Every manager has done those ridiculous deals though. It’s clear we are completely broken in the recruitment department.
Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24
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And Valencia was seen as a donkey back then in relation to what we had and what had gone before him.
So many of the lesser lights of those old squads would be elite in this shambles we have.
Imagine Nani or Berbatov rocking up now. The fanbase would erect statues for both!
That's why I chose Valencia, the way we saw him was in the context of a great squad which we also took for granted, our teams were very very good. Berbatov would likely end up being burned at the stake by the current players for wizardry.
Edit: I forgot to mention that all our current players are better athletes than some of the starters of our good to great mid to late 2000s teams.
I think the closest to technically sound players that we have are Eriksen - but he’s a spent force, and Sancho - but he lacks in other areas and is currently banished
More than.
Martinez has to come back be the leagues best defender & creator off the bat.
Huh? Ineos have signed who for what?
The disrespect.And Valencia was seen as a donkey back then in relation to what we had and what had gone before him.
So many of the lesser lights of those old squads would be elite in this shambles we have.
Imagine Nani or Berbatov rocking up now. The fanbase would erect statues for both!
Im predicting INEOS will improve our transfer business. But had they not joined the club at this moment in time I reckon our transfers would continue to be slapdash, with or without ten hag.
That's true, I'm down on Eriksen but he is a good technician, as are Sancho and Martial but these two are generally useless.
Shaw's technically excellent. He stands out even in the England team even with the likes of Foden in it.
Reality is all the time ten hag is here, we will have to witness Antony as a regular shoe horned into the team.
Also when people try to excuse ten hag from the transfer fee for Antony it is still laughable that he valued Antony at all and sees him as a first team player, even if we brought him for 30 million it would have been a awful transfer because you got players like elanga that is better and cost less then 30 million.
Also when people try to excuse ten hag from the transfer fee for Antony it is still laughable that he valued Antony at all and sees him as a first team player, even if we brought him for 30 million it would have been a awful transfer because you got players like elanga that is better and cost less then 30 million.
And Valencia was seen as a donkey back then in relation to what we had and what had gone before him.
So many of the lesser lights of those old squads would be elite in this shambles we have.
Imagine Nani or Berbatov rocking up now. The fanbase would erect statues for both!
It's beyond belief that we've spent so much to assemble such an utter mess of a squad.
I can think of probably 1 maybe 2 at the top of my head. AWB and you could argue Maguire this season.
And Valencia was seen as a donkey back then in relation to what we had and what had gone before him.
So many of the lesser lights of those old squads would be elite in this shambles we have.
Imagine Nani or Berbatov rocking up now. The fanbase would erect statues for both!
Would've been hated as much as Pogba and Martial by this clubs fanbase.
No chance. Nani and Berbatov were levels above.
It's just crazy that in their own time they were nice to have, but not ultimately what we sought, whilst now, either one of them would be seen as saviours.
I've seen this raised elsewhere too. The general expectation regarding these things is incredibly unreasonable. If the players that are to join United were at the level of proven ability that some of you think they need to be, they would be virtually unobtainable. If a player is proven in the Premier league, unless he's running down his contract, either his cost is prohibitively high, or he is not for sale. These clubs earn over a hundred million pounds a year from tv money, they won't just sell their best players to United because we ask nicely.
Being good in the Dutch league is perfectly fine. It's where we got Ruud Van Nistelrooy and Jaap Stam from, and Ji-sung Park. If Sir Alex had a time machine, this is where we would have gotten Van der Saar from too. This is where Liverpool got Suarez from.
It's not even the Dutch league specifically. Good recrtuitment consists of indetifying players at this level. You need to identify someone who isn't quite there yet, but who can make the next step. Someone who hasn't scored 30 goals in a major league, but someone who's playing well at Salzburg or Celtic or Sporting. That's the whole trick of good recruitment (which is not to say that it's easy).
Knowing that, it's completely senseless, both as a line of defense for the manager, as well as a way to criticise him, to say that he didn't get someone like Kane.
He needs to buy smart and then elevate these players that aren't proven yet, but we don't know that he can do either of those things.
Correct. A lot of the fans want to suggest that the awful recruitment was solely down to the admittedly, sub-standard, structure of the club. ETH will have known exactly what the structure was when he took the job and that he'd be (at least in part), responsible for identifying players.
To some extent what we paid for the players is irrelevant if they're not good enough.
The structure of the club from a footballing standpoint is shambolic, but the idea that a coach at the top level can absolve himself of having to be able to identify talent is bizarre. Whilst other clubs have a proper Director of Football or a similar individual involved, clearly the better managers are involved in the process and are not simply handed players and told to get on with it.
They wouldn't really lets be honest. They would've been some of the most disliked players at the club - they weren't even that liked when we were good.
We've had plenty of good players in the last decade. They've all eventually got brought down by the mess around them and the toxicity the managers and fanbase create for the players.
He is "too" inconsistent, to me technically excellent players are mainly technical consistent which doesn't apply to Shaw. Not only he misshits passes too often, he also misses first touches too often, he is generally above average but he isn't excellent. Also he is likely to mess up under pressure which is an other thing that technically excellent players don't do.
That's probably pedantic but as an example I have Evra as technically good and Marcelo as excellent. Lahm as good and Dani Alves as excellent.
The team was crap with Casemiro, Mount and Shaw playing so not sure how this will make any difference. Casemiro particularly was getting heavily criticized every game he played this season, yet suddenly his absence has been a blow. It's just the hope that kills.
I've seldom seen Shaw mess up a first touch. He constantly gets hospital passes launched at him by the touchline under pressure, that he manages to make something out of.
Marcelo and Alves are two all-time greats, but among his current contemporary's he's up there.
His ego let the team down. Didnt want to meet RR. Then gave these overpaid prima donas a clean chit. The sooner he leaves, the better it is for the club.
They didn't 'want' Antony. They scouted him and decided he was worth £25m, like they would have a valuation on lots of players.
Even ignoring the ridiculous fee, Ten Hag thinking Antony was good enough after his own comments about Guardiola underestimating speed and power in the PL is shocking.
True, correction under Ole they didn't necessarily want him. But they certainly did under Ten Hag's first window and he was a known asset to our scouts and DoF.
If he was such an obvious flop then our club should have also vetoed it. I agree on the gross misevaluation by ETH, Antony is his single biggest mistake.
Funny that if you so a simple analytical study in this, you see that we are overperforming this season more than last season relative to our actual performance levels.
- This season we have the 3rd highest xPts overperformance, with 31 pts but 23.78 xPts (7.22 more over just 20 games) - Spurs and West Ham have higher. This ranks us 13th in the table
- Last season we again had the 3rd highest xPts overperformance, with 75 points from 66.40 xPts, which ranked us 6th. Only Fulham and Arsenal had higher.
So it's pretty easily to take a more analytical dive into our season and see that it's in fact even worse than what the table shows. Whatever about injuries. We should not be playing that poorly. We are not a bottom half squad, we are not a relegation level attacking unit. That's coaching, that's on Ten Hag.
I know he hasn't really had much time but I'd probably add Amad to that list. The last 30 minutes yesterday Amad showed more technical ability than our other rws have shown all season.
The problem with Amad is he doesn't seem like an athlete at all, can easily see him go down the Martial/Sancho route.
Appears that your stats is consistent with his thoughts. I don't think he wants the team to come out and overpeform their XG chronically. He wants more chances to be created.
I think his coaching is likely fine, but the players are just not very good in attack. I saw many moments of peppering the final third at Bournemouth, West ham and Forrest but feck all was created. The attack isn't technically astute or strong in decision making. They are either subpar or too raw. But he did spend a lot of money on that attack so he takes blame there with the DoF.
Still employed. Crazy scenes that.
And what do you base this on other than having watched us for 18 months?
Peppering the final third... I've heard it all now.
I get your point but specifically, Licha and Shaw are big losses as the best ball players in defence. Especially Shaw is our only good attacking full back who actually links with our attackers. And we got done on transition yesterday without a specialist DM, and at least (last season's) Casemiro would have been there. We should have a lot more stability and control with those three in there.
And clearly as well absolutely nothing stuck to Rashford as a #9 yesterday and he didn't press in the way Höjlund does. So yes I still think injuries are a big part of the issue, although I think we will still continue to struggle for goals as we are heavily reliant on individual form.
I'm interested in what his excuse is going to be when Casemiro, Martinez and Shaw are back and we're still playing like AFC Richmond.
He's fecking delusional. It takes a special kind of narcissist to say you have "no regrets"about the Mainoo substitution when you have the benefit of hindsight and still refuse to acknowledge you clearly fecked up.
He's fecking delusional. It takes a special kind of narcissist to say you have "no regrets"about the Mainoo substitution when you have the benefit of hindsight and still refuse to acknowledge you clearly fecked up.
The stats show we are overperforming again this season when he is claiming we are underperforming. We have chronically finished poorly and underperformed our xG relative to actual goals, but we have chronically overperformed our xPts (which means we have been fortunate to win as many games as we have and probably didn't deserve to).
Last season we finished 3rd but underlying metrics pointed to us being probably more fairly in the 4-6 range. This season we are currently 7th but the metrics point to us being in the 11th-17th range if you look at all the clubs who are close to our xPts level.
How can you think that the coaching is fine when on the pitch we are playing at the same level on average as Crystal Palace, Bournemouth, West ham, Forest, Wolves and Fulham? That is where we are in the xPts table, on the pitch in the 7 games we've played against those, we have lost 4 of those games, and not once did we look comfortable in the 3 wins?
You mention player quality being to blame... Well yesterday Elanga was man of the match. The same Elanga who looked useless for Ten Hag and worse than what we had available. Isn't coaching to blame for that difference? The coach should be coaching the attack to improve their decision making, he should be getting players that were highly rated at one point or another to perform well. He should be motivating them properly. These are not relegation standard players, this is shit coaching making them look worse than they are quite often. This isn't being compared to the top 4 teams and injuries holding us back, this is being compared to the teams fighting to stay in the league on a yearly basis. That's our real performance level this season.
That would be throwing McT under the bus. He is not going to say that.
Having said that, I don't watch his interviews. So I don't know if he is taking any accountability for our situation or not.
I'm not defending ETH but there's a big difference in the way teams play against you when you play for Forest and Manchester United.
You are assuming he is referring to underperforming only on chance creation. You can't just assume XG as a case for over performance. We underperformed on chance creation, controlling games, defensive errors, all of it.
In terms of results relative to underlying statistics, yes. But based on the context of the quote I think it's pretty clear that wasn't what he was referring to.
I am arguing his stance that we are underperforming this season by saying actually, we are lucky to have 31 points on the season, and our actual performance levels probably deserves 5-10 points fewer. You can't just say everything is underperforming so we look like a relegation level side on paper. Over or underperform for me is always going to point to the metrics like xG differential per 90 and where we rank in that vs rank in the real points table (hint, we are 11th). Or look at how we rank with xPts (13th). Our real points level and real table ranking of 7th in the league is great relative to where we actually deserve to be.
The way to improve that is simply just... Coaching better. Coaching influences performance levels. There can be luck affecting the finishing and goalkeeping bounces. But that wouldn't show that much if you looked at xG differential and xPts.
Yes but you are not really getting his point. He clearly believes that the team is not performing to a standard in terms of chance creation, control, defensive errors etc. None of this is reflected in XG. In fact the fact that we create so few chances makes it unsurprising we overperform XG.
Overperforming on XG does not take away from his point that the team is actually underperforming in terms of standards. He isn't fighting the point that we just aren't clinical enough, he's saying in his own words, we just aren't playing well enough in various areas of the game.
So he is saying that last year we were 3rd but player availability wise we probably should have been 6th (which our underlying metrics also showed)? That's fair. There also wasn't a lot in it between 2nd and 6th in metrics.
One summer and 200m later, he is now saying that we are 7th but underperforming? I'd agree that we are playing worse than expectation and playing worse than what we have available. I'd agree that it'd be easier if we had everyone available. But our actual results are definitely overperforming relative to the performances we've put out on the pitch.
The point is he managed him every day and would’ve known his level, he’s out of his depth to think that could transfer to United.
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