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2023-24 Performances


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4.6 Season Average Rating
Appearances
38
Goals
3
Assists
2
Yellow cards
6
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The biggest black mark of ETH's reign thus far.

I don't understand how he pushed so heavily for Antony.
Can’t get my head around it. 85m could’ve gotten us almost anyone..

Can only hope ETH doesn’t double down with this one at the expense of Amad, Garnacho and Pellistri. Some actual potential there.

Can we just forget his price tag? It’s overpriced definitely. But he has been really good this season.
By what standards? Sancho’s? Man hasn’t registered a single goal or assist.
 
Can’t get my head around it. 85m could’ve gotten us almost anyone..

Can only hope ETH doesn’t double down with this one at the expense of Amad, Garnacho and Pellistri. Some actual potential there.

By what standards? Sancho’s? Man hasn’t registered a single goal or assist.
It’s the system. It doesn’t work. I think today’s setup is very negative. It’s not a good sign we continue playing this kind of football.
 
Can we just forget his price tag? It’s overpriced definitely. But he has been really good this season.
Now that we have a proper CF, if Antony forges good partnership with Hojlund and racks-up good amount of assists, he will be ok for us.
 
Price tag is a huge pressure. I think his issue though is more than he lacks the physicality to deal with fullbacks.

He tends to make good passes in the final third
I don't think he often does put in good passes in the final third, although he did put a good one or two in this season (I forgot which game exactly). I think he just lacks creativity and vision. He can perform to that ability every once in a while, but because he lacks in those 2 areas compared to most good attackers, he can't consistently achieve the same creative output in the final third.

I'm still willing to give him a chance with Hojlund here. I don't think it will change much, but I wouldn't be a United fan if I didn't give him a chance. Not that my opinion matters.
 
Price tag is a huge pressure. I think his issue though is more than he lacks the physicality to deal with fullbacks.

He tends to make good passes in the final third
He definitely lacks the confidence to take them on because he feels they’ll outmuscle him / knock him off the ball. But there has to be a way around it as like I said there are times when you just can’t get the ball off him - for example his ability to help us keep the ball is miles better than Rashfords - so you can see what he does do well. But once he’s in attack he stops thinking or acting like an attacker needs to - put in a drilled cross, switch play, cross to the far post etc Personally I think passing and crossing is what he needs to work on most - once you are a threat with your passing given his ball retention you become a completely differently porposotion for opponents to deal with.
 
Most of what Antony does is good, but he lets himself down in the big moments by failing to make the final pass, cross or finish. I really do think there's a really good player in there potentially but he has to be calmer at times and he needs to continue working on going on the outside.

On the other side we have Rashford, who is almost the opposite. He's lazy, selfish and most of what he does is diabolical. However, he has had a knack throughout his career of being productive in big moments and being capable of flashes of genius.
That sums it up well and I never really thought about it that way - in how much the two flanks contrast. Rashford produces stellar moments in the final third but let’s be honest here, the bloke spends 85 minutes of most games playing poorly. Even Martinelli who isn’t even that good in his general play is twice as good as Rashford in the quality of overall play. Rashford just has the ability to turn it on for a goal / assist in that one odd moment and hurt teams big time. Antony does everything well that Rashford doesn’t - brilliant defensively, controls the ball effortlessly, never gives it away - but as you say he is clueless in the final third.

Such an odd situation. Sancho should ideally be the best of both worlds as he’s more naturally talented than either but lacks the effort. It’s funny actually - our two most technically gifted attackers Sancho and Martial are the least reliable. That’s us post SAF in a nutshell.
 
Now that we have a proper CF, if Antony forges good partnership with Hojlund and racks-up good amount of assists, he will be ok for us.
For that he would need to learn to pass it on the ground or in the air and he has shown no quality whatsoever when it comes. He has showed a weird tendency to lift his passes up instead of whipping his passes. I don't think we'll get the best of Hojlund with a creativity dark hole like Antony
 
For that he would need to learn to pass it on the ground or in the air and he has shown no quality whatsoever when it comes. He has showed a weird tendency to lift his passes up instead of whipping his passes. I don't think we'll get the best of Hojlund with a creativity dark hole like Antony

Yup. Antony is remarkably uncreative. He can retain possession in the middle of the field, occasionally get into the channels (though it seems like he can't outrun anyone and rarely beats a man one on one), and cut in on his left foot. Once teams began taking that option away from him, he doesn't seem to know what else to do. There's not much else to his game. He rarely gets a through ball right and his crossing seems aimless at best. Almost any of our more recent right sided players would be a better fit than he is.
 
He gets in a good position to cross, shoot or pass but has that 1-2 seconds of "what the actual feck I'm a football player, not a spanner?" and loses the heat of the action.

Fix that and he's a good player.
 
Good first touch. Good tracking back. Decent but not dangerous off the ball running. Poor at passing. Poor strength. Poor pace. Poor end product.

He's the most meh footballer in the league.

If you look at the other RWs in the PL:

Silva at City
Kulusevski at Spurs
Salah at Liverpool
Bowen at West Ham
Saka at Arsenal
Ayew at Palace
Mbuemo at Brentford
Elanga at Forest
Bailey at Villa
Sterling at Chelsea
Wilson at Fulham
Almiron at Newcastle
Neto at Wolves
Semenyo at Bournemouth
Baldock at Sheff Utd
Garner at Everton
Chong at Luton
Gudmundsson at Burnley


I think he's only getting ahead of 8 of those (bolded) - the ones who are probably going to be involved in the relegation fight this season. And of those 8, 3 are players United youth products we didn't think had a future at this level.

He's been an incredibly disappointing signing so far.
 
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How anyone can look at that performance yesterday and tell me it was a good winger performance is baffling. It was another performance with zero output or zero attacking threat. Have we spent £85m on a player to laud his tracking back and once in a blue moon decent touches? This guy will be riding the bench by next year if all is right with the world. Only reason he isn't riding pine right now is because his boss picks him to try to justify the massive outlay. Any other team and he'd have been a bench player ages ago. We have seen the limit of this player. He is not going to get any better than he is right now.
 
Dalot, Lindelof, Martinez Casemiro, Eriksen. I would even say Rashford

Rashford was excellent - miles above Antony and better than either Arsenal winger by a distance as well. AWB was also very good. The only starters who weren’t definitely better than Antony were Martial and Bruno.
 
That sums it up well and I never really thought about it that way - in how much the two flanks contrast. Rashford produces stellar moments in the final third but let’s be honest here, the bloke spends 85 minutes of most games playing poorly. Even Martinelli who isn’t even that good in his general play is twice as good as Rashford in the quality of overall play. Rashford just has the ability to turn it on for a goal / assist in that one odd moment and hurt teams big time. Antony does everything well that Rashford doesn’t - brilliant defensively, controls the ball effortlessly, never gives it away - but as you say he is clueless in the final third.

Such an odd situation. Sancho should ideally be the best of both worlds as he’s more naturally talented than either but lacks the effort. It’s funny actually - our two most technically gifted attackers Sancho and Martial are the least reliable. That’s us post SAF in a nutshell.
A player combining the qualities of Sancho ( composure, ability to pick out a pass and play one-twos) and Antony( tenacity, ability to carry the ball, wriggle out of tight spots and defensive acumen) would be an ideal player. But like you say, in typical fashion we have these 2 who can only do half of it and hence we are stuck with 2 ultimately ineffective players.
 
MOTD made a compilation of players not passing to Antony which highlights that his team mates don’t rate him much either.
Passing the ball to Antony is like putting your money in a low yield savings account.

You're not going to see any return for a while. And when you do, it'll be in just as bad a position as when you originally gave it away. The fact it's protected from getting stolen is the only benefit. Though even then, there's a chance it'll go bust.
 
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Rashford was excellent - miles above Antony and better than either Arsenal winger by a distance as well. AWB was also very good. The only starters who weren’t definitely better than Antony were Martial and Bruno.
I would not say he was better than Arsenal wingers, not Martinelli who was a constant thread and got balls into the box. Overall I agree he was better than Antony though

Agree on AWB too
 
How anyone can look at that performance yesterday and tell me it was a good winger performance is baffling. It was another performance with zero output or zero attacking threat. Have we spent £85m on a player to laud his tracking back and once in a blue moon decent touches? This guy will be riding the bench by next year if all is right with the world. Only reason he isn't riding pine right now is because his boss picks him to try to justify the massive outlay. Any other team and he'd have been a bench player ages ago. We have seen the limit of this player. He is not going to get any better than he is right now.

To be fair he wasn't given much service.

Even the best dribblers in game operate at their best when there is clear grass ahead of them. It's no good giving him the ball when there are 2-3 players in front of him.

MOTD analysis last night showed how we repeatedly didn't pass to him when he was in acres of space. Lindelof was looking for a central pass whilst our two wingers were unmarked in acres of space. Happened a few times.
 
That sums it up well and I never really thought about it that way - in how much the two flanks contrast. Rashford produces stellar moments in the final third but let’s be honest here, the bloke spends 85 minutes of most games playing poorly. Even Martinelli who isn’t even that good in his general play is twice as good as Rashford in the quality of overall play. Rashford just has the ability to turn it on for a goal / assist in that one odd moment and hurt teams big time. Antony does everything well that Rashford doesn’t - brilliant defensively, controls the ball effortlessly, never gives it away - but as you say he is clueless in the final third.

Such an odd situation. Sancho should ideally be the best of both worlds as he’s more naturally talented than either but lacks the effort. It’s funny actually - our two most technically gifted attackers Sancho and Martial are the least reliable. That’s us post SAF in a nutshell.

Where does this theory that Antony never gives the ball away come from? He ‘retains possession’ when he stops it and passes it back where it came from, but the moment he tries anything more ambitious than that, it’s often unsuccessful.

A number of times the ball was passed to him yesterday and he produced an inexplicable back heel to nobody. I’d be surprised if he hit double figures in the Championship.
 
To be fair he wasn't given much service.

Even the best dribblers in game operate at their best when there is clear grass ahead of them. It's no good giving him the ball when there are 2-3 players in front of him.

MOTD analysis last night showed how we repeatedly didn't pass to him when he was in acres of space. Lindelof was looking for a central pass whilst our two wingers were unmarked in acres of space. Happened a few times.
There's a reason he isn't given much service. He loses it almost every time. There was a time he was given the ball to start a counter. At the point he got the ball, he was ahead of Zinchenko and Saka, yet once he got the ball he stopped and tried to do one of his pointless dribbles which got Zinchenko and Saka back into the picture and killed the attack. Rashford was visibly frustrated at it and I was too.
 
To be fair he wasn't given much service.

Even the best dribblers in game operate at their best when there is clear grass ahead of them. It's no good giving him the ball when there are 2-3 players in front of him.

MOTD analysis last night showed how we repeatedly didn't pass to him when he was in acres of space. Lindelof was looking for a central pass whilst our two wingers were unmarked in acres of space. Happened a few times.
Antony is not a dribbler.

He's not a player who can make use of green grass ahead of him because he's not a player that can beat his man.

Antony is more of a give-and-go option for other players around him. You can pass it to him and, to his credit, expect him to have a good first touch to control it.

But after that, he'll either get bullied off the ball, pick the most basic passing option open to him (often backwards) or cut inside to shoot on his left foot. That's the extent of his game. You can set your watch by it.
 
For that he would need to learn to pass it on the ground or in the air and he has shown no quality whatsoever when it comes. He has showed a weird tendency to lift his passes up instead of whipping his passes. I don't think we'll get the best of Hojlund with a creativity dark hole like Antony
This is spot on, unfortunately. Trying to picture Antony providing an assist to Hojlund is incredibly difficult as his passing along the ground isn't good enough and his crosses are invariably overhit.

The player I thought would really benefit from playing with Hojlund is Sancho. He can actually slip in lovely through balls and put in decent crosses from the right but we might not even get to see that in action now.

The fact we signed these two wingers in the first place for over £150m with no reliable striker to feed was just terrible planning. Maybe neither of them are actually good enough, but how will we ever really know if they're not even given the conditions to succeed?
 
If he's given a chance, when he's fit Amad will put him out the team.
 
Just don't see much of a ceiling. He'll always be a useful, hard worker with a decent shot. Will eventually be relegated to the bench in the future.
And so it begins, the slow revision of a player who has left United, we knew was average and will become better and better the longer he is away from the club.
 
Passing the ball to Antony is like putting your money in a low yield savings account.

You're not going to see any return for a while. And when you do, it'll be in just as bad a position as when you originally gave it away. The fact it's protected from getting stolen is the only benefit. Though even then, there's a chance it'll go bust.
:lol::lol: There’s more creativity in Antony insults than in his actual game.

Antony is where counter attacks go to die and in a slow possession game we know he going to faff around with the ball only to pass back to AWB or Casemiro.
 
There's a reason he isn't given much service. He loses it almost every time. There was a time he was given the ball to start a counter. At the point he got the ball, he was ahead of Zinchenko and Saka, yet once he got the ball he stopped and tried to do one of his pointless dribbles which got Zinchenko and Saka back into the picture and killed the attack. Rashford was visibly frustrated at it and I was too.

If players are avoiding passing to him then he shouldn't be in the team. What's the point?
 
Rashford was excellent - miles above Antony and better than either Arsenal winger by a distance as well. AWB was also very good. The only starters who weren’t definitely better than Antony were Martial and Bruno.

That's quite generous towards Rashford - he scored fantastic goal, but was far too selfish after that, taking several shots when he could have slipped in a teammate.

He was much better off the ball than he has been recently though, that's a positive development. If he can offer the same kind of defensive support that Anthony does, then he'll be up there with the very best.

As for Anthony, I thought he was reasonably good yesterday, was excellent off the ball, held onto the ball well, his link up play was reasonable (some good, some bad), and was poor in the final third. There was one moment in particular where he beat 2 players with a lovely bit of skill, but then dawdled and ended up losing the ball on the edge of the box. That was frustrating.
 
I think he's looking better this year, nowhere near there yet but definite improvements and I don't think he can attack like Rashford does as he gives us such balance with his defensive work
 
I said start of the widow the right side of the attack needed addressing is was as crucial of a priority as bringing in a centre forward. I won't totally dismiss Antony, he's just not good enough to be a first team player at this point of his development. He should be playing behind a regular in that position. City did it with Foden / Mahrez and at times Bernardo Silva. You need depth in quality in the attack and the wide areas last season were abysmal.

That's without even considering the fullbacks who do just enough to do a job but not actually excel at anything. Should have gone for Frimpong and Marcus Edwards or Brennan Johnson.
 
I think he's looking better this year, nowhere near there yet but definite improvements and I don't think he can attack like Rashford does as he gives us such balance with his defensive work

Most of his good defensive work (yesterday at least) was as a result of Antony having given the ball away in the first place though and not through trying to be proactive or creative. Just sloppy basic passing errors often under no pressure. A player of his style just can’t afford to be error-strewn in possession.
 
A winger who has no hope of beating a man. Has he gotten past a single fullback since he joined the club? Even Dan Burn was comfortably keeping up with him.
 
I thought he was quite good. Defensively superb and kept the ball well. It's a tough ask to expect him to constantly beat a man in a game like that. He's pretty much always receiving the ball with immediate pressure and managed to keep it and spin his man majority of the time. Needs to work on his final pass/action of course.
 
That sums it up well and I never really thought about it that way - in how much the two flanks contrast. Rashford produces stellar moments in the final third but let’s be honest here, the bloke spends 85 minutes of most games playing poorly. Even Martinelli who isn’t even that good in his general play is twice as good as Rashford in the quality of overall play. Rashford just has the ability to turn it on for a goal / assist in that one odd moment and hurt teams big time. Antony does everything well that Rashford doesn’t - brilliant defensively, controls the ball effortlessly, never gives it away - but as you say he is clueless in the final third.

Such an odd situation. Sancho should ideally be the best of both worlds as he’s more naturally talented than either but lacks the effort. It’s funny actually - our two most technically gifted attackers Sancho and Martial are the least reliable. That’s us post SAF in a nutshell.
Will give you he's good defensively but the rest is a load of shit. If he's not taking pot shots from stupid angles, he's over hitting crosses to messing up simple 5 yard passes. Absolutely baffling that someone can watch Antony week in week out and draw that conclusion, he might not be Rashford or Garnacho we're they run into a crowd of players but the end result is the exact same.

As for yesterday thought he did what he does good just that, good. Helped out defensively and had some nice moments where he retained possession well in tough positions but ultimately created nothing and if the 59% pass accuracy is true he GAVE AWAY the ball a lot.
 
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