Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24

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Anyone who thinks he's suddenly rediscovered that an actual midfield works is just coping.
I doubt if anyone thinks this.

I dare to hope that he is realising that his current players cannot deliver his preferred play style and that he is considering a more pragmatic approach for the rest of the season, or at least to be willing to go to plan B sometimes.
 
I don’t think we’d miss Bruno much if we sold him. He’s a passenger in most matches.

Agreed, he's a frustrating footballer, excellent at some things but lacking in some basics, can't beat a man or turn on the ball.

Hard to shake the impression that he didn't fancy Anfield and took a cheap booking to avoid it too.
 
He has built a team that is capable of playing Europe/International competitions, but not EPL. I can understand poor performance against Bayern. But we are too week to compete against physical teams in this league.
 
Just to clear a few things up, are some of you now saying McTominay and Amrabat are actual midfielders?
 
The cultists blamed the players for every bad result. Some even suggested that they can’t handle adversity so they downed tools to get the manager out as they can’t handle the discipline and standards he’s trying to impose… or something along those lines. You would know considering that you are the #1 cultist and the official spokesperson for this cult ;)



It is very much a thing. Have a look at all the stan accounts on Twitter for example. Even posters on here that make every excuse under the sun for him while excessively praising “achievements” like simply not getting battered as a mark of progress.
Not particularly wanting your manager to be sacked, at present, having weighed the evidence and likely outcomes / alternatives is not remotely akin to cult membership.

Being of the opinion that some of the players are not very good, struggle to follow instructions and lack physicality is not the same as accusing them of downing tools. More likely the people who do want him to be sacked would say the players aren’t playing for him. To claim he’s lost the players and use it as a defence of him would be ridiculous, don’t you think?
 
The cultists blamed the players for every bad result. Some even suggested that they can’t handle adversity so they downed tools to get the manager out as they can’t handle the discipline and standards he’s trying to impose… or something along those lines. You would know considering that you are the #1 cultist and the official spokesperson for this cult ;)



It is very much a thing. Have a look at all the stan accounts on Twitter for example. Even posters on here that make every excuse under the sun for him while excessively praising “achievements” like simply not getting battered as a mark of progress.
I remember when I had my first beer.
 
The point I am making is that 4231 gets the best out of all of our best players.

Best for Shaw as he can get forwards because he is covered. Best for Cas as he has legs around him. Best for Rashford as he can play in the channel and the LB can take a man away. Best for Bruno cos he has a free role and doesn’t have to track back, and therefore doesn’t lose the ball in deep areas. I can’t think of a single good performance playing 4141.

And it can be an exciting formation when on the front foot too… Spurs have played it all season and up until the injuries were playing the most exciting football in the league.

Dalot, varane, (Martinez), Shaw
Mainoo, Cas
Antony, Bruno, rashford
Hojlund

Other than potentially Garnacho for Rashford, and maybe AWB for Dalot in certain games, it is easily our best team.

No team plays the same formation in attack as defence these days, so a team's starting position is kind of moot anyway. Most big teams these days play a sort of 3-box-3 formation in possession, which pretty requires you have at least one player who plays in a sort of hybrid role if you want a back 4 to go with it. City, Liverpool and Arsenal all often start with a single nominal midfielder but have defenders they like to bring into midfield (Stones, TAA, Zinchenko). Spurs do it by having at least one FB really high up the pitch, particularly Porro, to generate the same 3-4-3 in possession.

I think that wanting our FBs to play as attackers is a mis-reading of their qualities. Shaw, Dalot and AWB have a combined career total of 37 assists in 515 appearances, which is honestly awful. They're simply not goal creators.

A better bet in my opinion given our squad is to follow the template that Liverpool, Arsenal and City now have, which is to start with a nominal single midfielder on paper and support them with defenders stepping up to make a midfield box.

For some reason though our transitions this season have been dreadful and wrecked this. I suspect the ability of the players, the injuries and the coaching team all take some responsibility here. If you go back to the Arsenal game, we actually did it really well in that game. But in most other games we struggle with the formation change, which is why we keep getting cut apart on the counter. There's something to be said for being conservative in the short term, to get our form back, but longer term playing with 6 players continually deep isn't going to cut it.
 
No reason why that shape can't be adopted in any game when you're under pressure for a period of time. A huge problem for this team has been recognising when drop into a more defensive shape to see out difficult periods.
Yeah I think that’s probably right. It is simpler to give this responsibility to midfield players instead of asking the full backs to cover and the wingers to chase back. With EtH’s preferred set up, too many players have to recognise when to adjust the shape and do it quickly and we just can’t get it right at the moment. Mainoo and, say, Bruno could be drilled to lead the switch into the more compact formation. Possibly the high press would then need to involve one of the full backs and I recall @Adnan wrote a persuasive post on the merit of that tactic.
 
The point I am making is that 4231 gets the best out of all of our best players.

Best for Shaw as he can get forwards because he is covered. Best for Cas as he has legs around him. Best for Rashford as he can play in the channel and the LB can take a man away. Best for Bruno cos he has a free role and doesn’t have to track back, and therefore doesn’t lose the ball in deep areas. I can’t think of a single good performance playing 4141.

And it can be an exciting formation when on the front foot too… Spurs have played it all season and up until the injuries were playing the most exciting football in the league.

Dalot, varane, (Martinez), Shaw
Mainoo, Cas
Antony, Bruno, rashford
Hojlund

Other than potentially Garnacho for Rashford, and maybe AWB for Dalot in certain games, it is easily our best team.

The team pretty much played the exact same 4 3 3 that they normally do this season, with the difference that the 2 8s didn't push up as much (although Mct pushed a bit higher than Mainoo) and overall the team kept a very tight defensive shape, as can be expected away at Anfield. We didn't play a no 10 and Mainoo didn't sit next to Amarabt. He pretty much covered the same areas as Mctominay. As limited as Amrabat and Mctominay are the three worked well to support each other defensively this game.
 
Amrabat is definitely a midfielder. A rather slow one, but still a midfielder.
McTominay is something of a CB-ST hybrid.

I'm just having a laugh at the slightly contradictory stuff about ETH having finally found a midfield which also includes two non midfielders according to some.

ETHs clearly a wizard, which should serve him well against Potter.
 
Good result today, I'm glad he finally realised that you can't play open with this set of players he currently has available when he has 11 injuries, this is literally what I've been asking for.

It shouldn't be a straight toss up between losing 4-0 and winning the game, there should also be games like this where you do whatever you can to not lose the game, that's what keeps you in a job. Then when you come out of the other side of all these injuries you might still be in with a shout of winning something.
 
No team plays the same formation in attack as defence these days, so a team's starting position is kind of moot anyway. Most big teams these days play a sort of 3-box-3 formation in possession, which pretty requires you have at least one player who plays in a sort of hybrid role if you want a back 4 to go with it. City, Liverpool and Arsenal all often start with a single nominal midfielder but have defenders they like to bring into midfield (Stones, TAA, Zinchenko). Spurs do it by having at least one FB really high up the pitch, particularly Porro, to generate the same 3-4-3 in possession.

I think that wanting our FBs to play as attackers is a mis-reading of their qualities. Shaw, Dalot and AWB have a combined career total of 37 assists in 515 appearances, which is honestly awful. They're simply not goal creators.

A better bet in my opinion given our squad is to follow the template that Liverpool, Arsenal and City now have, which is to start with a nominal single midfielder on paper and support them with defenders stepping up to make a midfield box.

For some reason though our transitions this season have been dreadful and wrecked this. I suspect the ability of the players, the injuries and the coaching team all take some responsibility here. If you go back to the Arsenal game, we actually did it really well in that game. But in most other games we struggle with the formation change, which is why we keep getting cut apart on the counter. There's something to be said for being conservative in the short term, to get our form back, but longer term playing with 6 players continually deep isn't going to cut it.
Very well put. The way we’ve been trying to play is probably the right end-game but I’m pretty convinced that we have tried to do it too quickly hoping that it would all have clicked by now. Injuries and (I think) a lack of basic quality in some areas of the squad has made it more difficult.

EtH didn’t want to admit it but he has to just take a little step back from his vision and get the players doing jobs they feel comfortable doing. Moving back towards the fluid, high pressing, modern style of the elite teams can happen but it (evidently) can’t be rushed.
 
I'm just having a laugh at the slightly contradictory stuff about ETH having finally found a midfield which also includes two non midfielders according to some.

ETHs clearly a wizard, which should serve him well against Potter.
I'm confused about Amrabat, that's all. He is a midfielder clearly. McTominay is a mystery. He doesn't seem to have a set position but he's a useful squad player I guess. He isn't a midfielder just as he isn't an attacker or centreback, but at the same time in bits of play he's all of them.

Said no one until Jamie and Gary today
Huh? Care to explain?
 
No team plays the same formation in attack as defence these days, so a team's starting position is kind of moot anyway. Most big teams these days play a sort of 3-box-3 formation in possession, which pretty requires you have at least one player who plays in a sort of hybrid role if you want a back 4 to go with it. City, Liverpool and Arsenal all often start with a single nominal midfielder but have defenders they like to bring into midfield (Stones, TAA, Zinchenko). Spurs do it by having at least one FB really high up the pitch, particularly Porro, to generate the same 3-4-3 in possession.

I think that wanting our FBs to play as attackers is a mis-reading of their qualities. Shaw, Dalot and AWB have a combined career total of 37 assists in 515 appearances, which is honestly awful. They're simply not goal creators.

A better bet in my opinion given our squad is to follow the template that Liverpool, Arsenal and City now have, which is to start with a nominal single midfielder on paper and support them with defenders stepping up to make a midfield box.

For some reason though our transitions this season have been dreadful and wrecked this. I suspect the ability of the players, the injuries and the coaching team all take some responsibility here. If you go back to the Arsenal game, we actually did it really well in that game. But in most other games we struggle with the formation change, which is why we keep getting cut apart on the counter. There's something to be said for being conservative in the short term, to get our form back, but longer term playing with 6 players continually deep isn't going to cut it.

I agree with a lot of this in theory… a lot of the teams are playing this way. It is a lot of Pep plagiarism from their system of the last few years.

But I would argue that none of the pretenders you mention are looking better for it. The Liverpool side of 5 years ago with a 433 with wide attacking fullbacks would annihilate this current Liverpool and Arsenal side. And probably this seasons city too. It’s just in vogue until the next system comes in.

And I agree that Shaw and Dalot aren’t amazing in assists. But the width they provide in overlapping, especially shaw, has been critical in the success of our wide attackers in previous years.

The simple fact is… ETH has been trying it all season and it hasn’t worked bar one decent performance at Arsenal.

And I flat out refuse to believe that had he been playing a slight more “old fashioned” shape, we would be fairing worse. It is likely we would be higher in the league, and we would likely still be in Europe too.
 
Yeah I think that’s probably right. It is simpler to give this responsibility to midfield players instead of asking the full backs to cover and the wingers to chase back. With EtH’s preferred set up, too many players have to recognise when to adjust the shape and do it quickly and we just can’t get it right at the moment. Mainoo and, say, Bruno could be drilled to lead the switch into the more compact formation. Possibly the high press would then need to involve one of the full backs and I recall @Adnan wrote a persuasive post on the merit of that tactic.

Yeah, usually the players all bomb forward with no thoughts of getting back into a defensive shape even when they continously give the ball away in attack. I'd like to see this adopted more when seeing out wins, just to get the players in tune with the requirements of switching to that shape.

I think a huge part of the reason it worked today was because, Liverpool just weren't prepared for it. They thought they'd have the freedom of the pirch. If you don't try to chase and get stretched, this doesn't really allow them to create gaps to ping those long switches across the field into space. Liverpool's midfield lacks creativity, so when you sit in like that, you force them wide. We saw in those few minutes how threatening they can be at getting it from back to front when the game opens up.

Sit in and close it down. They will just ping long balls and crosses at you. In the hope that 1 in 700 of them will fall to nicely for a shot. Much easier to deal with those than to be chasing Salah and Diaz towards your goal with 20 yards of space for them to run into.
 
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I'd love to see a team of

Onana

AWB
Varane
Martinez
Shaw

Casemiro
Mainoo

Mount
Fernandes
Eriksen

Hojlund/Rashford

I'm sick to death of our wingers. They are soul destroying.
 
Again, I have no idea what's people expecting from our team when we have the whole first team out. We just don't have the quality to play the way you guys want .

How many times have we played with our best team this season ? Anyone has the stats. I'm too lazy to check that.
 
Again, I have no idea what's people expecting from our team when we have the whole first team out. We just don't have the quality to play the way you guys want .

How many times have we played with our best team this season ? Anyone has the stats. I'm too lazy to check that.
We played our 8th different combination at cb today, not out of choice. And we got a result against the hardest side to play away from home, who were top of the league with 11 home wins out of 11 before kick off.
 
Deserves congratulating today. He worked with the limited resources he has and ground out the best result possible. Nobody saw a clean sheet coming!

One way of looking at it…

The other side of that coin is that he only reverted to a system we have been clearly in need of for months because it was forced on him due to squad issues.

And by this logic, if he goes back to his preferred style and we start to look open again, surely it will be he who deserves the criticism.
 
One way of looking at it…

The other side of that coin is that he only reverted to a system we have been clearly in need of for months because it was forced on him due to squad issues.

And by this logic, if he goes back to his preferred style and we start to look open again, surely it will be he who deserves the criticism.

Yeah I mean if he runs it back with McTominay and Bruno yet again he should be sacked on the spot if I'm honest.
 
Again, I have no idea what's people expecting from our team when we have the whole first team out. We just don't have the quality to play the way you guys want .

How many times have we played with our best team this season ? Anyone has the stats. I'm too lazy to check that.

They were expecting Liverpool to win by about 7 or 8 goals.

Once maybe, could have been Wolves.
 
I agree with a lot of this in theory… a lot of the teams are playing this way. It is a lot of Pep plagiarism from their system of the last few years.

But I would argue that none of the pretenders you mention are looking better for it. The Liverpool side of 5 years ago with a 433 with wide attacking fullbacks would annihilate this current Liverpool and Arsenal side. And probably this seasons city too. It’s just in vogue until the next system comes in.

And I agree that Shaw and Dalot aren’t amazing in assists. But the width they provide in overlapping, especially shaw, has been critical in the success of our wide attackers in previous years.

The simple fact is… ETH has been trying it all season and it hasn’t worked bar one decent performance at Arsenal.

And I flat out refuse to believe that had he been playing a slight more “old fashioned” shape, we would be fairing worse. It is likely we would be higher in the league, and we would likely still be in Europe too.

I think this it the wrong way of looking at it. I do agree that playing more conservatively would have resulted in better results so far this season. That's how we played for much of last season and it certainly covers up the shortcomings in a few of our players and gives us an extra degree of cover. However I also think the ceiling for that type of football is far lower.

If our aim is to become compete toe to toe with any team in world football - which may seem a long way away this season but surely is the goal - then at some point we need to transition to a more pro-active, attacking and, frankly, risk taking form of football. If that means taking a step backwards before we take a few forwards, then that's fine.

Obviously our problem is that we've taken several steps backwards this season, not just one, which is why I'm not against being more conservative for a while. But I think conservative football won't win us the league again. Its more a question of when we take that step, not whether.
 
Deserves congratulating today. He worked with the limited resources he has and ground out the best result possible. Nobody saw a clean sheet coming!

He's a good manager at digging out a result when he needs it, but It does make you wonder what he'd have done (and would have happened) if Bruno was available.
 
Currently averaging 1.64 points per game this PL season, which still puts him a fair way ahead of Ole when he got the sack. (Ole was around 1.4).

Think he still has some leeway in fairness, as you’d expect those points per game to improve as he gets players back from injury.

Reckon he’ll need to be picking up almost 2 pts a game from now on in to keep his job into next season mind.
 
Once we have Martinez and Casemiro fit we will have a pretty good team for the 2024 part of the seasom
Onana
Dalot Varane Martinez Shaw
Casemiro Mainoo
Mount
Bruno/Antony Hojlund/Rashford Rashford/Garnacho

is a pretty good line up
 
0-0 draw at Liverpool, after being dominated and people start spamming “he can lead us to great things” quotes :wenger:

in fairness to him - it’s an improvement

I did hear something about our touches in the opposition box in the first half being our lowest since that stat started being recorded
 
Id say it sums up where we are as a club if we’re at the point where we are giving the manager credit after that performance.
 
Id say it sums up where we are as a club if we’re at the point where we are giving the manager credit after that performance.
Yes but nobody cares what you think because you’re a Jeep. It’s impressive you can even type with those big knobbly wheels! :D

Seriously though, it’s the result more than the performance that is to be congratulated. Nobody gave us a hope and he found a way to limit the damage and take something from the game.
 
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