Time to abandon "progressive" football...until we fix the foundations

[justsomebloke]

I think by "progressive" football it was meant that we wanted to build from the back, starting with De Gea and progressing through midfield. This was no longer the case against Liverpool and Southampton, as we were happy to go long and then fight for the second ball. It worked against Liverpool and it worked against Southampton until Eriksen was exhausted and we spent the last 30mins defending. Which we've gotten much better at, but still this is surely not what ETH wants.

Did that really "work" against Southampton though? In the sense of allowing us to dominate the game or pointing to a viable path forward? To me that looked a lot like a mid-table side playing a lower-half side and not having a very good day. Stats tell the same story - barely above 50% possession, outshot, 74% passing accuracy and 1.34 xG (with 1.36 for the opposition). This could have gone either way.

Not that I'm complaining - second consecutive win, broke a long spell of away defeats, clean sheet and in this sense another step in the right direction. But I think it was hard to see the performance here as providing any kind of template for how we need to play. We were largely ineffective, and if this is how games continue to look we will inevitably lose and draw quite a lot of them. We easily could have here too.

 

[Borys]

Did that really "work" against Southampton though? In the sense of allowing us to dominate the game or pointing to a viable path forward? To me that looked a lot like a mid-table side playing a lower-half side and not having a very good day. Stats tell the same story - barely above 50% possession, outshot, 74% passing accuracy and 1.34 xG (with 1.36 for the opposition). This could have gone either way.

Not that I'm complaining - second consecutive win, broke a long spell of away defeats, clean sheet and in this sense another step in the right direction. But I think it was hard to see the performance here as providing any kind of template for how we need to play. We were largely ineffective, and if this is how games continue to look we will inevitably lose and draw quite a lot of them. We easily could have here too.

Hard to disagree, it was a close game and a draw would be fair result. Maybe I abused the sentence "it worked", but this is because we were absolute shambles the first two games, while against Southampton it seemed at least we could get the basics right.

It was not a good game for us for sure, but I also am not that bothered since this team will hopefully look much different in the coming days. This squad winning over Southampton after a long streak of defeats is a big positive, although like I said before ETH took 3 steps forward and then 2 steps back after Brentford game.

 

[Zen86]

He’s doing what a sensible manager would by steadying the ship while gradually getting in the players to achieve his vision. Unless you can buy a whole new team in a window, not budging from your “philosophy” isn’t going to get you anything but the sack.