Progress made from last season

ScholesyTheWise

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We look exactly how we looked when Ole or Rangnick were here. We may win the odd game of football,
maybe a few in a row, but you can't really tell what we're trying to do, how we're trying to play.

it's still "get the ball to Bruno/Rashford/Garnacho and pray they do something with it".

You can't seriously watch Utd this season and claim we've made progress.

We've been kack for 8 months now.
 

Mr Pigeon

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I sometimes wonder if this last year has been cursed. Rising fuel costs, my boiler dying, the minor car crash I was in, United playing shite. I'm not going to be a narcissist and say that the club's bad luck is purely down to the universe fighting against ME to balance things out, but it does have at least 20% to do with the fact that I have an incredibly large knob.
 

el3mel

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It’s been a decent season. Looks worse because we’ve lost games and not drew any, hence 2 points worse off than this time last year, not helped by the crippling injury list.
Decent season for midtable side maybe. Some of you have no standards for the club you are supporting.
 

mu4c_20le

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Football hasn't been great but still in a position to finish strong, if we go on a run. But the season will depend greatly on his signings, like Antony and Mount. He will either live or die by them.
 

iHicksy

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Last year we were a top 2/3 contender, we finished 3rd. :houllier:

We looked a couple of key signings away from a title challenge.
This season, the quality of our play is that of a bottom third club.
I mean - a contender as in, we'd have the team and style to be there consistently. We knew that last year Liverpool were doing poorly and Chelsea had imploded. And to stay there we'd need to build. We have gone backwards.
 

Asger

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Are the people that say our season has been decent so far not afraid of December fixture list?!
 

frostbite

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The biggest positive is that we’ve been so bad that surely it can only get better right? Our forwards have 1 league goal between them after 12 games. It’s shocking really.
At this point, we need to get creative. Instead of playing with "inverted wingers", we should play with "inverted lines".
 

Dannn411

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We have definitely not improved but i'm happy we're at least beating the teams we're supposed to beat. Even though a trip to the dentist is better than watching us play.

Thing is, I don't see any clear path to performances improving because Ten Hag keeps doing the same things every match and you just know that over 38 games, the way we're playing is going to come back to bite us really bad.
 

Bestietom

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I sometimes wonder if this last year has been cursed. Rising fuel costs, my boiler dying, the minor car crash I was in, United playing shite. I'm not going to be a narcissist and say that the club's bad luck is purely down to the universe fighting against ME to balance things out, but it does have at least 20% to do with the fact that I have an incredibly large knob.
Your large knob is not worth a @uck to you if you don't know how to use it. Just like our team now.
 

crossy1686

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The fixture list has been very kind to us so far, and some of our rivals have regressed or plateaued so it makes things look less bleak than they are but there’s no doubt we’ve regressed.
 

OrcaFat

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It’s a decent points haul given the general adverse factors we’ve been dealing with.

It’s hard to tell whether we are above or below par under the circumstances but we’ve muddled through with players out of form and some curious decisions by EtH. In other words, the players we’ve had available can do better and EtH could have made better choices. These things probably will improve even without our best players returning to fitness and peak form. Just taking a couple more of our chances would make a big difference.

Vs last year, we’re not better from game to game but we are further forward in development of the squad profile and “process”. It will pay off in the second half of the season (when it’s too late to win any trophies) and will set us up for next year.
 

sullydnl

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Stats back what the eye test would suggest, we're worse across the board this season than we were on average last season.

But we've been lucky in terms of how those performances have distributed into results so far, getting the most from the games we didn't lose by avoiding any points-sapping draws. One of only two teams not to draw a game so far.

The question is whether we have the capacity to improve performances before the league table starts fully reflecting them.
 

GazTheLegend

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The fixture list has been very kind to us so far, and some of our rivals have regressed or plateaued so it makes things look less bleak than they are but there’s no doubt we’ve regressed.
This feels like a bit of a myth at least. Maybe it's not exactly steelmanning the argument exactly but we've played Spurs and Arsenal away, as well as City and Brighton. We LOST all those games (there's an argument we got kind of fecked over by VAR in all of them) but - it's not been kind exactly, just kind of average, because that's 4/12 games. I thought we were good at Spurs and Arsenal and a bit unlucky to lose... but we did lose.
 

RedSky

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This feels like a bit of a myth at least.
It isn't. I've just compared them quickly. Note, I've added the fixtures that play today to this table. We've had one of the easier fixture lists compared to the top teams so far.

Club​
Home​
Away​
Manchester United​
7​
5​
Arsenal​
7​
5​
Liverpool​
6​
6​
Manchester City​
5​
7​
Tottenham​
5​
7​


Arsenal probably had slightly easier fixture list, but having said that we've been very fortunate that from our 5 away games, we've played 3 of the current bottom 5. Granted the other two were Arsenal and Tottenham, but we've barely touched the midpack. While at home, we've played City and the next highest is Brighton in 8th.

Liverpool, City and Tottenham have all had much harder fixture lists.
 

hobbers

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We’ve struggled to beat 7 bottom half sides and lost to every top 8 side we’ve played. Plus Copenhagen. Plus Galatasary.

On form this season we wouldn’t even present a challenge to Newcastle, Brighton, Villa. Or any traditional top 6 club. Home or away.

They will all sweep us away as Brighton and Spurs already have done
 

cyberman

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It isn't. I've just compared them quickly. Note, I've added the fixtures that play today to this table. We've had one of the easier fixture lists compared to the top teams so far.

Club​
Home​
Away​
Manchester United​
7​
5​
Arsenal​
7​
5​
Liverpool​
6​
6​
Manchester City​
5​
7​
Tottenham​
5​
7​


Arsenal probably had slightly easier fixture list, but having said that we've been very fortunate that from our 5 away games, we've played 3 of the current bottom 5. Granted the other two were Arsenal and Tottenham, but we've barely touched the midpack. While at home, we've played City and the next highest is Brighton in 8th.

Liverpool, City and Tottenham have all had much harder fixture lists.
How, the feck, is playing Spurs / Arsenal / Bayern away in 10 days followed by high flying Brighton lucky in any way?
We played well in all but Brighton but didn’t have a chance to breathe because we kept losing close games.
We’ve played 6 of last years top ten (9 when you take us out) in 10 games for feck sake
 

Leftback99

Might have a bedwetting fetish.
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Jan 11, 2015
Messages
14,458
It isn't. I've just compared them quickly. Note, I've added the fixtures that play today to this table. We've had one of the easier fixture lists compared to the top teams so far.

Club​
Home​
Away​
Manchester United​
7​
5​
Arsenal​
7​
5​
Liverpool​
6​
6​
Manchester City​
5​
7​
Tottenham​
5​
7​


Arsenal probably had slightly easier fixture list, but having said that we've been very fortunate that from our 5 away games, we've played 3 of the current bottom 5. Granted the other two were Arsenal and Tottenham, but we've barely touched the midpack. While at home, we've played City and the next highest is Brighton in 8th.

Liverpool, City and Tottenham have all had much harder fixture lists.
Yep. Given how bad we are away from home and that we've already played the bottom 6, we've had it easy so far.
 

RedSky

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How, the feck, is playing Spurs / Arsenal / Bayern away in 10 days followed by high flying Brighton lucky in any way?
We played well in all but Brighton but didn’t have a chance to breathe because we kept losing close games.
We’ve played 6 of last years top ten (9 when you take us out) in 10 games for feck sake
It's not lucky agreed. But we've had an easy fixture list so far. Only two difficult away fixtures from 5 and we've struggled away under ETH. Our home fixtures have been relatively simple too, as demonstrated by the fact we've only played City, followed by Brighton and Brentford. Those have been our hardest fixtures at home so far...

We've had an easy ride.