If you want a manager to set his team up like a championship club playing a once in a lifetime cup game against one of the big boys then yeah sure, I guess you can describe what we saw on Sunday as setting up a team.
Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24
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If you want a manager to set his team up like a championship club playing a once in a lifetime cup game against one of the big boys then yeah sure, I guess you can describe what we saw on Sunday as setting up a team.
I’m not being facetious, it literally would have been better to buy nobody at all. By the end of the season, Antony will have cost United over £100m in transfer fee and wages. Imagine United had just banked the money and played an academy player. Even if Garnacho wasn’t ready, Elanga was (12 G/A vs 0 G/A from Antony this season, just for the record).
An Arsenal fan stating the obvious and yet we've got United fans with fingers in their ears. Sad times. Antony's been a horrific signing for us. Just utterly abysmal.
Same with Fred and Amrabat and Mount now too in hindsight. We just moved sideways with most moves and got unlucky so far with Mount.
We were replacing one of the most two footed players on the planet so our strict criteria was replacing him with one of the most uselessly one footed players on the planet!?
Please make that make sense.
The amount of times we've realeased a better player for cheap then signed a worse overpriced replacement post Fergie needs to be investigated. Criminal running of the worlds greatest football club.
Certain he won't be going until end of the season
Excellent post.
The fact I still see people wanting to see ETH under the new board are once again missing the point.
It was you who brought up a couple of signings made over a decade ago by a different manager nonetheless. My point is relevant because SAF had shown he had an eye for talent and improving players. None of which the current manager has displayed till date. So why should i have any confidence in any if the signings made by him. Especially when they haven’t shown any promise at all in the limited time they have been available.
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If you read my post I point out Raphinha don’t have moved to us. But he did move that window at least.
- Asensio - Had an ok 2021/22 season and I think we were linked with him? Was he clearly at the time a better choice though id argue no as Antony had been showing a good level in the CL, called up to Brazil NT and was younger and known by the manager.
- Gnabry is a better player but wouldn’t move to United at the time. He was flying in Bayern.
- Inaki Williams im not even entertaining.
- Gonzalez was a decent wide option but not exactly exceptional at the time. Very debatable if he was a better option than a player known to the manager with CL experience.
- Mendez again just no.
- March - Your solution in Sept 2022 is to sign a player who didn’t score a single goal in the previous PL season?
- Olise - I like him, he had a decent season not outstanding though - I suspect recency bias of his performances this season is playing on us both here.
I would still buy him for his initial scouting valuation of £25m. He’s absolutely not been worth £80m but he’s played enough games and particularly in his debut season offered enough in his overall game that as I’ve shown with other wingers he’s not as bad as some would have you believe.
Yeah, na. Hindsight.
Yes of course.
Because you've invented a bunch of criteria, have claimed to know a club and players stance or fully invested in a random unsourced, press report.
Anything to believe there wasn't a single player available better than Antony for £85 million.
As I say, whenever a posters ask "name me a better transfer option" we know how that conversation goes.
A long list of names will be provided and the poster will find a story that discounts every single one. Which is what you've done.
Also, this thing about hindsight. Unless somebody watches the Dutch leauge, of course you give the player a chance. Then after 18 month, you form an opinion on him. That's not hindsight.
The whole point here is that one guy didn't need "hindsight." He'd already worked with him.
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So Dean Kulusevski was a realistic alternative?
You just don’t like that there is a reason why these players weren’t signed. They were all either unavailable, coming off the back of poor seasons, or simply not interested.
The only press report I’ve referenced is a literal quote from Diaby. There are however numerous articles showing which clubs were considering the options like Bowen and it was all Arsenal and Liverpool.
And hang on let’s be clear here. I am not, and never will, suggest that £85m was well spent. I am saying he’s failing at United but in the context of the summer 2022 window he was the best available option. Hindsight doesn’t change that.
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The criteria also isn’t my invention it was widely reported at the time and I’m pretty sure Ten Hag made reference to wanting someone of that profile in his conferences.
And nothing in my quoted post was factually incorrect. Not liking the facts doesn’t change them.
And nothing in my quoted post was factually incorrect. Not liking the facts doesn’t change them.
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck. It's a duck! No ifs, buts or maybes. A decade of the same shit, hired people top performing else where and flunking here, under our club structure. But supposedly it's THEM JUST SHIT/INCOMPETENT. Not the shit show that has run the structure of the club.
It's also quite funny how you post all that and gleefully self refute by asking why a Woodward "hasn't been poached" and pointing out the department INEOS has chosen to start fixing to sort out United. Lastly If you are as correct as you imagine about ETH why didn't they simply do what Bayern have done with Tuchel? It's frankly obvious why they gave had cause for pause.
The likes of you are like the French Bourbon monarchy. "You learn nothing and forget nothing" and just steam ahead with the same insanity confident of different results every time like you are stuck on a round about.
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Salut. Personsally I stopped laying all the blame on players and their coaches since the end of Jose's second season. Because IMO they have been given no help. They have all been recruited or kept whilst being suited to a different plan than what is trying to be implememted every two seasons. To perform consistently in such turmoil must be incredibly hard. Especially when morale, culture and winning know how have been consistently erroded. Though I get annoyed with a number of them for under using their talent's with self supervision. I still maintain some sympathy for what they have faced
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Kulusevski was an option to buy for Spurs. That's all. That deal doesn't have to go through if Manchester United come in with an £85 million offer.
He's a better player than Antony and was able to be bought. Managers are paid millions to know this stuff. To see talent and potential. Not to grab whatever's closest.
But this is a game I'm not bothering with now. You could he given 50 names. You'll refute all of them to defend ETH.
When you're claiming its impossible to get Bowen for £85 million I think you're getting close to being factually incorrect.
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Kulusevski was an 18month loan. With an option to buy. He would regardless of option to buy have still been on loan at Spurs in Summer 2022. If you think that we had any realistic prospect of signing a player already playing for a top 4 rival (yes we’ve sunk that low) who is contracted there for another 12 months with an option for that loan club to buy him I can’t help you.
Quote from the BBC article:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/65941284
It was a game plan to minimise damage, and to maximise our chances of getting something from the game.
Would you prefer to play open attacking football against City, and let them run riot? Does that sound a good idea when we had McT and Bruno upfront and Lindelof at LB? The 7-0 against Liverpool would have seemed like a good result. Compared to the top sides we might as well be a Championship team. That’s where we are and how far we have fallen.
You can do that by assessing all the managers previously who held the position, their expertise and their results as a whole. All good managers, but failed to kick on. Closest I think who came to establish themselves was LVG. He got an identity in place, and would have built a team on it, if he was given time and resources.
ETH has a winning percentage on his side. He has got some players firing. I fully trust him to finish the season and be here the next.
Great post and highlights some of the main reasons I've ended up hating his approach as a manager.
Ultimately, despite injuries and maybe some tiredness from playing a lot of games last season, it's clear we're far from the side we were last year which should have only been a base level to improve from anyway.
His 'plan A' appears seriously flawed in that it involves moving the ball up the pitch as quickly as possible and getting many bodies forward as quickly as possible (there's naturally an increased risk of turnovers, but that's acceptable if your defence is pushed up and all the players that are forward then recover the ball quickly through well organised pressing). In reality though, we have central defenders and a 'defensive' midfielder that aren't moving up the pitch and also aren't fast, so their weakness is greatly exposed as soon as the ball is turned over, hence the chasms of space in midfield.
I'd imagine his plan is to recover the ball quickly higher up the park, not sure stats wise how this part works in reality, but to my eye, I feel like either through the traps not being organised well enough, or the players just not being very good at it, we don't actually win the ball back very often when we do press (if we do get it back it'll often lead to our dangerous situations but this doesn't happen anywhere near enough). Continuing to play in this way exposes our biggest weakness and so it isn't a good plan A, even if we might get away with it against some of the teams with players that aren't as good as ours.
It simply doesn't work at all against teams with equal or superior squads to us for the most part, hence the terrible record against good teams.
Then against the very best, we just get absolutely rinsed and resort to a poor version of Solskjaers football (Call it Plan B). Defend deep, ping the ball forward and hope someone can do something with it (often trying to defend wave upon wave of attack as we don't really have the players to help the ball stick up top when we play like this).
Without even going into substitutions or transfers or anything I feel like he's getting it wrong at the most fundamental levels and for me that's a really poor manager. Good managers don't persist with an approach they aren't equipped to deliver, they find alternatives to get the best results with what they have, and that's in any business.
You’re proving @Marwood completely right here.I can also play that game with Antony….
- only scored 8 goals the previous season playing for by far and away the best team in Holland despite being an attacker.
- Has only played about 50 games in European football before we signed him.
- never played in a top league.
It’s a very easy game to play what you’re doing there, isolating a negative but bottom line is those were all better options at the time regardless. Having seen all those players play with my eyes around that period and the period since I’m confident in my eye test. And I get some of the players I mentioned werent and still aren’t the full proven package but neither was Antony and you could argue he was the least proven because again never played in a top league.
As for recency bias with Olise..
See this post from me in January 2021 on Olise
https://www.redcafe.net/threads/championship-players-i-like.460472/post-26724159
I’m confused by the inaki williams comment also. He’s a far superior player to Antony in every metric.
And come on man, Antony a better option at 80 million than Asensio at a fraction in summer 2022? Really ? Really?
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It wasn't even a competent counter attacking performance though. Ole did a better job of implementing those tactics
The wider problem is the football is abysmal no matter who we play, we goy played off the park by Fulham missing their one good player
You would still buy Antony with the benefit of hindsight? You are one zany guy
You also can't just ignore the fact that ten ha pushed for Antony even after the initial offers had been rejected so the price was clearly way more than £25m
100% agree, with the right squad of players plan A might be successful, with the wrong group of players it is a disaster, failing to recognise that and adapt is all I need to know to judge ETH as a manager, you can strip away everything else and that one damning factor remains
Elanga was probably the perfect example of a player who had to step down a level or two and get away from the pressure of playing for Man Utd. When he first broke into the team under Rangnick he showed enough that I thought he'd be a decent premiership player, but last season he was terrible and looked like a deer in the headlights. Really looked like he couldn't handle the pressure and needed to leave for the good of his own career.
That's obviously not saying that Antony was the right signing, but I think there's a fairly strong chance that Elanga would have been even worse if we'd kept him. When we had both of them last season Antony was much better. It's just that this season Antony has declined significantly while obviously Elanga has done well at Forest.
This must be the end, can't really see a way forward for him. Terrible setup again and again, it's just terrible to watch this team.
I take your point (and obviously you’ve watched far more of Elanga than I have) but do you think that might have been exacerbated by the signing of an £86m winger ahead of him in the pecking order?
At Arsenal, when Smith-Rowe broke through he briefly looked more impactful than Saka. He was playing on instinct as he knew he was gonna get a run in the team as our squad was threadbare at the time. He then suffered a lengthy injury and when he came back there was far more competition for places. Every appearance suddenly felt like an audition and he kept trying to force it rather than playing his natural game.
All of that is to say, maybe giving Elanga a genuine shot with a run of games may have yielded positive results.
Also, your point is coherent and based in reality. Whereas the idea that £86m couldn’t possibly be better spent than on Antony…
Antony wasn't a hindsight thing. Our scouts specifically said he wasn't worth the money.
I want him to continue. But think it's inevitable INEOS go in a different direction. I repeat, it's unfair to blame him for the signings. That is the club's responsibility.
Except that isn't even remotely true. ETH for a fact pushed the board to sign Antony given his history working with him at Ajax, and there's a reason why the majority of players we've been linked with originate from the Dutch league. ETH has been recommending them and wanted that role.
A strong club doesn't go out and spend 90 million just because the coach wants it. That's the point. Do you think he would have convinced Bayern to do the same? The answer is no. That's where structure comes in. So many players Pep has wanted but City have refused to pay silly money for. Sometimes you have to save these coaches from themselves. That's why you have a recruitment team.
Why would you want him to continue? Our performance level this season has been awful, we're normally largely terrible to watch even when we win.
I know people might argue that the players are the ones failing to deliver on the pitch, but I can't see he's doing anything to help them perform any better.
Reminds me of Liverpool signing Salah, despite Klopp preferring Pulisic, Draxler or Brandt.
According to The Times’ Paul Joyce, Salah was only Klopp’s fourth-choice target with Christian Pulisic, Julian Draxler and Julian Brandt all wanted ahead of him.
But former sporting director Michael Edwards intervened and reportedly convinced Klopp to sign Salah from Roma instead.
I think we're talking marginal differences. Our squad, even at full strength, isn't close to those of City, Liverpool and Arsenal. When it's spent the season ravaged by injury, it really is no wonder that we've fallen even further adrift and other teams have managed to overtake us.
As for "punting half our current squad at once", that's more or less what we need to do to get back to the top in the time-frame people seem to expect it to happen. It's also what Klopp oversaw at Liverpool. As I posted earlier in the thread, it took three summers to turn Liverpool's squad into one that was predominantly "Klopp's". In 2018/19 (his third full season) 10 of the 16 players with the most starts were signed with Klopp in charge. An eleventh was an academy graduate that he promoted to the senior side. That number is 10 (or 11) of 14 when you consider overall league appearances.
On just signings, that would be the equivalent of expecting Ten Hag to challenge for the title (and win/challenge for the Champions League) next season with a squad predominantly consisting of around 10 of:
Malacia
Eriksen
Martinez
Casemiro
Antony
Mount
Evans
Onana
Hojlund
and whoever we may sign in the summer.
You can pretty much immediately discount Evans and Malacia as back-ups, and I think it's fair to similarly discount Eriksen (given his age, the fact he was a free-transfer, and his history of nearly dying on the pitch). That means we would need four signings in the summer to all come in and hit the ground running, and a dramatic improvement of form and fitness from a good chunk of the others compared to what we've seen this season.
This also ignores that those players weren't the only players brought in at Liverpool in that period. Discounting back-up goalkeepers (as I've done with Bayandir), they also brought in Karius, Klavan, Solanke and Oxlade-Chamberlain (and Grujic in January 2016) in that time frame. In fact, Caulker in his first January was the only loan signing they made until the emergency loan of Kabak in the January window of 2020/21, five years later, and Arthur last season. We've made six already.
Making the most of what's available means top four and nowhere near the title, which Ten Hag achieved last season and still has an outside shot at this season. It is all Klopp could manage at Liverpool until the rest of his squad came together. Not that I think Ten Hag is as good as Klopp, but first full season Klopp went over a month and 10 matches in which their only win was an FA Cup replay against Plymouth Argyle. Second full season Klopp had a run of one win in six, bookended by a 5-0 defeat to City and 4-1 defeat to Spurs. This was without the squad turmoil we've faced.
As reigning champions, with a foundation far stronger than ours has been this season, an injury crisis saw them go on a run of three wins in 14 matches, losing eight of them, having been beaten 7-2 by Dean Smith's Aston Villa earlier in the season. Hell, they finished fifth last season, despite no real extenuating circumstances.
I think we need to get rid of Ten Hag to have a clean slate under INEOS and remove any dark clouds that may be lingering from his time here, but the reality is that we're going to need a fairly large clear out (however long that takes) and an understanding that progress isn't necessarily always linear if we're going to get back to the top.
Who gives a feck if he pushed for Anthony. Managers often push for players that aren't the best choice. They are coaches not scouts. The whole point is having a structure that doesn't expose them in that department.
It's literally in his contract that he is involved in recruitment. Therefore he shares responsibility.
It's hardly the only issue anyway. Ignoring the recruitment he's still doing a poor job managing the team.
I do agree with nearly all of what you've said there.
I just think the football is dreadful. Ten Hag has managed to get enough wins to get third last year and an outside chance of top 4 this year, but our placing never felt legitimate based on performance level and we could just as easily go on a losing run and drop a couple of places as maintain position or improving on it.
I totally agree we need a clean slate with a new manager to move forward. I don't think it's realistic to expect a massive cull of the squad though, as it's doubtful top level players will be willing to come until things improve. That's the reason I think we need someone capable of doing better with what we currently have.
Unfortunately ETH has managed Antony, Amrabat, Malacia and Onana, so therefore he has far more knowledge than any scout would, maybe the club should have identified that these players were not suitable, but you cannot excuse ETH on the basis he is no scout, he knows these players and still assessed them as being a fit from the club.
Onana is actually quite good and has big value if he had a proper defence in front of him. That's not his fault.
Malacia was 14m euros for a backup left back. Ten hag never managed him before, by the way.
Antony was literally the only name on the table becsuse he had no alternatives or suggestions by Murtough. Literally feck all. So what do you expect in that scenario?
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