No footballer is above criticism, but we're taking criticism of De Gea a bit too far here. Yes of course Allison and Neuer are better keepers, and most of us could name 5 or 6 better keepers on the planet, but we should keep in mind the pure shite that was served up as De Gea's back line over the last decade -- that is, until the last few weeks when Malacia, Martinez, Varane and Dalot have finally given us a stable back line that we haven't had since the last days of Ferguson.
The successor to David de Gea
- Thread starter iammemphis
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
I think you are twisting words here. +6,7 is a really high season total. His abnormal 2017/2018 was +8,5 I believe.
Saying
9 games, or 21 games at +11 is ‘really well’ and ‘good’, and
17 games at -3.3 or -4 or whatever is ‘collapsed entirely’,
makes no sense unless you’re ou to get someone. +6,7 over a season is really good, and if that mean is made up of a good spell, a medium spell and a bad spell, the good spell needs to be fecking fantastic to carry a medium and a bad spell to a really well total. You can take any of tje keepers with 6,5 and less over the season and piece out their best and worst parts, and they’ll end up worse than De Gea last season.
I’m not really bothered wether he had 5 abnormely good months, 3 abnormely abnormely good months, or 2 months out of this world. What interests me the most, is that he is clearly not spent or over the hill if he can play like that for as many games. His decline the years before were not necessarily the last words, which for a keeper of 30 years is reasonable.
Now, wether he is the keeper Ten Hag wants to build around next season and the one after, will be interesting to see. But he seems to be building around him this season, so it’s a good thing to see that in a well functioning team, he still has the capacity to be a good goal line keeper. With his third clean sheet in five games today, which is also nice.
My problem of him is that he had many opportunities to start the play and he slowed down.
I can tell you're not bothered, but if you were making a sincere assessment of the player's form and abilities, you would be. To put it short, last season De Gea blew hot and cold, and you're only focussing on the hot and ignoring the cold. That's not a serious way to look at a player, and is bound to result in all sorts of wonky conclusions.
Quite the opposite, it is you who tried to disclaim the good period as an irrelevant anomaly, and me who argued to look behind the good and bad patches to see a fuller picture. I’m not the one twisting numbers to suit the argument.
I don’t even claim De Gea is going to have a good season, I just claim that anyone who want to dismiss him completely on the basis of the previous seasons and the ending to last season, is going to have to find a way to explain his extremely good showings last season. Pretending that +11 and -3.3 balances out is not the way to go about that.
The fly in the ointment with De Ges is his salary. Thats the biggest reason to move him on. No way he will be offered even the same deal hes on now, if offered a new deal. Would he accept a big pay cut as he has mentioned he would like to see out his career here, or to save face leave?
De Gea is still a decent goalkeeper, but does have a lot of faults, kicking out coming off his line etc are not natural to him, although this season he is trying to be more mobile.
I think TH would also like a new keeper in the mold of the modern goalkeeper.
De Gea is still a decent goalkeeper, but does have a lot of faults, kicking out coming off his line etc are not natural to him, although this season he is trying to be more mobile.
I think TH would also like a new keeper in the mold of the modern goalkeeper.
Rumours starting up again about Oblak...
So your view isn't that his salary is the biggest issue then is it, it's that you think the manager wants a different type of goalkeeper.
By "look behind the good and bad patches to see a fuller picture" you actually mean just speculating about the reasons for good or bad form. As I said before, a) that is literally unknowable so is of limited value and b) the whole point in the thread was about his performance in recent seasons, which can be measured without speculation.
Maybe this thread is getting too long, but if you recall, in the first post you responded to, I said "De Gea ranked 2nd among goalkeepers in the league last season for shot stopping, which was good." So the idea that I'm suggesting "+11 and -3.3 balances out" is obviously not true. I made it clear it was a good season in summary right at the outset.
But summing up an entire season with one single number at the end is just about the crudest metric possible. Its neccesary up to a point, such as when you're comparing multiple players over multiple seasons, because adding more detail would make comparisons difficult, just from a practical perspective. But if you're trying to get a fuller picture of how one season went and how a player performed, we can easily dig in a little deeper. There's no excuse for sticking to that single metric.
In this case, what De Gea lacked last season was consistency, and that's what we see when we go behind the season total. He was like the striker who bags a hatful in a month and then goes several months where he can't buy a goal. Knowing that a player was inconsistent is an important piece of the jigsaw when it comes to assessing their performances. Inconsistency is a definite weakness in players, particularly among goalkeepers.
De Gea last season was remarkable for his inconsistency. In that regard its exceptional among the seasons I can see. I looked at Loris in 18-19 and Allison in 20-21, along with De Gea in 17-18, who all had roughly the same end of season totals, and the difference was striking.
Edit: stuck it in a table to make it easier.
| Player | Best run of form (PSxG-GA over 5 games) | Worst run of form (PSxG-GA over 5 games) |
| De Gea 21-22 | +5.9 | -2.5 |
| De Gea 17-18 | +3.3 | -0.8 |
| Allison 20-21 | +2.7 | -0.4 |
| Loris 18-19 | +3.7 | -0.4 |
His ups and downs last season were not the normal ebb and flow of form that all players have over the course of a season. At his peak he was outperforming those other already excellent keepers by almost 1.6X. At his lowest ebb he was conceding goals at a rate of more than 3X. These variances are huge in comparison with himself and others. I don't see how any analysis that ignores all of this or writes it off as normal can be taken seriously.
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No, I agree, there is a significant difference. Hopefully, it is mostly explained by the now so infamous ‘Rangnik Effect’. We’ll see.
His best form was under Rangnick, so not sure what that tells us.
Do you remember what the Rangnik Effect looked like?
If you're prepared to actually look at the stats and show a correlation between the team's performance under Rangnick and De Gea's performance, I'd be interested to see it. The data are quite complicated, from the perspective of finding a trend and I can't honestly spot a trend that lasts over the season. There was no correlation at all under Ole. Then both the team and De Gea got better when first Carrick and then Rangnick took over. But De Gea's form dropped away about 8 weeks before the team's as a whole. But then it stayed steady at the end when the team was getting worse by the week. So a simple "it started well but then went wrong" isn't going to cut it.
Can’t wait till he’s gone. Still one of our biggest weaknesses. He’s lucky martial is injured or it would be the clear weak link in the side currently.
Both I think. I think they will use the fact TH wants a different goalie to justify to him why they wont renew his contract or reduce it by around 200k
I agree. Show me another keeper of his age with his ability, at a position where full maturity brings the best in their game. The guy is on one hell of a trajectory.
Meslier is also a notoriously hard worker and technician. He has a good feel for the game, which is so important in a modern keeper. People think he is small, but 6'4" is not small. And he is a fit for hagball, but of course him being owned by a rival means we would have to overpay like crazy to get him. So I figure we end up overpaying for Maignan but I would be happy with Meslier.
Gavin Bazunu
Not sure how he did in the rest of the game, but wasn't great for the goal. A better goalkeeper sends that over the bar.
Reports today that utd will take out the 1 year extension on both rashford and de gea's contracts.
It’s possible there’s a relegation clause in his deal or something along those lines, but yeah. The club seemingly think a deal could be done because it’s a name that just never goes away (and not even in the Gaitan way)
Rashford I agree with simply based on the fact he CAN thrive in an ETH system because of his pace, versatility in playing a couple of positions and at an age where he can still learn but De Gea is never going to learn anything new or adapt at this stage of his career.
At £375K a week he won’t be sitting on the bench but he’s also never going to be a good distributor of the ball which means we’ll always be handicapped from ETH not being able to play out from the back properly as he wants, all good having great ball playing centre backs in Varane and Martinez or Eriksen playing from deep but we also need our keeper to do more than a 5 yard pass or hoofing it.
Doesn't make him a better keeper. His team still got relegated and we'd have been far down the table with him than De Gea.
Maybe it doesn't but he is a better keeper.
my guess is (and not saying he's my choice) it will be Jan Oblak (maybe we now only go for keepers with beards 
)
)De Gea is ok defensively when in form (except off the line, but not a huge deal with now solid defense) but he is consistently ABYSMAL in build up. He is so horrible that was told to not pass, and not play ball if opponent forwards pressure him even slightly. Instead he shoots a long ball forward, which gets lost majority of the time and we are forced to try to get ball back instead of attacking in possession.
De Gea's inability to play ball and start a proper build-up changes entire nature of our game, in large part forcing us to be reactive instead of paying dominant style that Ten Hag wants for United.
This is a fundamental problem. And because of it, as much as I love and respect De Gea, there is no doubt at all that he is a serious problem and needs to be replaced as soon as we have a better alternative.
That said, Dean Henderon is not what we need. Neither as a footballer, nor as a leader, nor as proper team mate. So we need to find somebody outside the club.
De Gea's inability to play ball and start a proper build-up changes entire nature of our game, in large part forcing us to be reactive instead of paying dominant style that Ten Hag wants for United.
This is a fundamental problem. And because of it, as much as I love and respect De Gea, there is no doubt at all that he is a serious problem and needs to be replaced as soon as we have a better alternative.
That said, Dean Henderon is not what we need. Neither as a footballer, nor as a leader, nor as proper team mate. So we need to find somebody outside the club.
Same height as Hendo, so Caf has deemed him too small. Plus hasn’t been great for the last year or so.my guess is (and not saying he's my choice) it will be Jan Oblak (maybe we now only go for keepers with beards
Still sure Pope is a better keeper than De Gea?
Yeap. Way better.
So he made a mistake, nothing worse than anything we've seen from DDG, remember Portugal, Brentford, Arsenal, Barcelona, Chelsea, Everton etc etc etc........
embarrassingI agree, they were embarrassing mistakes.
Can De Gea does a Buffon and play at the top level till age 42?
Jan Oblak also stay on his line a lot and depends on his agility. So in a way, he is no difference from De Gea. You might as well teach De Gea to come out for more crosses.my guess is (and not saying he's my choice) it will be Jan Oblak (maybe we now only go for keepers with beards
Keepers who rely purely on athleticism and reflex saves tend to be the ones who don't age well. As those attributes decline they just don't have the all-round game to fall back on. That's why even when he was at his best I expected De Gea to decline relatively early, probably in his early 30's. So about the age he is now.
Unfortunately it actually seemed to happen significantly earlier than that, with a huge decline starting just before he turned 28. Not sure if it was because of the expected physical decline though; it seems more a mental decline where he lost confidence, hunger and sharpness. The fact he's now also at the age where he may lose some agility on top of that means it might just get worse from here on.
He can`t come out for corners, that`s his biggest weakness, Oblak should have been bought 3 seasons ago
I know it is a huge call but we should look at Kovar and Vitek. I don't think there are great options out there. Kovar is now 22 and Vitek is 18. Sign Dave for another year and then let these two go at it. De Gea was only 20 when he came to us to start. Vitek and Kovar are over 6ft 4 and 5 so huge guys in goal. Vitek especially has great reflexes.
But I also recall a quick counter-attack that he initiated against City, during Ole era.
You can criticise any elementary error of a Keeper if you like, because 1 is too many, but you can't criticise any what-if situation, when you are not on the ground.
Regarding Oblak - I've been following Atletico's games for years and no doubt he's an amazing keeper. However, he has no foot game whatsoever. De Gea was great with his feet, I think Scholesy even mentioned it once, can't understand what happened there
I think that was De Gea being very good at saving shots with his feet.
What do you mean by take out? Can you be more clear?
Really missed the trick with Donnarumma. I think he's the best Gk right now.