Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24

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He survived again. How? Hope this is not our new standard under Ineos. It feels like Glazers were more ruthless.
 
What's the point then? Let's just shut down the club in that case and never do anything.
Me might as well do it because I agree with the post you responded to.

Or we could just get the idea of playing modern football out of the door and get promising upcoming managers in the mould of Jose or Conte. The core of this group is still suited to play that kind of football.
 
I feel for him tbh, but we need to cut or losses with him, he's not better than this.
 
Interestingly in 15/16 most agreed that LVG needed to go but that season we managed to get 66 points and were fighting for a CL spot until the last day.

The recency effect. But there are still those who will think that Ole was/is worse than ETH.
 
Yes, most of us are baffled. He could literally pull out a gun and shoot a player and there would be a few in the Caf giving him a pass.
These players are criminals. Just getting rid of deadwood, innit?
 
One could almost suspect fans supporting rivaling clubs to leave a vote or two….

Plus he's going to attract viewers that agree with him. A lot who don't will have switched off.

It's also what happens with e-celebs in general. Fans of an internet personality will be persuaded by whatever that person says much of the time. Can all get a bit culty whether that's someone offering football opinion, politics commentary or probably even young girls declaring which make-up brand is the best if their favourite influencer says it is.
 
It's going to be Potter or Southgate. They're going to go British and someone who's used to working under a setup like the one they're setting up currently. I doubt they're going to feck around and give someone time to learn on the job or get used to it.

There are options outside of Britain INEOS
 
look i feel for the guy simply b/c we have had a stupid amount of injuries this season, whether or not that is his fault is up to debate, however he's got to go
 
I don't believe any of the Southgate rumors, nor do I want him hired by any means, but the one silver lining of a potential Southgate appointment is that fans will be skeptical of him from the start and won't give him a free pass / ready-made excuses like with any other manager.
 
I wouldn't attribute those issues to progressive intense modern styles. It's attributable to 1 man's style that tries to play in the manner you said. This doesn't happen to other sides that try to play a progressive intense modern style. Hence why I take issue with this vague description.

Progressive intense modern styles do bring to light a lot of deficiencies and issues, but I disagree with what you're getting at here. You think that with better players, it will make things click. You're passing off the responsibility onto the players only. I don't see how that's going to make his system work.

There is far too much space between the defensive line and the pressing players. This isn't the case for other progressive intense modern style sides. Compactness is valued for all styles. If you're Ole or Mourinho, you value it because it makes you more solid at the back when soaking up pressure. When you're pressing in an intense manner, you value it because it makes the "pressing maze" more difficult to navigate through. With the amount of space we give other sides, it's very easy for them to turn our press into a great transition for themselves.
I like your pressing maze term.

Compactness cannot be achieved everywhere all at once obviously.

When pressing high with a defensive line that is medium, as many teams do, there will be space in midfield that needs to be managed. We have done that poorly in many games this season.

You see gaps in Arsenal‘s games and Pool‘s games but they deal with it.
 
We’re 16th in the points table since February 18.

That’s 10 games, 10 points out of 30.

All this whilst being relatively lucky that opponents struggle to finish in matches against us.

This is astonishingly bad, I struggle to even find the words for it.
 
I admire your resilience, and others like VP89. You all deserve medals

The whole thing is getting very childish, I’ve reached out to a few to ask if they can explain their position / assumption / assertion to me and guess what, no response.

It’s getting very tiring

What exactly are you looking for? I mean the posters who want EtH out have made their position very clear.
 
The recency effect. But there are still those who will think that Ole was/is worse than ETH.
Ole in retrospect was pretty OK for me. He trusted others better than him to coach and train us in areas he was weak and had us play a fun/efficient ballgame plus embodied some of our old siege mentality. The sum of his team were much greater than his parts until the odd Ronaldo signing pretty much ruined his dynamics I feel.

ETH somehow managed to replace most of the team and make us a LOT worse (!). ETH seem a stubborn fundamentalist with no wider sense of urgency or contingency plan, severely lacks charisma like other fundamentalist coaches to compensate. And the guy seem a tad sadistic in a dysfunctional way on different areas of player handling.

So far he has objectively failed on measurable metrics and set tons of negative records. He turned us into a nonfunctional tier 3 league Ajax but in the EPL... Heres hoping we as club don't double down, but seen as he has board room charisma at unprecedented Stockholm Symdrome levels with the out of touch board, can also see him get a renew. Still rather keep him over out of depth Southgate we're rumored to get....
 
Even with all the injuries shouldn’t we at least be beating the likes of Crystal Palace and West Ham etc? I get standards have dropped but we’ve also forgotten our history as a footballing juggernaut. We’ve fielded weaker teams in the past under Sir Alex and managed to come away with something.

That fighting spirit to win at all costs is completely drained from this team and manager. The culture just isn’t there. We used to thrive in adversity.
 
…and I don’t think appointing Southgate will be as bad as people make it out to be. Stranger manager-team combinations in football have clicked in recent history
 
Brainless tedious sludge at home. Never acceptable. The injuries are rough, it did really hit home yesterday once again how savaged our squad is, but we're so dull and lacking in ingenuity. We create so little, and look so bereft of ideas every single game. Our players honestly seem dim for the most part, there's so little intellect there. Makes me wonder if some of them are even capable of following tactical advice.
 
…and I don’t think appointing Southgate will be as bad as people make it out to be. Stranger manager-team combinations in football have clicked in recent history

The big problem with Southgate is that he’s had a huge amount of attacking talent with England and turned them into a very boring team.

It would feel like yet another appointment that lurches us in a different direction. I can accept that ETH likely has to go and that we’ve never seen the football we hoped he would bring but I would at least like to see us pursue an attacking manager.
 
It took 35 games, but he finally changed the defensive set up today. If he'd have done that earlier, we'd have a lot more points regardless of injuries.

I think he's stubborn beyond belief, but it seems like the penny has dropped. Let's see if that's enough to keep his job.

Better not be enough but still get the sense he could save his job by a decent performance in final
 
Ole in retrospect was pretty OK for me. He trusted others better than him to coach and train us in areas he was weak and had us play a fun/efficient ballgame plus embodied some of our old siege mentality. The sum of his team were much greater than his parts until the odd Ronaldo signing pretty much ruined his dynamics I feel.

ETH somehow managed to replace most of the team and make us a LOT worse (!). ETH seem a stubborn fundamentalist with no wider sense of urgency or contingency plan, severely lacks charisma like other fundamentalist coaches to compensate. And the guy seem a tad sadistic in a dysfunctional way on different areas of player handling.

So far he has objectively failed on measurable metrics and set tons of negative records. He turned us into a nonfunctional tier 3 league Ajax but in the EPL... Heres hoping we as club don't double down, but seen as he has board room charisma at unprecedented Stockholm Symdrome levels with the out of touch board, can also see him get a renew. Still rather keep him over out of depth Southgate we're rumored to get....


Totally agree. Let's hope we won't be lumped with waistcoat. Surely there are better options?

Tuchel as a short term solution unless by some miracle it becomes some match made in heaven. He seems to be able to extract as much as possible out of the players before blowing up.

But regardless, after ETH the bar is so low that anyone will be an improvement.
 
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He kind of admitted he wouldn't be able to win the league with the football we played with his second place finish season which was why he changed things things up. Ronaldo didn't help but it was part of the plan to take the club forward and it failed miserably. EtH has basically said the same thing recently that he could have got more points on the table had he been more conservative but it would be bad for the long term project. The last three managers have basically all had the same problem. How much you want to blame the managers or the fact that the recruitment and the player quality simply isn't good enough is up to the individual.

There is this idea that at some point we needed to hit rock bottom in order to finally rebuild properly and in a way that could make us competitive at the top again. Missing out entirely on Europe would allow us to significantly trim the squad rather than hoarding players because of the number of games that Europa League or Conference league would bring.

It’s strange but I remember arguments on here about ETH being too pragmatic. This season he’s been stubbornly avoiding pragmatism supposedly in pursuits of longer term benefits. Our fanbase demands a certain level of results to retain your job but what if we need to go through this kind of pain in order to make strides forward?

I’m not sure any manager has ever come back from such a low (at least not in modern times) but I am fascinated by what we’d try to do next season if we didn’t sack ETH. Just as an experiment I almost want to see it play out.
 
100% and I don’t think anyone is confidently in. I wouldn’t even say I’m in. Hopefully my reply to crossy shows that I’m actually very much I don’t care who it is but let’s be clever about it.

Every single post targeted at me I respond to with care an attention unless I’m treated with disdain or disrespect and it’s not worth my time.

If this poster believes there is a ****, then they are far better off highlighting the reasons why by quoting the post and dealing with it directly or by attempting to highlight **** like posters so that we can all understand this imaginary ****.

I think it’s incredibly rich suggesting I don’t try to encourage the quality discussion given what I put up with in this thread and the depth and detail I put into my replies on the whole.

It’s consistently of a far higher standard than that of those suggesting there is a ****.

Do you not also see the irony in choosing this post to wuote and discuss rather than my one about what I’d like to see next year?

As long as we can keep it "fun", it's ok. I am noticing some name calling here and there and it's not good for the fanbase. After all, we are pulling for the same thing
 
It’s strange but I remember arguments on here about ETH being too pragmatic. This season he’s been stubbornly avoiding pragmatism supposedly in pursuits of longer term benefits. Our fanbase demands a certain level of results to retain your job but what if we need to go through this kind of pain in order to make strides forward?

I’m not sure any manager has ever come back from such a low (at least not in modern times) but I am fascinated by what we’d try to do next season if we didn’t sack ETH. Just as an experiment I almost want to see it play out.
The issue is that the performances are somehow worse than the results.

If we were developing a decent playing style and it was just unsuitable players and the injuries that had cost us a lot of points, I'd be much more forgiving and open to him staying on even if we'd had the exact same results. It'd be understandable and there would be every reason to think that we'd improve and become more consistent as we signed more players and the current players grew into the system (such as Klopp and to a lesser extent Arteta had). But in reality, we're only as high as we are because of individual player quality and the opposition not bringing their finishing boots. Our playing style is unbelievably naive and poor, and it's not an exaggeration to say that we look like one of the worst, if not the worst, coached team in the league. Based on performances and expected points (if the expected goals scored and conceded in each game actually came to pass) we'd be in 15th. 15th! Over the last third of the season the results have started reflecting the performances and we actually are in 15th/16th since mid-February and we'll likely drop even lower over the next two games.
 
Totally agree. Let's hope we won't be lumped with waistcoat. Surely there are better options?

Tuchel as a short term solution unless by some miracle it becomes some match made in heaven. He seems to be able to extract as much as possible out of the players before blowing up.

But regardless, after ETH the bar is so low that anyone will be an improvement.

Yeah I would think he is a short term appointment,however if he can get us back into top 4 then makes us more attractive for their ideal fit manager in couple of seasons. Think an Alonso/Nagelsmann could definitely be attracted.

I also believe that if we have to go through a few more managers in order to find the right one then I am totally on board with that as well.
 
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One thing that he deserves massive criticism about is why didn't we go more conservative... 8 months ago? We've been a disaster defensively since the first game of the season. Week after week we were a complete mess, he could've adapted to be more tight in there especially with all the defensive issues. Instead he went full on suicidal football which just made us a million times worse. He didn't have a good situation, but he dealt with it fecking horribly and it led to this season spiralling the way it has. It just shows a complete lack of willingness to adapt which isn't an encouraging sign if he is to stay.

Fair enough today. But why did it take until the 36th league game of the season to make the most obvious change that should've happened in September?
 
What exactly are you looking for? I mean the posters who want EtH out have made their position very clear.
This one is a new, I haven’t seen this routine yet. It’s like nobody can come up with any reasons why ETH should go because it’s so irrational to think so.
 
This one is a new, I haven’t seen this routine yet. It’s like nobody can come up with any reasons why ETH should go because it’s so irrational to think so.

Even I can't think of any genuine reason. Maybe we are being knee jerk, after all we are in mighty 8th position, in relegation form and negative GD.
 
Nah, I think we're going to do fine under a guy like Tuchel. Ten Hag has had some shit luck with injuries and he didn't do himself any favors with his tactics / transfers. The transfers we're going to fix this summer. The tactics through better coaching. The injuries through (hopefully) better luck.

The injuries aren't luck. They are as a result of everything else. It's partly rushing players back, partly players at 80% fitness who under a good manager would be fighting to play and partly players getting injured in training trying to practise at near matchday intensity his half baked system.
 
The issue is that the performances are somehow worse than the results.

That's it for me too, too many poor performances even with semi full strength and at times against low level teams like New Port and Coventry, being spunked 3 nil twice in the same season by Bournemouth or 4 nil against CP are some examples of many shit performances.
 
But that cycle has to start again as if you get a new manager in, these same players will just throw him under the bus in another 2 years time.
If it’s Southgate, I think the non-English players will suss him out within weeks.

And fans will lose patience quickly. They already know he’s shit, and he’ll be failing under a structure nobody else got

Only plus to his appointment is that I don’t see it being a long one
 
He survived again. How? Hope this is not our new standard under Ineos. It feels like Glazers were more ruthless.

Simple really, the people Jim are hiring to make these decisions aren’t here yet, the Glasers are clueless, yes they may have fired him now but ultimately their next option would have failed too.

SJR is waiting for legitimate people in post to make the right decisions, we as a fanbase have been whittling on for years about footballing people in power and now it’s happening so let’s wait for them.
 
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