The sorry state of our club is not on him.
The first half performance, though, is. As the commentator in my country said at one point, United were playing with a false #9, a false #10, a quasi #6 and a quasi #8. If there's a name for this, that would be "suicide tactics".
All the teams, in this first week, fielded tactics and player roles on which they had worked in their pre-seasons. Sorry, all but one. Again, the lack of depth is painfully obvious. But you can't have one injury sending you into the multiverse of tactics. Why have a pre-season, then? I believe ETH is a smart man, so won't see much of that in the following weeks. In any case, we aren't Ajax in the Eredivisie. The quality that can allow the manager to go a tad overboard with experimentations is simply not there. Furthermore, ETH is not facing, week in and week out, managers who try to make a stew out of the Dutch 433 no matter the defensive costs or the players weaknesses any more. At this level, most of the managers he'll come up against have earned their bread in the PL. If you offer them the three points, they'll take them. It goes without saying for Potter. This is something even Pep and Klopp were forced to realize sooner rather than later and make adjustments.
I argued at the start of the summer, when some on here were dreaming about Bruno or Eriksen as false #9s, that this is one of the toughest tactics to pull off in football and i would be unpleasantly surprised, if ETH tried it without coaching his team for at least a whole season and bringing in the players that will allow him to lay the foundations of his philosophy. Today, the most worrying fact for me was the "why". We basically sacrificed a forward role on the pitch so that we could get McTominay close to the box. That's comical stuff, really.
And as the saying goes, if you don't show the football gods respect, they will punish you. First, goal: McT gets easily dispossessed in the attacking half, Fred does what Fred does best (gets drawn to the ball like a headless chicken), and a forward's simple run (the kind of run we chose not to have) opens up the defence. The second goal was pretty much the same, with Eriksen getting caught while McT was sauntering at the edge of the box. Which brings up another issue that goes back to the Solskjaer debacle last season. If you have limited players on the ball, the best thing to do is keep it plain and simple. The likes of McFred, Dalot, even Rashford and Martial aren't exactly made for expansive football.
In the second half, things got just a tiny bit better because the roles made more sense. Eriksen isn't a holding midfielder, but he can pass the ball through the lines better than Fred. Which makes the debacle with FdJ reflect even worse on the club, because it made pretty clear how desperate we are for a player in those areas. Also, if we are going to use the Dane heavily in our possession game, and with the fact that both Martial and Ronnie like to play in between the lines... that kind of makes Bruno redundant, doesn't it? And it showed today. And, given Bruno's numbers, that could be a riddle to solve.
