Superb this is in response to a 2-1 away win.
Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24
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Superb this is in response to a 2-1 away win.
16 players is a bit misleading. ETH's transfers have actually been mostly fine - Antony is the stick to beat him with and Mount we really don't know about him as an 8 - otherwise point me towards the signings we have made that are starters and have nit improved us?
Hojlund. The bar is low given it was old Ronnie, Wout and the crock monsieur he is comparing with. Undeniably better in my opinion.
Casemiro. We know not his first choice but was instrumental last season and is still a very good player, an actual DM.
Martinez. Just class.
Onana. Think it's quite clear whether or not you rate him he is in the mould of what we should be looking for. Just look at the stats in the league to how vital he is for us. DDG post WC was a shambles bar an ok season last year. For some context, the last time DDG bettered (or even came close to) the level Onana is playing at in the league from a PSxG perspective was 17/18. Tells you a lot about the selective memory of many of our fans.
That's really it...Malacia, Evans, Bayandir, Eriksen, Amrabat, Wout, Dubravka etc are all squad players, loans or frees. Those that have played have generally been good/useful.
How did you get to that estimate? Currently both Bundesliga and Serie A are above Premier League, with La Liga only slightly behind. Only two leagues will get an extra spot.
When we attack we look pretty good tbh. Lots of runners, support and overlaps.
Games still turn into basketball matches though which makes us look absolutely knackered and lose our shape.
Games still turn into basketball matches though which makes us look absolutely knackered and lose our shape.
It was reported by sky presenter that the PL has a 77% chance of getting extra CL spot.
I don't know how they calculated though.
Villa could easily win the Conference League. They've one of the best managers for European competition.
City and Liverpool should go far in CL and the EL.
Arsenal also could go far in the CL.
He did mention teams he expects to do well but 80% is just very generous. It's probably likely but 80% is bordering on certain.To be fair he literally explained why he thought so in the post
I think the number is 77% currently.
But his explanation falls short. Three teams winning doesn't mean anything if the other three that are still in it quickly join the first two who are already out, if Italy or Germany have more teams reaching later stages in these tournaments. All teams matter, so focusing on just those three is simply not enough.To be fair he literally explained why he thought so in the post
Same could be said about other league's teams though.
Bayern will go far in CL, Leverkusen could go far in EL, Eintracht are notoriously good in Europe as well and could go far in Conference League.
Same with Inter, Milan, Fiorentina, or Real Madrid, Villarreal etc.
I suspect it may be just English fans once again vastly overrating the quality of their teams.
Don't mind not being there after 18 months, I do mind looking worse after 18 months.
Will take the win, but consistent poor performances eventually lead to poor results - it's not rocket science and we've seen exactly this with the previous two managers. You don't regularly concede this many chances defensively and expect good results.
Dumped out of the UCL group stage and hoping to sneak into the race for top four isn't good enough.
Dumped out of the UCL group stage and hoping to sneak into the race for top four isn't good enough.
Based on yesterday and the West Ham performance it's highly unlikely we'll get 6 more points than Villa in the next 14 games to finish above them.
77% that 5th would be enough for CL according to this:
https://theanalyst.com/eu/2024/02/what-are-uefa-coefficients/
77% that 5th would be enough for CL according to this:
https://theanalyst.com/eu/2024/02/what-are-uefa-coefficients/
I think you haven’t seen Villa in recent weeks. They’ve been worse.
That's such a weird way to make predictions about the next 14 games. Why not use a bigger sample size?
Villas results in 2024: 2 wins, 2 draws and 3 defeats.
United have 5 wins and 1 draw over the same time period.
There's no way anyone can look at those results and think it's "highly unlikely" that the team with 3 more wins over these 6/7 fixtures couldn't make up 6 points over the next 14.
Just go on the last 24 then. Performances will need to improve to achieve it is all I'm saying.
Well, usually I would tend to agree (& I'm not English). But in the past four seasons the EPL finished outside the best 2 leagues only once, which is 25% of the time. So 75% seems about right. However the outside finish was 2019/2020 and since the EPL has finished 1st three seasons in a row, two of those seasons the EPL finished well ahead of the other leagues. However, since United and Oilcastle are out and can't add any more points it could get close this year.
You’re terrible at top 4 predictions though so there’s that. Thats a 4/5 year sample size
Look at the odds on the three European competitions.
To break it down,
Champions League
English clubs are first and fourth favourites (City, Arsenal)
German clubs are second, ninth and eleventh favourites (Bayern, Dortmund, Leipzig)
Spanish clubs are third, seventh, eighth and twelfth favourites (Madrid, Barca, Atletico, Sociedad)
Italian clubs are sixth, tenth and fifteenth favourites (Inter, Napoli, Lazio)
Europa League
English clubs are first and fourth and fifth favourites (Liverpool, Brighton, West Ham)
German clubs are second and sixteenth favourites (Leverkusen, Freiburg)
Spanish clubs are tenth favourites (Villarreal)
Italian clubs are third, sixth, seventh favourites (AC Milan, Roma, Atalanta)
Conference League
English clubs are first favourites (Villa)
German clubs are third favourites (E Frankfurt)
Spanish clubs are fourth favourites (Betis)
Italian clubs are second favourites (Fiorentina)
English and Spanish clubs have all qualified for the last sixteen, whereas Germany (Frankfurt and Freiburg) and Italy (Roma and Milan) still have to navigate tricky last 32 knockout games.
Also in the Champions League four of the ties are between Spanish, Italian or German clubs, so a big chunk of these clubs will definitely be going out.
I'd be very surprised if England didn't comfortably wrap up one of the extra two spaces.
This happens in a lot of sports. Someone will go ahead and their mentality inadvertently changes because they now have something to lose.
You're just terrible with numbers. Out of your depth.
Onana is meh. He’s not what we really need to move forward as he is too error prone. His strength is his supposed kicking which at times is awful and he takes way too much time to release the ball, even when we losing
Good analysis.
It'll come down to Spain, Germany and England.
So they've a 2 in 3 chance at least.
There's a pretty good chance of there being at least one PL club in each of the 3 finals.
Villa are very strong favorites for the Conference League. They haven't won a trophy since 1996, so I'd imagine Emery will take it seriously.
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Even if this were true, you can surely admit his profile is 'better' than DDG? That's without the act that he's actually also been better coming into it.
It's officially 77%
England 77%
Italy 50.4%
Germany 48.3%
Spain 12.5%
France 9.9%
Czech Republic 1.1%
Belgium 0.8%
taken from here,
UEFA Coefficients: England Still on for an Extra Champions League Place (theanalyst.com)
Got it. I think it's a bit inflated but let's see.
I would've thought Spain be higher than Italy.
Spain already lost two teams, Italy none. I think that explains it.
Calling that "official" is a stretch, isn't it? It's just a statistical prediction, nothing more. It's as valid using these 77% as a number as it is to claim it's 80% or 40% based on your gut feeling on how the teams will perform. If you believe Liverpool will now struggle due to Klopp's departure, Villa will take their performance drop into the ECL and suddenly England uses two more teams quite quickly for example. Those things aren't factored in the Opta stats, so believing them to play a role to come to a different conclusion than Opta is perfectly fine.
Either way, if the PL gets the 5th place (which is likely) and United gets this spot (which is possible), United should thank the other English clubs on their knees for bailing them out after giving the PL this race to catch the leading leagues due to the horrible CL group stage.
I don't fancy our chances of catching Spurs and Villa anyway. Villa might be distracted by European football, fatigue, pick up a few injuries.
We're lucky to beat Villa twice though. Otherwise we'd be 10+ points behind them.
It's propped up by 8 loan players that were loaned in because we don't currently have the financial muscle we should have due to almost a decade of overspending before you put Antony, Casemiro, Hojlund and Mount into the mixer.
Antony I agree with but only based on the price point, I don't think Ten Hag was nessecarily wrong to pursue Antony. He is a cog in a Ten Hag system, his role is to stretch and hold up play to make space for others. But you don't pay £100m for a cog you pay around the 25-30m mark that our scouts valued him at.
The issue is three fold. Joel said no to a package deal for Martinez and Antony early in the window reportedly. Then when we wanted him Ajax said no and we refused any unreasonable asking price at that point and rather than look for alternatives Murtough waited for the player to kick up a fuss and then paid the asking price anyway. It was a mess of a transfer and I do feel the weight of the price tag hasn't helped the player nor how you or I judge him game to game because we don't want a cog for £100m we want output, and that is completely understandable and justified.
Hojlund was a result of being in desperate need of a striker, a position we really shouldn't be in desperate need of as a top club.
Casemiro was a desperation after waiting for De Jong/letting our CEO and Director have jollies in Spain being edged by Barcelona. Whitwell article alluded to United being offered the player, the club telling Erik and Erik saying yes if I remember correctly.
Mount, I am in the camp that he will ultimately replace Bruno. Bruno does not fit the type of football and when he loses the ball playing Hollywood style you can't press from the front as well because three or more of your players are out of the shape and having to chase back. I like Bruno but Mount ultimately could take that spot if Bruno leaves or he falls off.
I certainly think that Ten Hag has been naive, he's definetly green lighted some mistakes that a better run club would have nipped in the bud, but I do firmly believe that, as shown at Ajax, once the sporting structure takes over the squad building, and we aren't doing vanity tours and rather camps with one base and a lot less travelling with logical friendlies that don't split the squad across multiple venues etc then I do think we will see an improved team and invigorated Ten Hag.
That being said I would not be angry if INEOS replace him. I just hope they have found a good alternative.
You know thats not the fecking point. A win is a win but the way we play isnt sustainable at all. The way we defend is truly horrendous we never really control the match. Its always end to end affair. If you are happy then more power to you but I put the club to higher standard than this.
It isn’t sustainable and was the same under Ole, everyone kicked Arteta when Arsenal were struggling but he was building towards something that was sustainable.
Personally I see ETH being more Ole than Arteta, maybe that’s doing him a disservice, I’m sure some better recruitment would help but still think we’ll be too pragmatic to compete with City if we persist with ETH.
It shouldn't though should it, or if it does, they're should be senior players and coaches to spot it happening and do something about it.
Agree it happens though, Villa stepped off the gas when they scored. I fully expected them, even at HT, to score one and then immediately get a second...but they let us off the hook a bit.
It is why I worry about EtHs in game management slightly, because he seems quite a cautious "hold what we have" type of bloke. Imagine Pep or Klopp or SAF, they wouldn't take a backwards step. They'd be urging their players to keep their foot on the jugular.
Piling on centre backs with 5 minutes left and removing most of our attacking threat is depressing. I really dont like his mentality.
We had 2 of our better defenders out and had been conceding chances
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XG suggests it was a close game. Which we won away from home to a team that doesn’t usually lose at home.
We haven’t lost this year.
Since key players returned from injury we’ve been undefeated with one draw to Spurs.
I’d disagree. There are clearly good bits of play in attack that are getting us goals now. It’s disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
It just takes time and progress isn’t linear and easy to plot. It’s messy and I’m happy with Ten Hag recently.
A good squad needs constructing from someone with the knowledge to do that. We haven’t had that arguably since Sir Alex and Gill left. So I’m glad we can agree United has struggled from poor recruitment which has made Ten Hags job dealing with injuries and all the off field issues of Sancho, Ronaldo, Antony and Greenwood miraculous.
We don’t have a good squad yet, we have a very good manager, patterns are developing and our coaches are doing good work too. So we mainly need the right personnel in the squad to play consistently to a high level. We also have young players like Mainoo, Garnacho and Hojlund who are blossoming into top quality players.
We had the worst injury crisis of any time I can remember as a United fan. And we’re still there or there abouts with CL qualification despite having had Evans as a key CB (due to fitness).
It’s not naive and lazy it’s a perfectly reasonable position to have given that since having our key players back we’ve been winning.
What a lot of you don’t like is that you’re slowly being proven wrong.
Who else would you appoint that would have dealt with all of these crisis so much better that we’d be doing what exactly?
What do you think was a reasonable position for us to be in given our injuries and squad at this stage in the season?
I don’t like your mentality
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In fact just to add to this we’ve won every game since Casemiro’s return.
If your only definition of playing well is not losing I can't argue.
I was only joking, I could care less what xg says about the end result, there's only one scoreline that matters and that's the one where real goals go in for both teams.
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