This is spot on. I started to see as the season went on but hoped it just needed time. Liverpool loss last season was it for me, knew then he wasn't good enough
Think people were so focused on looking like anything modern in possession and pressing that they closed their eyes to other weaknesses that were quite evident.
Our defensive structure has been poor with him, which is why we had the Liverpool and City annihilations. His game-management is poor. He doesn't have a plan b and seems very static. His use of the squad isn't great either. He's also poor at defending transitions.
When you then take into account that in England, his plan of overloading the flanks and attacking areas just isn't working ( which may be why he tried to switch to a transition approach), we also don't have an attacking plan that has been able to work for our strikers. If fans weren't on his side, they might have noticed this with Ronaldo in the lineup.
I've never seen a team look poor because their striker wasn't the best presser, yet fans looked past that and blamed Ronaldo. Yet the same fans turned around and said that we should have gotten Kane. It wouldn't have worked for the same reasons. The system is reliant on every aspect working to even look a little bit decent. That shows a flawed system, rather than one which can be successful. That was my fear with him then. And with the nonsense of not being able to play without Licha/not being able to play Varane and Maguire together, this pretty much confirmed it for me. Massive inflexibility similar to LVG.
Fans wouldn't like to feel gullible, but IMO, they've helped serve some of his poorest strategies. The way Maguire was treated, with Ten Haag acting like he couldn't play with a player like him was a major flaw from Ten Haag. Fans accepted it and it backed some of the memes, but what it showed me was a manager unwilling to work with what he had. Like LVG, he made it seem like his system was to tactically complex to play a player like Maguire, which to me looking back, should have spelled problems. Maguire was essentially scapegoated for our poor start to last season. This is not me saying he's great, but given that his system has proven to be incredibly flawed, we've been very quick to throw players away to support this now clearly flawed tactical setup.
He may have used a system that seemed attractive prior to coming, but what's pretty clear is that when looking deeper, he's quite clearly out of his depth. As much as Moyes was.
