I think when our fans try to break down his failures into team selections and transfers, they miss the trick. His failure is in his tactics and training. His job isn't simply to pick the team and recruit talent, it's to prepare the players for the game and send them out with clear winning instructions and the right shape to allow the team of individuals to play with enough cohesion to create chances, score goals, control the game and limit chance concessions. That's what we're actually paying him for, and he's consistently failed to deliver this in any shape or form this season. We need to stop acting like we're Aston Villa or West Ham. We are the largest football club on the planet and have spent enough money to ensure that we get the best talent and management. I should still expect for us to play better than clubs who on paper have sigificantly less talent than we do, with an understanding that lack of depth may lead to inconsistency which would stop us from challenging. Not that we play bad in every game and cling on to games where we show a little sign of knowling how to play football.As a club, we may have a 3 year rebuild in mind to get us back to the top, but it doesn't mean we wait three years to see good football or to get the best talent. 3 years may be the deadline, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to and looking to get there as soon as possible.
The way we play is the issue. We don't have attacking formulas, we struggle to get the ball into the opposition half and we don't control games. Our forwards recieve little service and our players lack the cohesion to pull off even the most basic patterns of play. Tools which even Fulham and Luton were able to display against us. As fans, we need to be honest and not simply base decisions out of anger and recent results. Can anyone say that they expect a team containing Bruno, Onana, Casemiro, Varane and Rashford get dominated like this. This season, we've had similar performances whilst also playing with Shaw, Licha, Hojlund and Garnacho. On paper, at various points, people have described all of these players as being talented. Even Dalot has played well recently. Yet as a team, they truly suck. These aren't bad players by any stretch of the imagination. AWB, Maguire, Mount and Mainoo are also not bad players. Yet people treat these players like they are bad based on their play this season under this manager. This is not a situation where he lost the dressing room and they downed tools. This is a situation where we've just been consistently bad. Yet fans find ways to blame previously proven blayers.Ten Haag iss the problem here. Not them. There's just no cohesion; both defensively and in attack. How is Bruno supposed to play the ball successfully, when our players are so wide and fluid? Where are the passing options? What's our game plan in attack? How is our midfield supposed to defend against counters when our entire team is wide and out of position? Why is Onana instructed to kick long?
People were annoyed about the way the press attacked Ten Haag. However the truth is he hasn't come under the requisite amount of pressure that he should have been facing. We've lost ten league games this year, are 8 points off 4th spot, have played terribly all year, with a goal difference of 0 after 26 games. As fans, we simply shouldn't be accepting that. The cohesion of the team comes down to the coach, no matter how much people would like to blame everyone else. Why did we sell De Gea and buy Onana, if Onana is not a presence playing out of the back?
That scenario explains the actual problem we've had in regard to structure over the last ten years. We abandoned a legend for the sake of a manager who hadn't gotten the team to play good football, on the basis that the KEEPER would be what would get us there. Similar to the Ronaldo and Maguire situation, a player was painted as the reason why we don't play good football, in an attempt to defend the manager and deflect from the fact that our play was poor. It's been a struggle to score goals this season, and our number 9's have all had issues with getting service, similar to Weghorst and Ronaldo. Our pressing is also still poor, despite the changes we made, as this was the reason Ronaldo was binned. As a club and fanbase, we turned our back on players with no evidence as a means to " support the manager" and have gotten no reward for this. A club with a good structure, like Bayern, would have questioned the validity of all these ideas. People question player power, but a manager not producing results and under pressure, will do anything to keep their job. The club would have assessed the situation, looked into the way the team was playing and made a decision on the manager in a quick enough fashion as to not derail the club. At these clubs, based on play and money spent, outside of Mourinho and Ole, none of the managers we hired would have made it past their first season. Ole would have been sacked after the 6-1 loss to Spurs in 2020. As a club, we have only taken action on players and managers once the media and fanbase have completely turned
We let De Gea go because Ten Haag, the only football mind with power made that direction. We were cold in our dealing with De Gea due to him not being wanted by Ten Haag, because we were just going along with what the manager wanted, as we put 100% trust in his idea. We bought Mount for the same reason, without a question. Yet its quite clear now that the manager isn't the brightest in terms of ideas and formulating a contingency plan. He was never good enough to treat with that much respect. So now we are in a situation where he's failing and blaming the club for it, despite having the freedom to do whatever he wanted outside of deals we couldn't complete ( due to player preference). There are people who think the failed structure is in us not getting De Jong; but the truth is the failure is actually in the lack of pressure Ten Haag received after failing to win his first two games of 2022-2023. We're too understanding, too slow to react, not cut throat enough and lack a sense of urgency for a team our size. You don't big trophies without a sense of urgency.