Murder on Zidane's Floor
You'd better not kill Giroud
- Joined
- Jun 11, 2015
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Recruitment is the hardest thing in sports.We buy the wrong players. End of.
Recruitment is the hardest thing in sports.We buy the wrong players. End of.
It also gets harder when you have fallen away from the leading pack. We can’t realistically sell to potential recruits a vision of winning the Champions League any time soon and so we largely end up with players who are either Plan B or over the hill and, in both cases, paying over the odds on wages.Recruitment is the hardest thing in sports.
It is but we have also not used statistics effectively nor looking at mentality too.It also gets harder when you have fallen away from the leading pack. We can’t realistically sell to potential recruits a vision of winning the Champions League any time soon and so we largely end up with players who are either Plan B or over the hill and, in both cases, paying over the odds on wages.
Liverpool didn't look like they were gonna win the CL anytime soon before they built their recent squad. Neither did Chelsea, who looked less likely to win it all than us the last few years, and rely on big wages to draw players.It also gets harder when you have fallen away from the leading pack. We can’t realistically sell to potential recruits a vision of winning the Champions League any time soon and so we largely end up with players who are either Plan B or over the hill and, in both cases, paying over the odds on wages.
Great stuff, 1967-1993 so we should become good again around 2039.Sir Alex retired, yes, but unfortunately he had already made decisions or been party to decisions that led to the longterm decline of the club e.g. under investment in the side due to the American take-over - google Rock of Gibralta or read Keanes biography.
He loves the club, don't get me wrong and even in retirement he's tried to reverse things, but actually it made things worse from blocking Mourinho as his immediate successor, right up to phoning Ronaldo (age 36) in August 2021... which threw Oles project into turmoil.
The club allowed him too much power when he was the manager and by employing him as a well paid club Ambassador, he's become a thorn in every subsequent coaches side, namely a back seat driver.
Amazingly, Utd. have been here before, in the nineteen seventies.
Evra, Rio, Vidic, Scholes, and Giggs were all on the decline. DDG was good, but was still making errors in his 2nd season. Lindegaard came in and played after he made errors. He didn't go up a level until 13/14. Valencia was a very average player. He 'replaced' Ronaldo and was so far off his level it made you cry. Jones and Smalling looked okay at first, but they were still nowhere near the standard we required. The drop off from Rio and Vidic was monumental.People overstate how poor the squad was in 2012-13. It was not bad at all.
DDG
Evra, aged 30-31
Rio, 31-32
Vidic, 31-32
Valencia
Promising youngsters Phil Jones and Smalling, who both started well and looked like the next generation of defenders
Chicharito, a fantastic super-sub
Rooney, 27-28
Carrick, 31-32
Nani, an excellent player at the time
Ashley Young in his best years
RVP with thirty goals that season
Experienced seniors Giggs and Scholes to advise younger players and were fine with playing very seldom
That's an amazing core of players. Some were getting a bit old, but it's not like 30-32 is ancient for world class defenders, and RVP took the league by storm that year. Of course we had the likes of Cleverley and Bebé, but any club has dross on the bench. Some of the veterans began to leave when Fergie did, and many players were clearly unenthusiastic about playing for Moyes, but it's kind of a myth that SAF left him with a crap squad. It wasn't the perfect team, but it was certainly more robust than any we've had since.