My issue is that sacking the manager delays yeh big decisions. Arteta made some massive calls at Arsenal. He shipped off Aubamayang who was their top scorner for years. It would have been easy to say “they are making a mistake” just like you’re saying with Rashford. The sum of the team is greater than the sum of the individuals and if we sack the manager we just roll the dice again. We have seen it time and time again the players get a stay of execution. If Ashworth can change that than I’d be happy to change the manager, but we have no evidence of that currently.
Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24
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Boasting about scoring the most goals in this team is like celebrating winning a race against people with 1 leg when you have 2.
Maybe ETH will ultimately not be good enough. Maybe what we have seen this season is very much exposing his limitations. Or maybe all the things we’ve discussed are mitigating circumstances that help explain why ETH and the team has done so poorly. Im open to either of these being possibly true.
The problem you are having here is that there are people who aren’t open to anything. Their mind is made up. They don’t come here to discuss , they come here to rant and will mostly support/post information or narratives that only support what they want to believe.
If that’s the case I can get behind it, personally I don’t think there’s the recruitment team will have the balls to get rid of Rashford by themselves, particularly when a new manager will be coming in and saying “ I would like to work with him”. The chances of those players going increases with Ten Hag in charge, regardless of the new recruitment structure.
No it didn't, because they were missing Suarez and Sterling. You can't ignore the fact they lost 2 of their 3 best attackers during their title challenge. It's not the same squad.
This is their starting XI for Klopp's 1st game
Also if we're going to use your logic, ETH inherited a squad that finished 2nd 2 seasons prior and had way more money to inject into it + didn't lose any of the top performers that helped us finish 2nd.
We lost Greenwood and Cavani by the time Ten Hag came in, which was 2 of our three best attackers. We also lost Pogba.
I get that Liverpool's squad wasn't the best when Klopp took over, but ours was in pretty bad condition when Ten Hag came in too.
Liverpool did an excellent job turning theirs around within three summers. We've not come close to that.
Now, if you want to discuss Ten Hag's apparent lack of clarity over the tactical direction he wants to take us in, and a possible inability to identify the types of players he needs for that, then we've got a discussion on our hands.
I don’t think that is a certainty whatsoever.
I do agree with your second point, the new recruitment structure will be make or break regardless of manager. Where we will have to agree to disagree though is I still think Ten Hag is a very good coach whereas you don’t think so. That’s fine and I doubt my mind will change this season unless we completely collapse.
For me, I don't really care if we throw the baby out with the bathwater here. INEOS getting their own man in and a clean slate for the manager in the new season is enough of a positive for me to not concern myself with "what ifs" about Ten Hag.
About the only argument I can make for keeping him into next season is the apparent lack of suitable replacement.
If that happens then the new management is as incompetent as the previous one.
Agreed
Getting rid of Rashford isn’t going to improve us to the point that it makes it worthwhile to keep an underperforming manager. I’m not even convinced Ten Hag will want to sell Rashford this summer if he stays, he’d more than likely what to keep him.
The squad Klopp inherited had finished 2nd one full season before. The season before he took over they had finished 6th. The squad Ten Hag inherited had finished 2nd one full season before (and reached a Europa League final). The season before he took over they had finished 6th. Quite similar.
As others have mentioned, Liverpool were consistently worse than United, finishing outside of the top 4 every season in 5 years except the title challenging one. That was an outlier; outliers are not what one builds an argument around.
It's not that hard to judge. You look at the players' track records, careers, etc. It shows pretty clearly that United's squad was better than Liverpool's.
The 11 most used players for Liverpool in PL 13/14 (when they challenged' for the title) were Mignolet, Skrtel, Henderson, Suarez, Gerrard, Johnson, Coutinho, Sturridge, Sterling, Flanagan, and Leiva.
The 11 most used players for Liverpool in PL 14/15 (when they finished 6th) were Mignolet, Henderson, Sterling, Skrtel, Coutinho, Moreno, Gerrard, Can, Lovren, Lallana, Allen.
The 11 most used players for Liverpool in PL 15/16 (when Klopp took over and they finished 8th) were Mignolet, Clyne, Can, Moreno, Milner, Lallana, Firmino, Lovren, Coutinho, Leiva, and Sakho.
As you can see from these "most used" lists, there are only 3 players in common from 13/14 to 15/16: Mignolet, Coutinho, and Leiva. 4 if you count Sakho (who was the 12th most used player in 13/14). We know that most of these players were nothing more than 'very good'.
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There's another thing that doesnt wash. And gets debunked endlessly in this thread. We didnt overperform last season. We are massively underperforming now.
And no, Klopp inherited a terrible squad that had just lost its only 2 top quality players.
They did not 'sell players', they lost basically entire squad bar Coutinho, Henderson and Skrtel. Sturridge was a crock, and all the players that made this squad competitive were gone: Gerrard, Suarez, Sterling. And BTW, that team also finished 6th the season before, and lost Gerrard from that team even.
Well said. Valid and constructive criticism is all part of supporting our great club. However, constant negativity - much of it generated by our obvious failings viz-a-viz City and Liverpool - does not help to address out current circumstances. I personally worry about ETH and his capacity to lead us back to the promised land. However the arrival of Sir Jim and the simultaneous departure of Klopp give grounds for cautious optimism. I think we will take the Scousers in the cup on Sunday. We will come out and play and get our reward - I just believe this will be a memorable day for Utd. They will play their kids cosbof injuries and it will cost them. Looking to next season I do think we have to line up an improvement on ETH. For my money a good English coach like Potter or Howe is needed to build the kind of foundation for success thar ETH failed to.
Didn’t hear you or anyone else saying that last season. Weird revisionism.
“Improving the club increasingly this season” those dutchies do be smoking some crazy shite.
I'm sure there was a plethora of people saying we don't have enough goalscorers last season, it's been said for years. Do you think that scoring a good number of goals automatically means a player is suited to a specific style of football? Did you think Ronaldo was suited to Ten Hag's football?
That is exactly the argument, anyone who would come as manager now... I would not want!
Along the lines of " I refuse to join any club who would have me as a member" (Groucho Marx)
Shame.
Both can be true. We definitely overperformed last season relative to our overall squad strength and depth. We largely stayed injury free, and if we had faced injuries, the wheels would have come off just as quickly as last season. We are also certainly underperforming this season, but part of the reason is because Ten Hag was looking to tactically move us on from simply a deep lying counter punch team and try and create a far more aggressive structure. The issue is we still don't currently have the players to fully make that transition, and that's been compounded by injuries to our key players that are the most likely to enable that transformation. I think he's correct in trying to dogmatically make his system work. If we continued to play as we did last season, we would certainly have got better results this season, however, we also wouldn't have got any closer to reaching the top teams continuing to play that style. The question is can Ten Hag actually make this system work with better suited players and that's the unknown factor. I'm willing to try and others arent which is entirely fair.
To be honest, I think the whole "squad that almost won the league/squad that finished second and third" thing is irrelevant. It's quite obviously not as simple as just totting up players from two or seasons prior, but about whether the players were actually good enough to meet the ambitions of their respective clubs, and by and large, they weren't/aren't. I only engaged on that point because the argument was that they lost two of their three best attackers, which was also true for United.
The reality is that Klopp inherited a squad that required heavy turnover to become a top team, as did Ten Hag. Except the turnover at United has been managed terribly. The difference is not in squad's inherited, because I honestly think that's negligible when the aim is to get to the top of the table. The difference is how the club's have managed those squads.
We didnt overperform. We finished with 74 points the season prior to the inevitable Ole wheels-off season. We spent massive money, the most ever in a single window, on a marquee signing in defence, midfield and attack. We finished with 75 points.
Not qualifying for the CL last season would have been viewed as a disaster especially given how badly Liverpool and Chelsea and Spurs all did.
What kind of nonsense is this? You cannot just look at Ole's last game as a benchmark.ETH has had his share of horrible losses as well.
It still doesnt take away the notion that Maguire was and is seen as an antidote to modern football. He is slow and has poor positioning. Both at United and at England he was so bad he got the most horrible abuse, threats and what not.
EtH has found a way around his shortcomings and made him much more productive and limit exposure of said shortcomings. Granted, out of necessity, but EtH and Maguire himself added something to his game that we look a lot better with him in defense than say, Lindelof or even Varane. Maguire sometimes even showed up at the wings, passing and giving options that I had to look twice.
I liked Ole because he changed the congested and mostly defensive looking for a 1 goal win Jose and the slow build up of LvG. But tactically he was not an equal to what EtH is capable of.
Anyhow. Lets go sunday. I am positive we will give LFC something to think about. Lets crush them! Come on!
Hear hear. I'm all for open discussion, criticism is good and EtH as most if not all managers, should bear some. But even after a win, putting in the sword again because we don't play City/LFC/Arsenal esque football just begs the question: how for real are these 'supporters''?
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Is this a parody account? And is it the new narrative that we have to find a new job for Hag? Jesus FC.
There was talk around getting another striker so we could challenge for the league title. I vividly remember this place (and Gary Neville) saying United were just Harry Kane away from challenging for the league title. So no, there was no talk about Rashford not being suited to Ten Hag's style, although he strangely was last season?
Unfortunately I think he's going to, unless the new board and team know which manager they want to replace him already.
This is a good thing, at least long term. We don't want to rush into hiring someone for the sake of it.
Bar some miracle where he somehow gets us into fourth (or maybe fifth and that being a CL spot) I think we're going to see a "mutual consent" departure at the end of the season.
Listen, I think we're shit right now. I also think Ten Hag probably needs to be sacked but stop with this rubbish. We were dreadful in 21/22. We were also incredibly inconsistent under Ole - in fact, we were largely shit. We were pretty shit under Jose as well. Also quite shit under LvG. And, just to add to that, we were shit under Moyes, too. So, can we stop with the "we're expected to be good" narrative when it's complete nonsense. We've been fecking shit for 11 years. Nothing is a given nor has been for a long, long time.
No, it just shows how incompetent the key board warriors are.
My only concern is that Liverpool, Bayern and Barcelona are all looking this summer, maybe Chelsea also. We don't want to go into the summer not knowing what we're going to do regarding the manager. We don't want to move too slow and be left with Potter or Southgate.
Dont use words like narrative to describe a phenomenon you've just made up. Jose, Ole and ETH all peaked at a certain level, pretty much the same level. 70-80 points in the table and winning the odd cup.
So it's obviously valid to compare how we're doing now to that yardstick. No one has said that yardstick is good enough, even though plenty of gullible United fans have been conned into thinking its the maximum we can ever achieve, same as Arsenal's lot were.
I'm sure we're sounding out potential candidates already, but nothing is going to be known until Ten Hag's gone (or going).
I honestly wouldn't be overly surprised if we've got a new manager announced within 24 hours of the final whistle on the last day.
Rashford can score goals and play well, and still not be suited to Ten Hag's style of football, he's a good player(when in form).
Ten Hag had to change how he has his team play specifically because of players like Rashford and Fernandes.
What if you're right, but the keyboard warriors are actually wrong about all the excuses and our players are actually capable of playing some good football?
I thought you couldn't stand ten hag ball?
He obviously won't go back to Ajax when he will have offers from Bayern, Barcelona, Liverpool and Juventus in the Summer.
If any of that is remotely true then he’s a terrible manager. You’ve got a system that works for the players and wins you games but you scrap it all and massively underperform all season because you have a fetish for a Dutch philosophy that clearly doesn’t work and abandons any use of a midfield. That is truly a dereliction of duty.
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