Come on nowDe Gea is among our top 5 keepers so he’s obviously an all time great
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Season Average Rating
- Appearances
- 58
- Clean sheets
- 25
- Goals
- 0
- Assists
- 0
- Yellow cards
- 2
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) and Imran (@Annihilate Now!) look forward to a new life under Ruben Amorim. What system will we be playing? What players will impress? and how will it all go? We also say goodbye to Ruud Van Nistelrooy and review United's 3-0 win at home against Leicester City.
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Come on nowDe Gea is among our top 5 keepers so he’s obviously an all time great
Yeah you just need someone who is fairly comfortable in possession. It's debatable whether De Gea is that. What isn't debatable though is that he doesn't make up for this shortcoming in other areas.
He's reportedly on more than 350k a week. Unless he's willing to reduce that by more than half, take a short contract and probably a bench role , I can't see how it makes sense to keep him. We have an opportunity to get off one of the worst contracts we gave ever given out this summer and we should take it .
It’s definitely to do with his composure and concentration on this particular occasion as every players were tightly marked on the right side but he still insists on passing it short instead of taking a touch and pass to the other side.
And I agree with the rest of your post.
I think it's debatable
I do think that Rashford has a decent shout at being considered a legend here. He needs a string of seasons similar to this one though. Winning a few big trophies will go a long way too.
De Gea is among our top 5 keepers so he’s obviously an all time great
I'm not sure where you draw the bar. De Gea has longevity on his side, but I haven't been a fan of his performances since 2018 really.
I am a big fan of DeGea but he was very poor last night, distribution woeful. I thought he had shown signs of improvement with this so far this season but last night was a big step back.
Forgetting that he was shocking yesterday, he invites pressure on us. He takes too long to play his short passes allowing opponents to close us down, and then ends up having to boot it long to nobody. Perfect example just before the 40 minute mark last night.
Over the years how many of our big mistakes from the likes of Fred have come from a De Gea short pass?
Over the years how many of our big mistakes from the likes of Fred have come from a De Gea short pass?
You think that his command of his area/cross claiming and sweeping abilities is good enough to make up for his pretty shoddy distribution? Good enough for a club with aspirations of winning the league/Champions League?I think it's debatable
He won the league already so yes, he's good enough to win the league.
My God his distribution yesterday was atrocious. He's normally below average, but that was shocking.
I also felt that the shot was not unstoppable. That being said - clear feckin handball. He uses his arm to safeguard the ball. No way in hell is that a natural position. He creates a bloody crib with his arms so the ball rolls excatly where he wants it to go. Where the feck is VAR?
I also felt that the shot was not unstoppable. That being said - clear feckin handball. He uses his arm to safeguard the ball. No way in hell is that a natural position. He creates a bloody crib with his arms so the ball rolls excatly where he wants it to go. Where the feck is VAR?
In my opinion the game has changed since Guardiola arrived. Unrelated, but similar reason as to why the likes of Mourinho and Conte were never going to be successful over here in the last few years.
What about Courtois? The game hasn't changed so much that Courtois wins loads of Champions leagues whilst being poor on the ball
He isn't Ederson in possession, but he makes up for it by being much more authoritative than De Gea. He simply gives you so much more than just the odd spectacular save.
Fair enough but my point stands that you don't need David Beckham in goal to win big things.
I agree with that, as long as the keeper excels in other areas.
Courtois is far more dominant than De Gea, as he himself alluded to when Mark Goldbridge tried to make that same comparison after the CL final.
And Courtois isn't playing under Ten Hag, a manager who ideally places heavy emphasis on this aspect of a goalkeeper's game but has had to compromise on those principles this season due to our players' weaknesses, one of which is De Gea's point blank inability to play that football. If Courtois was playing under ETH, his distribution would also be a serious issue but at least he wouldn't have those other weaknesses.
If you want us to try and win titles playing a style of football where distribution matters less to cater to De Gea then you are effectively calling for ETH to be sacked. Because as long as ETH is the manager, De Gea will prevent us from fully playing in the manager's preferred manner. And it's insanely difficult for a manager to win major trophies while setting up the team in a compromised way.
Which part do you disagree with? That was a poor performance even by De Gea standards. But none of his mistakes lead to goals. Goalkeepers like Alisson and Ederson do in fact occasionally make costly passing mistakes that lead to goals, but these mistakes are shrugged off because people assume that the overall good passing outweighs these mistakes.
I personally disagree with this. I'd rather the goalkeeper don't try to be an outfield player. Or to make it simpler terms:
Goalkeeper A
- 10 out of 10 when it comes to making saves
- 5 out of 10 when it comes to passing and distribution
- Concedes 0 goals per season due to passing mistakes
Goalkeeper B
- 9 out of 10 when it comes to making saves
- 10 out of 10 when it comes to passing and distribution
- Concedes 1 goal per season due to passing mistakes(or keeping the ball for too long)
I pick Goalkeeper A any day of the week. And I am convinced that he is worth more points as well.
I think he's had a few bad games recently distribution wise but he had been doing quite well beforehand.
Watched the highlights a little earlier. The absolute state of this clown.
If we renew this contract of his it will be on the Rooney/Jones scale of stupid. Don’t do it.
If we renew this contract of his it will be on the Rooney/Jones scale of stupid. Don’t do it.
Clean sheets are a statistical (and not particularly good) measure of team defence, i.e whether a goal was conceded. We're talking about goalkeeper performance, i.e. what the goalkeeper actually did to contribute to that goal not being conceded.
I can't think of any stat that specifically measures De Gea's perfomance within the team that favours him at the moment.
Goalkeeper stats are probably the most useless among the football stats. They say nothing about shot quality, positioning and whether or not the defence was the primary culprit. And don't give me that xG shit.
This feels really harsh. I don't know why people can so easily just insult players like him.
Yes his kicking is bad. He's obviously trying despite that glaring limitation and it will only be under the manager's instruction. He couldn't have predicted this was the way GKs would go when he was a young boy learning his trade and now it's too late for him. None of that is really his fault.
I also think we should replace him in the summer but have some compassion.
Tbf just because that Perez chance didn't lead to a goal doesn't make it not bad. The mistake is made in both instances (Allison vs de Gea for example) and just because one was scored and one wasn't doesn't make one better. They just got luckier with the finishing.
I love de Gea but I think he also lacks in other areas not in your example, like claiming balls in the air. I think it will be one of those things where you don't realise all the things your GK should be doing until someone comes in and starts doing it. Like Casemiro did in midfield.
Perhaps, but let’s be honest, all he is missing is the red nose and a unicycle.
Look, I take no joy in De Gea being this big of an issue. He was one of my favourite players for years and has been a bloody good goalkeeper. But, honestly, he’s killing us now. Can’t kick. Can’t catch. Can’t organise.
We’re going to go and renew this contract and it’s going to be a big issue for years to come. I’d go as far as to say what he does with De Gea could really come to define the Ten Hag era. I find that extremely worrying.
But the point is that if he was doing okay it was in a compromised team. This season we've being going long a lot, far more than ETH's previous teams did.
For example 23.3% of Ajax's goal kicks were lauched 40+ yards versus 60.6% of ours. Their average length was 29.5 yards ours 45.9 yards. They went long the least often in their league, we've gone long 13th-least often in ours. Etc etc. And bearing in mind, they were going that short despite having a better target up front in Haller than we've had for most of the season.
That's unsustainable if we want to play in ETH's preferred way. We're going to have to stop going long as often and our goalkeeper will need to play out from the back a lot more than they currently do. And De Gea simply can't handle that. As long as he's here, we're restricted to being that much more of a long ball team.
It's not about whether Goalkeeper A or B can do this or that.
The Goalkeeper like any other player has to suit the style of the team, just like Ronaldo, McT and Maguire have seen themselves outted from the team. The same must happen with DDG unless he can somehow magically turn his whole game around.
There's no way he should be given a new deal, accept his time is up and move on. Better players than him have left the club when their time was just up.
But the teams that goalkeeper B plays for pick up more points because the passing and distribution ability of there GK gives them more control and more of the ball meaning the have more sustained attacks and have to do less defending overall.
Which is why in the past 5 and a half season no team that dosent have a ball playing GK has got close to challenging for the title. The game at the top level has moved on and evolved as it often does to dominate you have to be able to build from the back and beat presses on a regular basis.
This model is so simple as to be worthless. There are shot prevention metrics out there that include the impact that poor passing has on a team, They show that poor distribution from a keeper does lead to goals against, by allowing the opposition to develop more attacking situations.
I’m not saying Rashford doesn’t have a chance or that he won’t have a bigger claim than DDG. But that till date he has a long way to matching DDGs performance levels. I think DDG has been patchy since 2018 (at times excellent at times rubbish) but he was phenomenal before that for a number of seasons.
Tbf basic common sense should tell people that.
This is a good read in that respect.
https://analyticsfc.co.uk/blog/2023/03/03/goalkeeper-passing-risk-versus-reward/
The fact that our defenders bail him out for the mistakes he makes (Casemiro against Barcelona, Bruno last night) doesn’t make his mistakes any less serious, it just means we’ve been a bit fortunate. And we have conceded from him playing out, Brentford’s 2nd and Leeds’ 1st at home immediately spring to mind.
The number of clean sheets thing from earlier in the thread is a nonsense too. How many of his clean sheets have come against canon fodder in the cups (for which his peers get rested for) or in the Europa League against weak opposition (again his peers don’t play these games)?
This is the Ronaldo argument all over again, he was scoring goals so he wasn’t the problem. We can all now see that this logic was flawed.
Dave makes saves so he’s not the problem. In reality he is: how many times does he go long and aimless against pressure resulting in a turnover in possession? How many crosses do we concede from because he is about a third as likely to claim or punch one as his peers? How much deeper do our defenders have to play because they don’t have confidence in his ability to sweep behind them?
Regarding your hypothetical choice, it isn’t the one we’re making. De Gea is an inferior shot stopper to Alisson, on every metric and on the eye test, his ball-playing mistakes have cost a similar number of goals and his general ball playing is leagues behind someone like Alisson. Maignan, Samba, Raya, Pau Lopez and many others are available and are at least as good if not better shot stoppers and much better at everything else.
If we’re talking hypothetically, let’s say that the average team scores every 20th time they have possession. In the scenario that De Gea goes long 10 times more per game than a good keeper and we lose the second ball (we almost always do as we don’t have someone like Toney or Mitrovic up top), that costs us a goal every other game.
If your goalkeeper can’t play, you can’t play out from the back, you’ll always lack control in games and you won’t win league titles. Courtois with Madrid may have won a couple of Champions Leagues, but some pretty poor Barcelona sides won La Liga in that time ahead of them even though they were getting embarrassed in the Champions League.
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He had Onana (Cameroon international) in his early 20s for the first few years until he got caught for doping. One of those "tested my wife's gear" situations.
Then he signed 38-year old Stekelenburg, gave him about 30 games (now the backup at Ajax), then he signed 38-year old Pasveer, who is their current goalkeeper.
Onana could have been an interesting signing, but he went to Inter last summer.
He's always struck me as a bit, uh, nuts though:
I guarantee you that if De Gea played for Ajax in the Eredivisie then they still would play short most of the time. Teams sit back against Ajax in that league.
I think there's a point to be made that maybe Ten Hag doesn't play the Ajax model because he's in the Premier League.
This pass going to Licha is all sorts of messed up
No, he doesn't play the same way because he tried it for the first few games. Realised the keeper is shite at it and decided to go longer with the ball.
Ederson does that all the time
Alisson launches 23.6% of his goal kicks and Ederson is at 20.5%, both in the league this season. It’s not about the Premier League, it’s about personnel. If we had a possession secure pivot player and a keeper who doesn’t treat the ball like it’ll explode at any moment, we could do the same.
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