FA Premier League

Manchester United 2:2 Aston Villa

Old Trafford

Kick-off
Sun, 1 December 2019 @ 4:30pm GMT
Status

Closed

Discussion Your Lineup Prediction

  • Status
    Not open for further replies.
    FootballHQ said:
    I'm surprised you took Greenwood to Astana on Thursday. He's looked decent in his sub games v Bournemouth and Sheffield United recently and now scored his first premier league goal so was expecting him to start today given we've conceded in the past to your youth strikers.
    Click to expand...

    It would be easy to make Greenwood an automatic starter given the poor start we made to the campaign, but Ole has been reluctant to do so for a valid reason.

    The club has made mistakes with youth products in the past. The likes of Macheda, Wellbeck, Januzaj became permanent fixtures in the starting lineup at too young an age. Leading them to think they had already made it at United, thus putting in the effort to improve themselves was no longer necessary. The club wishes to guard against that happening to the current crop of academy products.

    You remember Macheda, right?
     
    Random Task said:
    It would be easy to make Greenwood an automatic starter given the poor start we made to the campaign, but Ole has been reluctant to do so for a valid reason.

    The club has made mistakes with youth products in the past. The likes of Macheda, Wellbeck, Januzaj became permanent fixtures in the starting lineup at too young an age. Leading them to think they had already made it at United, thus putting in the effort to improve themselves was no longer necessary. The club wishes to guard against that happening to the current crop of academy products.

    You remember Macheda, right?
    Click to expand...
    I'd add to that, Ole subtly put it out in the media a number of weeks back that Greenwood could be doing more in training.

    Greenwood actually looked particularly hungry in the game that followed that comment too.

    Good man management. He's doing all of the right things with Greenwood.
     
    FootballHQ said:
    I'm surprised you took Greenwood all the way to Astana on Thursday. He's looked decent in his sub games v Bournemouth and Sheffield United recently and now scored his first premier league goal so was expecting him to start today given we've conceded in the past to your youth strikers.
    Click to expand...
    He'll be the sub but our front 3 is pretty stable for now and we dont have injuries there. Rashford-Martial-James picks itself. Unfortunately the midfield is a different story...
     
    FootballHQ said:
    I'm surprised you took Greenwood all the way to Astana on Thursday. He's looked decent in his sub games v Bournemouth and Sheffield United recently and now scored his first premier league goal so was expecting him to start today given we've conceded in the past to your youth strikers.
    Click to expand...
    Who would he start over?
     
    I was tempted to go with 3 CBs since our midfielders are short and we would only have one good header of a ball out there in Maguire if we start with Mata. But I went with Mata since Lingard travelled on Thursday.
     
    I wish Ole would just say feck it and throw Levitt in. I know he's a kid, I know he's just gotten back from our European game in central Asia, but he'd absolutely perform better than Andreas.
     
    Villa fans seem confident about this game if their reddit page is anything to go by.
     
    MaxiPaxi said:
    Villa fans seem confident about this game if their reddit page is anything to go by.
    Click to expand...

    My mate's a Villa fan, he's not lacking in confidence either. Fact is, we are so shockingly average nowadays that ANY team fancies their chances against us. Zero fear factor left for us.
     
    croadyman said:
    Didn't help that our targets were too narrow,the only names I recall were Rice & Longstaff. I could not understand why we didn't look at people like Bruno, Partey and Tielemans.
    Click to expand...

    We have 5 midfielders for 2 positions for god sake. It wasn't a priority until we hit an injury crisis.

    3 players out in the same position is crazy.

    What we need is more (world class) quality in midfield, and that wasn't available.
     
    I'm not travelling over this weekend. I have some business to attend to early tomorrow.
     
    Lynty said:
    We have 5 midfielders for 2 positions for god sake. It wasn't a priority until we hit an injury crisis.

    3 players out in the same position is crazy.

    What we need is more (world class) quality in midfield, and that wasn't available.
    Click to expand...
    Matic obviously isn't rated and Pereira isn't really a midfielder. That really only leaves us with Pogba, McTominay and Fred as our only midfielders. Garner getting the odd game as well.
     
    Lynty said:
    We have 5 midfielders for 2 positions for god sake. It wasn't a priority until we hit an injury crisis.

    3 players out in the same position is crazy.

    What we need is more (world class) quality in midfield, and that wasn't available.
    Click to expand...

    2 positions? We were playing 4-3-3 during Ole's honeymoon period, beside, number means feck all, quality is, and the reality is you only had Pogba and Scott as valuable midfielders.

    So tell me why did we spend 80m on Maguire while having 6 defenders available if number is everything?
     
    el3mel said:
    Then we decided to not spend 50m on Longstaff, then went on and splashed 80m on Maguire. We chose not to sign a midfielder.
    Click to expand...
    The financial people decided not to sign a midfielder. The playing side staff knew there was a need.
     
    el3mel said:
    Then we decided to not spend 50m on Longstaff, then went on and splashed 80m on Maguire. We chose not to sign a midfielder.
    Click to expand...

    Longtaff is a longshot kid who at the time had 9 games under his belt with no otustanding characteristics unlike Wan-Bissaka. £50 million was never a realistic valuation.

    You're not honestly advocating that Maguire has been bad,surely?
     
    Red_toad said:
    The financial people decided not to sign a midfielder. The playing side staff knew there was a need.
    Click to expand...

    So the financial people decided we also need AWB and Maguire. They deserve the credit for that then, not Ole, or are we going to give the credit for the good summer business to the manager and blame the board for the other signings not being done? What tells you that they didn't ask Ole and he decided that a defender is more important than a midfielder?
     
    Live in Birmingham so you can imag8ne I know quite a few Villa fans. They reckon they will have us.
     
    Tom Cato said:
    Longtaff is a longshot kid who at the time had 9 games under his belt with no otustanding characteristics unlike Wan-Bissaka. £50 million was never a realistic valuation.

    You're not honestly advocating that Maguire has been bad,surely?
    Click to expand...

    OK, why didn't we go on and search for other midfielders after Longstaff after he has been ruled out?
     
    Lynty said:
    We have 5 midfielders for 2 positions for god sake. It wasn't a priority until we hit an injury crisis.

    3 players out in the same position is crazy.

    What we need is more (world class) quality in midfield, and that wasn't available.
    Click to expand...

    Pogba - An excellent option but hasn't really lived up to his reputation
    McTominay - Has done well but is still new to the first team
    Matic - There were signs that he was declining towards the end of last season
    Pereira - Not a central midfielder. Especially not in a double pivot. More of a number 10 or winger
    Fred - Has shown nothing to suggest we should have signed him

    That's not a great set of central midfield options is it?
     
    Tom Cato said:
    We tried to
    Click to expand...

    We tried to? Who did we go after, did we try to bring Scholes and Xavi out of retirement or something? I'm sorry to be obtuse but we could have gotten Tielemans from Monaco easily but instead we decided to go for an unproven kid who had a bad injury and didn't exactly set the world alight. I'm not saying it's completely Ole's fault but don't tell me we tried... If we did it was a shit attempt!
     
    Last edited:
    Random Task said:
    It was a mistake not to do so, that is beyond question.
    Click to expand...

    The blame lies with Ed and the owners. Ole has to take some heat too. He'd have been understood and agreed with if he decided to publicly put pressure on the board, instead he decided to say everything was fine etc etc. Mistakes like that cost you your job in the end. I understand that he has probably learned from Sir Alex to try to work with the board and keep your laundry in the house but Sir Alex was a one off and he could work miracles.
     
    Drawing won't be a surprise, a loss will be another setback in a long line of setbacks.

    What I'm expecting is a nervy 2-1 home win. Hopefully the midfield options will be a little stronger for the Tottenham game and going into that game it's important to draw level on points with Spurs.
     
    el3mel said:
    OK, why didn't we go on and search for other midfielders after Longstaff after he has been ruled out?
    Click to expand...

    Who says we didn't? The United Stand youtube channel has been throwing a lot of names out in the summer transfer window about players and rumors surrounding the club, some of which carries more weight than others. The only credible comment we've had from an independent source int he club is that MUFC did look well and thoroughly at Bruno Fernande, but ultimately decided that the player would not be a good fit in the Premier League.

    I'm not going to challenge that, my job is not player skill evaluation, I'm just an opinionated fan just like everyone else.
     
    Tom Cato said:
    Who says we didn't? The United Stand youtube channel has been throwing a lot of names out in the summer transfer window about players and rumors surrounding the club, some of which carries more weight than others. The only credible comment we've had from an independent source int he club is that MUFC did look well and thoroughly at Bruno Fernande, but ultimately decided that the player would not be a good fit in the Premier League.

    I'm not going to challenge that, my job is not player skill evaluation, I'm just an opinionated fan just like everyone else.
    Click to expand...

    So you are pretty much saying we decided to not buy a midfielder? So back to square one. You honestly didn't prove anything wrong so far. We were the ones who decided splashing money on Maguire is more important than buying Longstaff or Bruno, not that we were forced to not buy any.
     
    el3mel said:
    So you are pretty much saying we decided to not buy a midfielder? So back to square one. You honestly didn't prove anything wrong so far. We were the ones who decided splashing money on Maguire is more important than buying Longstaff or Bruno, not that we were forced to not buy any.
    Click to expand...

    We decided to not buy a midfielder that wasnt good enough was the takeaway from my comment.
     
    Tom Cato said:
    We decided to not buy a midfielder that wasnt good enough was the takeaway from my comment.
    Click to expand...

    Who said he wasn't good enough ? If we thought Bruno wasn't good enough then we were stupid, plain and simple. More reasons to criticize actually.
     
    Not even showing the game here. Not for the first time either this season. Can't blame them.
     
    I can't believe this is not on TV, why the feck is it a 16:30 kick-off if we aren't accomodating Sky?
     
    Random Task said:
    It would be easy to make Greenwood an automatic starter given the poor start we made to the campaign, but Ole has been reluctant to do so for a valid reason.

    The club has made mistakes with youth products in the past. The likes of Macheda, Wellbeck, Januzaj became permanent fixtures in the starting lineup at too young an age. Leading them to think they had already made it at United, thus putting in the effort to improve themselves was no longer necessary. The club wishes to guard against that happening to the current crop of academy products.

    You remember Macheda, right?
    Click to expand...
    Macheda was never all that to be fair. He first team promotion was pretty random at the time.
     
    el3mel said:
    Who said he wasn't good enough ? If we thought Bruno wasn't good enough then we were stupid, plain and simple. More reasons to criticize actually.
    Click to expand...
    Just because he is smashing it in the Portuguese league doesn't mean he is going to smash it in the premier league. He may improve us slightly, but maybe we are looking for someone who will improve us massively.

    Man United is not the only club that seem to rate him, literally no other top club bought this summer for a ridiculously low price.
     
    el3mel said:
    Who said he wasn't good enough ? If we thought Bruno wasn't good enough then we were stupid, plain and simple. More reasons to criticize actually.
    Click to expand...

    People in the club who evaluate player targets, presumably based on the technique described by Ed Woodward in a recent interview. Basically, it comes down to advanced metrics. That' really all that anyone outside the club knows.
     
    MaxiPaxi said:
    The blame lies with Ed and the owners. Ole has to take some heat too. He'd have been understood and agreed with if he decided to publicly put pressure on the board, instead he decided to say everything was fine etc etc. Mistakes like that cost you your job in the end. I understand that he has probably learned from Sir Alex to try to work with the board and keep your laundry in the house but Sir Alex was a one off and he could work miracles.
    Click to expand...

    I like to imagine Ole bursting into Ed's office and screaming something along the lines of: "I want two top of the range central mids in before the end of the transfer window because my current options are either old or shit or both. You round-faced penny-pinching feck!"

    That's probably unlikely though.
     
    Status
    Not open for further replies.
Post-match discussion

Man of the Match

Daniel James image Daniel James 32% of 207 votes

Runners-up

Show more results

Player Ratings

4.7 Total Average Rating

Highest Rated Player

Lowest Rated Player

Compiled from 236 ratings.
Submit your ratings
View full results

Score Predictions

243,15,25
  • Man Utd win
  • Aston Villa win
  • Draw

Detailed Results

  • 23% Man Utd 2:0 Aston Villa
  • 20% Man Utd 2:1 Aston Villa
  • 17% Man Utd 3:1 Aston Villa
  • 13% Man Utd 3:0 Aston Villa
  • 5% Man Utd 1:0 Aston Villa
  • 5% Man Utd 1:1 Aston Villa
  • 3% Man Utd 4:0 Aston Villa
  • 3% Man Utd 1:2 Aston Villa
  • 2% Man Utd 2:2 Aston Villa
  • 2% Man Utd 5:0 Aston Villa
  • 1% Man Utd 0:0 Aston Villa
  • 1% Man Utd 4:1 Aston Villa
  • 1% Man Utd 0:1 Aston Villa
  • 1% Man Utd 0:5 Aston Villa
  • 1% Man Utd 4:2 Aston Villa
  • 0% Man Utd 3:2 Aston Villa
  • 0% Man Utd 1:3 Aston Villa
  • 0% Man Utd 0:4 Aston Villa
  • 0% Man Utd 5:4 Aston Villa
Compiled from 283 predictions.
Show more results Score Predictions League Table

Match Stats

  1. Man Utd
  2. Aston Villa
Possession
62% 38%
Shots
16 9
Shots on Target
6 3
Corners
9 9
Fouls
16 8

Referee

Craig Pawson

Man Utd Lineup

Substitutes

Lineup Predictions League Table View your Lineup Prediction