noodlehair
"It's like..."
Nope. Well yes in one sense that you could see what our players had been told to do, but then he'd randomly switch it mid game to hoofing the ball to fellaini. He couldn't decide what positions people played in and I would still watch the games with no clue what the plan was or what we were trying to do. It's just that instead of being a mess we'd have the ball for ages but without making any attempt to try and score and then every single time we lost it the opposition nearly would.To start off, I'll say his recruitment was dreadful and his vision for football downright sleep inducing at times.
But in terms of the influence he had over the players individually and as a group, to me he was clearly the best at getting them to do what he wanted on the pitch. That was clear from the first couple of games he took charge in. You knew what you were expecting from his team when they went out on the pitch - even if it wasn't pretty. The players I think also developed best under him - he had a transformative effect especially on Smalling and De Gea. De Gea was sweeping under him and became a lot more comfortable coming out of the box. Smalling became a more dominant CB.
His signings were genuinely dreadful though. His vision was outdated, but his implementation of it was actually quite good. Anyone else feel the same way?
Also in regards to comparing him to Rangnick, I definitely don't agree you could tell what we were trying to do after only a couple of games. Our first 10-15 games were a mess with no consistency at all in terms of types of performance and the results were really poor. I remember he used to bang on about it needing to "click" with the players, but he kept completely changing the system every 3 games. At one point we'd have Blind in midfield on his own and then a 50 yard gap to the rest of our team.
LVG's coaching influence mainly came down to people on the internet talking shite about him because they wanted to prove they knew about football tactics. In terms of the actual football on the pitch his team looked clueless and was the single worst football team to watch I can remember. Highlights included Old Trafford sarcastically cheering when it took us until the 80th minute to have a shot against a championship side, and "tactically" playing corners back to our own goalkeeper.
I've not been impressed with us under Rangnick so far but LVG at the same stage was even more all over the place, and he had a whole summer and pre season to get the squad into the order he wanted and work on tactics/coaching.