Of course in this case I can criticize the players because it's the individual mistakes that cost us. De Gea's mistake was huge and the reason they scored. Our players failing to finish on multiple chances were the reason we didn't. It happens, it's not a huge thing but it is on the players. In terms of how the game flowed/our control over it, I don't think we can have too many complaints. Arsenal are a good side with a terrific home record. We are a better side than them but at the Emirates they are always going to be slight favourites over us. It's the way it is for every big team playing at home. Even with that we limited them to not really that many chances (of course they didn't need to after they scored), while we created many but just didn't take it. If one of our 2 posts went in, or one of the other 3-4 chances were taken, we're not having this conversation.
I think we would be having this conversation. There’s a reason why we have separate threads to discuss the performances of different players - very rarely is it ever one single factor that leads to us losing, but they are all worth talking about.
Yesterday we lost because of multiple reasons, primarily individual mistakes but in some part also because the boss made a tactical decision that didn’t work out. This is a thread about Ole so we’re talking about that.
It doesn’t imply the manager has no impact at all. I’m saying don’t assign huge meaning to events that came about randomly and don’t go back after the fact and fit a narrative to these events as if they were all the result of a linear event path once Ole had selected his team
The point is to collect the biggest Data set you have (all of Ole’s results not just one) BUT be very, very careful about making judgements based solely on results because the point is Ole could do absolutely everything right in a game and we could lose or Ole could do everything wrong and we could win.
A football match is the outcome of millions of decisions and actions by 23(+) human beings and two sets of coaching staff.
The “fooled by randomness” part applies because when teams win, the “fools” praise the manager and when teams lose, the same fools criticise the manager and point to all kinds of mistakes they made which had the ball bounced differently, they would have lauded as great decisions
I didn’t make a judgement because of results, I watched the game and I thought we would have performed better if there was a tactical change. We might not have won (that’s happened before), but we would have played better and restricted Arsenal more.
That’s not being ‘fooled by randomness’ - it’s called watching the fecking game.
Even in chaotic systems, there are factors that play into the ‘outcome’ more than others. And the decisions of the manager are those.
That’s why the manager rightly gets credit for amazing performances like Paris, and should also have some questions asked in games where we don’t play as well. It’s not a big deal, just like that mistake from De Gea doesn’t make him shit, a mistake from Ole in one game doesn’t make him shit either - we just have to be honest about that if we want to get better.