t play. Otherwise we were matching them with a set up that has had success against Chelsea previously.
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Matching them? We didn't have a shot on target until the penalty did we?
 
Andycoleno9 said:
When you are one step near trophy you play best 11. Simple as that.
Or throw away competion in round 3. Why do you bother if you will throw it away later?
Meh, pathetic stuff. Fans complain often how football became all about money and then when season comes near to end they don't care for "minor" trophies. All they care is holly 4th spot.
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Why are you so bothered about what anyone else thinks?
 
2 man midfield said:
Matching them? We didn't have a shot on target until the penalty did we?
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They were equally as shit until de gea started throwing them into his goal. As soon as the second one went in then it was done and dusted.
 
Andycoleno9 said:
When you are one step near trophy you play best 11. Simple as that.
Or throw away competion in round 3. Why do you bother if you will throw it away later?
Meh, pathetic stuff. Fans complain often how football became all about money and then when season comes near to end they don't care for "minor" trophies. All they care is holly 4th spot.
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Because maybe we didn’t expect to be scheduled a semi final with 2 days rest when your opponents have 5? How the feck is that our fault
 
Ole got it wrong today no doubts about that. Fa Cup semi final and half hearted performance from all so passive. As a squad we’re not good enough to pick and choose our team like we did today.
 
We played too many games, we had to rotate. Had we played first 11 and lost, people would have questioned Ole for not rotating.

I feel we should have rested few more players.
 
2 man midfield said:
Matching them? We didn't have a shot on target until the penalty did we?
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Neither did Chelsea? 1 chance with Alonsos header. Then giroud scores in 55+1 minute. Was hardly them knocking at the door constantly.

If it stayed 1-0 I fancied us to knick one back but DDG saw to that.
 
We're in the middle of something like 9 games in a row with barely any gap between them. We can't play our strongest 11 in every single match. We're already seeing over the last three games how we're running out of steam and our players are starting to look tired.

With what's going on in the league, this match was always the one we were going to rotate the most in. But even then we started with eight of our strongest eleven (not counting Shaw).
 
Adam-Utd said:
Neither did Chelsea? 1 chance with Alonsos header. Then giroud scores in 55+1 minute. Was hardly them knocking at the door constantly.

If it stayed 1-0 I fancied us to knick one back but DDG saw to that.
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I dunno I thought they dominated the first half and their goal was well deserved. They had chances before that to make it 1-0, whereas we didn't get near their box. I never felt we looked like scoring all day.
 
Mcking said:
We ended up playing all our main players and will be going into those games straight from a horrible defeat.
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We played a team and a game we hadn't played since March. We went into the game with a terrible mentality. Neither here, nor there.

Chelsea wanted it, and they are fighting for UCL too.
 
Stretfordender said:
Ole got it wrong today no doubts about that. Fa Cup semi final and half hearted performance from all so passive. As a squad we’re not good enough to pick and choose our team like we did today.
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I would like to have seen Fred and McTominay in a midfield two, giving Matic and Pogba a break, Bailly for one of the CB's, Ighalo up front and thought TFM deserved a run at RB, AWB certainly looks a bit tired.
 
2 man midfield said:
I dunno I thought they dominated the first half and their goal was well deserved. They had chances before that to make it 1-0, whereas we didn't get near their box. I never felt we looked like scoring all day.
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They dominated the possession, but I felt we kept them at bay quite comfortably until Bailly's injury ( hope he's ok). The second goal killed us really, as we never looked like scoring.
 
Chelsea had almost double the rest time that we did. And it showed.

Genuinely don't care about the result. Top 4 and Europa League mean more given where we are.
 
This was always the least important game post lockdown. It is what it is. Normally I think it'd be valued more but the FA cup with no fans around really isn't the same. But with the scheduling and the league run in, it was always a game to rotate in, and they just took it more seriously than we did.
 
The club's target is to get back into the CL - we need it to attract the players we need to be able to improve and challenge Liverpool and City.

The FA Cup would have been great this year but it's just not the priority.
 
I had no problem at all with resting players, particularly as we had a game 2 days earlier which we looked knackered in. I'm completely baffled what we gained from our team selecton today though.

Surely you either pick a team strong enough that their quality might win you the game, or a team with fresh enough legs that they might compensate for what you're losing in quality. Or if you don't give a feck if you win just rest everyone remotely important.

Our team today was none of these things. We rested no one and also basically threw the game with our starting line up. Bizarre.
 
2 man midfield said:
I dunno I thought they dominated the first half and their goal was well deserved. They had chances before that to make it 1-0, whereas we didn't get near their box. I never felt we looked like scoring all day.
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Having possession is not domination, they did feck all with that possession apart from some toothless crossing in the box.

We were setup to counter, and they kept fouling us any time we tried to counter. The ref was stupidly lenient on them even though they were just fouling and breaking play repeatedly, they had something like 13 fouls in that half and not a single yellow.

It was after the Baily injury that things started going poorly. GK mistakes, and also the players that came on were looking tired and lethargic.

Having more recovery time for Chelsea probably also played a big part in helping them.

For me, I was happy to see the changes as I did not want to run these players in the ground. They have played a bit too many minutes without a lot of recovery time in there.
 
Hindsight is a great thing, but prior to the game, most people were asking Ole to make significant changes due to the congested fixture list.

I personally can't criticize Ole because the team we saw today is more or less the same team that beat them in the league and Carabao Cup. On both occasions, we played a 352 and won. Think what took Ole and our players by surprise was the fact they matched us and also went with three at the back. Never quite got to grips with it. Second goal early in the second half killed us and couldn't quite recover.
 
James playing was my only disappointment. Otherwise was fine with the selection and the tactics. Trying to win each game and playing your strongest team does not mean playing the same XI and formation every match.
 
My thoughts were you either play everyone or you play none of them. And seeing as we got this far, we might as well play our first team. Mind you, I still thought that even with the first team, the only spot to be rotated would be in goal. But maybe today was for the best. Ole has to pull De Gea now, and him making mistakes in the FA Cup is one thing, but we can't afford a De Gea mistake in our next two games...
 
Instinctively I wanted us to really go for this but the two performances earlier this week and the lack of time to recover from the Palace game showed that the first eleven needed a rest. I have sympathy for Solskjaer because it's his chance to win a first trophy but the problem was that his selection was a bit of a fudge, several players who have looked knackered started while the others came on later but we didn't pick a team to start that looked likely to get a result. It's easy to say in hindsight but he should have either gone full strength and hoped that the team could muster a performance or rested basically all of them, we didn't really do either.
 
Mcking said:
We played a team and a game we hadn't played since March. We went into the game with a terrible mentality. Neither here, nor there.

Chelsea wanted it, and they are fighting for UCL too.
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Chelsea had 2 extra days rest and didn't have to travel, they had the luxury of picking whoever the feck they liked.
 
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