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Hadn’t seen that. It’s interesting.
Gullit is saying it’s really hard to do and requires very good rest defence which is exactly what Arsenal and City do to dominate the way they do.
Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24
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Hadn’t seen that. It’s interesting.
I mentioned it before and I apply that to many other managers that failed at bigger/wealthier clubs. Every single manager has a dream setup and when they sign in big clubs there are less compromises, you have better players and you also have the means to bring new players without losing your best players, so it's natural for some to be tempted to apply their dream at 100%.
These kind of things always remind me the following answer from SAF, because the conclusion is in my opinion what separates him and other top managers from the rest, they have ideals/principals but will change them in order to be successful:
Good quote.
2 world class moments of brilliance saved us against Liverpool plus atrocious finishing from Liverpool however we got a draw and threw a massive spanner in their title chances. We beat Brentford at the weekend and no doubt the Cult of Ten Hag will be saying he’s a genius. Keep him at the club and we will be no better next season. We are getting like PSG with great players but no one to properly manage them and they do as they wish. Mainoo is amazing but he needs help yet our midfield is baffling to say the least. What are the managers tactics there? Let the opposition over runs us so we can live of the scraps for a break away ? He’s got to go.
edit - We are the under dogs with the Bookies away to the mighty Bournemouth at the weekend. That’s what he’s reduced us too! The mighty Bournemouth.
edit - We are the under dogs with the Bookies away to the mighty Bournemouth at the weekend. That’s what he’s reduced us too! The mighty Bournemouth.
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I’m going to wager that if he’s in charge next season. And we get a CB and CDM of the correct profile, that the majority of these pieces start falling into place and Hagnus Carlson steps forward.
so cringy
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I agree with you somewhat here.
I think Ten Hag has an incredibly clear vision of what he wants us to become, I also believe he knows exactly what is needed to get us there.
I do think that in getting to his ideal he may find himself losing the opportunity to enact this grand plan because the teething problems to get there will potentially reach an untenable point unless your current crop of players step up or you make significant compromises.
And I think that his dream setup is comparable to Zeman's dream setup. It's not realistic at the highest level without tactical adjustments his system would require that players are able of teleportation.
so much babble - and the conclusion being - "it will click at United with as well with the right players" is amusing, as if it foreshadows an unparalleled level of swashbuckling United football or domination or something. When I hear people talk about this fella it always comes across grander than what he's actually achieved.
It clicking at Ajax lead to a CL semi-final run where he got knocked out by Spurs and a few domestic titles but even De Boer has more so
That must be a record low for us against a true bottom half side.
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See I think this is where we slightly disagree.
I think I’ve seen enough with completely ill suited player profiles that this type of football absolutely can work, but I think it’s very dependent on the physical and technical profile. It’s really hard to do this well but in a completely different way to say how hard it is to dominate possession like Barcelona did or dominate space with positional play principles.
It’s actually quite exciting to see what could be truly great football return to Old Trafford but feck me is it hard to watch the process to get to it.
That’s crazy
This worries me even more. Those Ajax clips look just like us. That’s not good coaching surely. Just getting by on quality and luck.
Yeah. For me, and I said this multiple times since early on this season, it only works long term when you have a huge player quality advantage over your opposition. You can have that in the Dutch league with Ajax, you're never going to get that in the premier league over the opposition.
Ajax did well in big games too, but again, big games are unique. When your system works in 90% of games, the motivation is high and specific adjustments for the big games make a different impact. When you are in a league with the best managers like the Prem, then they find out how to take advantage of the system, pick holes in it and confidence plummets as you keep making the same mistakes. You don't build a system for beating City or Liverpool, you build a system to dominate 90% of your games. And his system gets picked apart by many of these other teams.
He clearly doesn't agree with the principles of it, in the same way many of us don't agree with the principles now. It's actually eerie how relevant the clips Gullit showed are to the problems we're having now. Same naivety, same unnecessary risks and same vulnerabilities on the counter we've experienced on a weekly basis all sason. It's unbelievable.
Rest defence is just a buzzword as far as this is concerned. We have nobody stopping counter attacks and that's why teams continue to kill us by taking 20-30 shots per match against us. You actually have to make some kind of concerted effort to stop that from happening if you ever want to be taken seriously as a coach.
How dare you
In fairness, he did get through Juventus and Real Madrid on the way there, and was quite literally seconds away from the CL Final. Football is a game of what-ifs, but it's not unconceivable given their run that year that they couldn't have beaten Liverpool in a one-off game.
That being said, it's a far cry from that Ajax side right now.
Just looking at Ajax pre and post his management. He obviously did a great job with them and they clearly miss him. Is it just that he isn’t suited to the league?
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He mainly focuses on the need to have a “Fernandinho” style player to hold. He doesn say it can’t work, just that it requires really good players which will likely cost a lot of money.
It’s not a buzzword it’s something that we need to work on.
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Also Gullit wasn’t a great manager.
Ah that's good to know. I don't follow Bayern's histrionics so don't feel like I have a good grasp on the whole deal with them paying a fortune for Nagelsmann, results being decent and then them canning him at the first bump in the road.
Stats are a funny thing. Here these guys claim that Manchester United are bad because 17th at points scored over all european competitions. Then they use as comparisment how bad that is because its nearly equal to...Aston Villa? Current P4 60 points swashbuckling Villa?
Then, keeping the ball stat of 50% is also bad, according to them. Jose Mourinho, -ex Man United, won the CL final in 2010 with Inter having just 31%! Then they keep on waffling about space left behind midfield and attack. The whole idea of attacking is to..score! So who cares what space is behind midfield. The only slight point they have it is a problem when players keep on messing up possession, like Bruno for instance. It's only because overall we defend well, we have top 4 against goals and we also do score lateky, if not enough. With better players instead or next to bruno, the botched attack should be mopped up just fine for a new attack.
Also, they finish that video with both ''experts'' saying how they would still keep ETH. Give him time with some new players. If he still hovers P6 P7 next year this time, then maybe move on.
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But Ten Hag clearly doesn't want that kind of player holding. He wasn't doing it in those clips at Ajax and he isn't doing it here, and that's with us having one of the most renowned holding midfielders of the last decade in Casemiro. It isn't a personnel thing, that's his preference. Casemiro has been pressing in stupid areas of the pitch all season, that doesn't happen if the manager doesn't ask him to do that.
Just to illustrate the point - since the turn of the year, only one team has managed fewer than 15 shots against us in 90 minutes. Wigan Athletic, who managed 9. We've played 15 games in that time. It simply isn't possible to control a game of football in that way, we couldn't even manage it against a League Two side like Newport County.
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He’s been very clear though about not having those big gaps in midfield.
I’ve already covered why I’m not concerned this season by just shot counts.
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I know but I don’t think long term this current showing is the plan.
I would hope not
Performance has no relationship to selection. It has no influence over in-game management including substitutions. Nobody is fighting for their place in the side because unless there's an injury to cover, everyone knows who's playing. Regardless of how well they played the week before or probably how they've trained. There's no genuine competition for places, or if they is everyone knows matchday performance plays absolutely no part in it. So the incentive to work hard and play well or lose your place, isn't something that really exists here. And it shows.
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We all doI would hope not
To be fair I think more people would be on board with it if we were playing some balls to the wall, you score 3 and we'll score 4, swashbuckling attacking football. But we aren't, we're crap going forward as well. We're the 13th or 14th lowest scorers in the league.
Problem for Erik is though whether or not he realizes it, is. The plan not working short term is likely to lead to him not getting the chance to implement it long term.
Is this what it has come down to? Resorting to what-if scenarios to inflate his accomplishments?
Unless I'm misunderstanding your meaning - Football is absolutely not a game of what ifs. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's someone somewhere that could come up with enough what-if scenarios in which he doesn't beat Juve or Real in said semi-final run. Now what?
Look at the squad he‘s had at MU, the shiit owners and the structure.
My feelings about Ten Hag wouldn’t change if United were 4th instead of 6th but I wonder if those who still like him would have felt different if we were say 9th rather than 6th. By majority of underlying statistics we are much closer to 10th than we are to 4th.
We can't claim that Ajax were making the same mistakes, that it is a personal tactical preference, and then say that you can't control a football match like that. Ajax regularly allowed the opposition less than 10 shots, won 6 out of 6 in the group stages with a GD of +15, and won the league with a GD of +79. Clearly you CAN control a match like that, we just can't seem to do it.
His tactics can be successful if we have right players but obviously we don't have and that the reason why we are losing. Rashford and Bruno are players who are careless with the ball. Once the ball is lost, we are overrun in midfield with at least 3 versus 3 situation. If we replace Rashford with Grealish and Bruno with Silva, we will dominate most of the game with less chances conceded and more goals scored. Yes, this problem can be fixed. If another 2-300 million is spend with no mistake. We need 2 pacy CB, 1 dominating DM, 1 LW who doesn't lose balls, and one AM who doesn't lose balls or make poor passes (I think Amad has those quality). If we get those players, it will be an interesting season next year. ETH make or break season if he stays on.
They were the form team in the League, or thereabouts, going into the fixture at OT.
Agreed.
The question Gullitt is posing in that clip is about having certain players designated to help control the defensive transition when you lose the ball in a highline setup where you have numerous players committed in the opponent's half. He then mentions a player like Fernandinho at City who is positioned to help contain and control situations when the space gets larger upon losing the ball. And he also mentions that Lasse Schone was someone that provided that option for Ajax.
And ten Hag's response to that is very simple and he clearly mentions that the rest defense is a important aspect in his approach but what his team does on the ball is even more important because the primary aim is to dominate the game on the ball. He goes on to mention how Guardiola himself has been sucker-punched on the counter numerous times. When he was Bayern coach and Real Madrid destroyed them on the counter, and several times against Solskjaer who came out on top by exposing the rest defense vulnerabilities out of possession which existed in Guardiola's team. Hence Guardiola had to rethink things and brought in players like Akanji and Ake to control the wide spaces in the backline due to their physical and athletic qualities. Fergie himself was done multiple times in Europe in the 90s when he went gung-ho in his quest to win the champinons league. And we did win the champions league, but the subsequent years saw us come a cropper against teams who took advantage of the spaces we left behind in defensive transition.
What we're seeing right now is ten Hag still attempting to instil a more proactive approach by not going full-out high press but going the hybrid route where he doesn't fully commit to the press hence the fullbacks don't always backup the high press. So the game against Liverpool was another example where in certain phases we go man to man when applying the press hence people think we have no midfield because in a bygone era it was normal to drop off instead of attempting to force mistakes higher up the pitch. And to be honest with you, those tactics worked because the alternative was to sit off and play a more passive/reactive game rather than attempt to disrupt Liverpool higher up the pitch. That then turned the game into a end to end game at times, and that suited us because Liverpool as a collective unit are better than us in possession as things stand.
When Solskjaer was the manager he utilised Fred and McTominay infront of Lindelof and Maguire. So eventhough Fred and McTominay weren't the best on the ball, their energy and ground coverage meant that the likes of Maguire and Lindelof weren't exposed in the channels in 1v1s. So when ten Hag arrived he broke that partnership up in midfield and we did well in his first season, but not signing Amadou Onana and Todibo who are large space compactors/ground eaters out of possession due to Maguire and Mctominay refusing to leave, meant our out of possession game is still weak in comparison to out rivals. The injuries to key men for large periods of the season has made it worse, but we just don't have players in defense and midfield who can eat up ground and dominate ground duels.
I've been saying for years that we should sign players who will help us control/contain transitions out of possession. Players who have the pace and power to compliment the more technical players in possession to create a system of play where we don't over burden our more technical players in possession where they're being asked to do things that expose their weaknesses out of possession.
Like I've said numerous times, we need two CBs and at least one midfielder who will be specialists in helping us control the defensive transitions when we turn over possession with a high volume of players committed into the opponent's half. We don't have those players and the potential to improve significantly is absolutely there for this team if we bring in the right profiles imo. The foundation of our team is weak from a physical and athletic level hence teams like Brentford can utilise their superior physicality and out-duel us in our own half hence pinning us back in our box and bombarding our box with a high volume of Brentford players and crosses.
He’s like our very own rain man. He is seeing things - patterns, formation - on the pitch that no one else can. Maybe his instructions are so advanced the average footballer can’t enact it because it’s too detailed and out there.
The clip from his Ajax days does nothing. It supports the vast majority who believe his methods won’t work. It would take years and all hell of a lot of good will and patience to get a squad suitable for him.
The clip from his Ajax days does nothing. It supports the vast majority who believe his methods won’t work. It would take years and all hell of a lot of good will and patience to get a squad suitable for him.
He's just way too intelligent for football, and we mere dimwitted plebs don't deserve him and his superior ways
I doubt we've ever been underdogs against a team in 12th at this stage of the season in PL history.
It's the worst rated PL team we've ever had and a large part of that is on the manager.
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