Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24
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You have to recognise the level that Liverpool played at prior to that season gave Klopp huge credit in the bank. The previous season they won the FA Cup, League Cup, made the CL final and 90+ points in the PL. The amount of credit built up for Klopp allows for one bad season with no questions asked. That same privilege shouldn't and won't apply to everyone. Last season was a decent first season for ETH but it shouldn't mean than injuries mean he gets a bye for the season.
The same would apply to Pep if they finish 4th next season.
Ole might have been ahead of his time 
but in all seriousness, I do agree with the sentiment about league position being more reflective of where you are as a team
but in all seriousness, I do agree with the sentiment about league position being more reflective of where you are as a team
You might not want to look at what happened in the league fixture right after we won the league cup.
Ole might have been ahead of his time
but in all seriousness, I do agree with the sentiment about league position being more reflective of where you are as a team
Well said.
It’s worrying how many fans want Ten Hag to stay based on the emotion of winning the FA Cup.
If he gets sacked and England win the Euros they’ll all want Southgate.
I can understand fans being frustrated and disappointed about the season we've just had. I really can. But the arguments are just getting silly.
It's fine to think that all the problems the manager has had to deal with don't excuse the performances and results. I happen to think they do, just. But taking an argument to the extreme to make it sound stupid is such a pathetic way to make your point. We're all on the same side here.
Well said.
That’s “King” to you
The dross we played for the majority of this season is too bad to ignore. The FA cup win was lovely and the happiest I’ve felt as a fan for a long while but I’m not sure I can take another season of chaotic football and treating the ball like hot potato
Jesus Christ
The injuries defense is taken way too far by ten Hag's apologists. We lost Martinez and Shaw for what was in reality the entire season and those are two huge misses, but the argument cannot be that without Martinez and Shaw there was no chance we could have played proper football even once.
The one result that has everyone buzzing, the win over City in the FA Cup, we say deep and hit on the counter, even with Martinez. We were nowhere close to being able to control the football for more than a few seconds. We did what we had to do against City and that result will be remembered for decades, but our football for almost the entire season was poor. Moreover, we were fortunate to grind out a lot of narrow wins on days when we were outplayed by opponents who wondered how they lost they lost a match they had dominated between then boxes.
And the less said about the CL, the better.
The one result that has everyone buzzing, the win over City in the FA Cup, we say deep and hit on the counter, even with Martinez. We were nowhere close to being able to control the football for more than a few seconds. We did what we had to do against City and that result will be remembered for decades, but our football for almost the entire season was poor. Moreover, we were fortunate to grind out a lot of narrow wins on days when we were outplayed by opponents who wondered how they lost they lost a match they had dominated between then boxes.
And the less said about the CL, the better.
Even devilish is losing it. He shits on most United things these days, but ETH seems holy to him. The end is near
Ole might have been ahead of his time
but in all seriousness, I do agree with the sentiment about league position being more reflective of where you are as a team
It's a shame those league finishes weren't really representative of progress at all though because as soon as we tried to move away from counter attack and push higher up the pitch we were getting slaughtered in his third season. Blame was placed on Ronaldo but the whole thing wasn't a solid foundation and we're still paying for some of his signings (Maguire, AwB, VdB, Sancho etc.) and the set up he left.
Time will tell if/when EtH leaves if the likes of Mainoo, Hojlund, Martinez, Onana, Mount will be a solid foundation for the future and he has signed his fair share of duds too, but i think will be there will be more cause for optimism than the squad Ole left us with.
It all comes down to whether you think EtH was right to persist with his strategy in the hopes that the front 6 learn and get better at executing it over time while the team gets healthy (ultimately sacrificing champs league and putting up some embarrassing records and performances) or if he should have been more flexible.
Ole might have been ahead of his time
but in all seriousness, I do agree with the sentiment about league position being more reflective of where you are as a team
Ole was 100% right there and apparently the fans still haven't learned. There are people suggesting they would prefer a repeat of this season to doing an Arsenal and taking the league to the last game. All that because "trophy -> no trophy". For some reason majority of the fans have this extremely shortsighted view. Like Ole was suggesting, once you're actually "back", trophies will come. The way people have been bigging up domestic cups lately is borderline small time. Especially the League Cup which really is a mickey mouse competition and no big club would boast about winning it. But we don't stop there, even finals are counted as achievements now. In competitions where you basically play one single good opponent to reach the final.
Its not just Ole, even Pep has said more than once that he values league performance higher than even the champions league as there is far more variance in cup competitions and league position is a much better indicator of consistency and quality of a team.
Went back and watched the match. It wasn’t even close until Haaland hit the bar. We looked so much better than they did. The patterns of play on the ball, choosing when to press or back off, passing out the back. We started to hoof balls after the Haaland chance and it turned into proper rearguard action but that’s what the cup final called for at that point.
On our other performances, yes we haven’t been able to put together a quality 90 minutes but we have had stretches of dominance within matches (think Liverpool) that show what our ceiling could be.
Well quite. The heart of the Ten Hag problem is his refusal to compromise his playing style to meet the reality that the players available couldn't perform it. Is that a sackable offence? Well maybe it is. But what else could he have done? Played on the break against Palace?
I would agree with that as well. But at least the CL is very prestigious and you play the best teams from Europe. 90% of the teams you play in domestic cups are either clearly inferior or even a tier or two below.
You call my argument disingenous then compare the manager market to those 4. Alright
I agree with the sentiment, but torn because I’m not sure ETH will be flexible enough to change up the open midfield
YES. You mean done what any competent manager does when faced with what he thinks is a squad crisis and lack of quality performances?
Literally not one fan would have blamed him for adjusting to missing some key defenders and shoring up our midfield/defense. Not one. Because the alternative was what happened: getting battered every game in the middle of the park and hoping for coinflip wins.
Pre cup final 73% wanted him gone
post cup final it’s now 50/50 a swing of 23%
because of one match
post cup final it’s now 50/50 a swing of 23%
because of one match
For every SAF there's approximately 1000x more managers that were just failures because they weren't good enough. Stop romanticising everything as if it needs to be this grand show of support. Also I'd argue 2 years is plenty of time to "get the foundations right"
If we'd have lost on Saturday, the poll would have been 80% + for sack.
One game and the majority forget about the shitshow of a season
Even looking past finishing 8th, a minus goal difference, bottom of our champions league group...
We've seen his ideal set up/tactics, thought nothing was wrong with all the shots faced and been far too stubborn with his "way of play" and player selection.
That's all going to suddenly change next season is it?
Incredible isn't it
What's more incredible is incessantly bitching about poll results from those wanting ten hag out, whilst also trying to suggest large portions of fans weren't backing him before the FA cup final.
I’ve noticed that We blame ole for the signings but don’t ETH.
I see you're no longer pretending to fence-sit now that your side is back on the ascendency
Listening to fans is basically the last thing ineos should do. Fans were backing every manager till the very end, no matter how bad he was doing. It's some sort of "pride" at this club.
He never fence sat in reality, he was always going to blame players and structure even if we finished in 15th
I am being sarcastic (ok poor attempt)
recency bias is mental
watch it change quickly as soon as we inevitably start serving up the same old shit next season, and then be stuck with him most likely for another season
"We looked so much better than they did."
We did look better in the sense that we executed our game plan better than they did and of course we got the win -- and I want to be clear that winning is almost everything in sport -- but we had very little control control of the ball and we relied on City having a bad day to beat them. We played a brand of football that was our only hope of beating the better side in a cup final, but is a brand of football we can never, ever embrace over a 38 game PL season. In a very real sense we did look better than City on the day, but we looked better by playing a worse brand of football that only works as a smash and grab, which is what the FA Cup really was.
City had a bad day? The Gvardiol/Ortega mistake obviously and then the two chances on goal by Alvarez that on another day he would have beaten Onana. De Bruyne was shocking. Haaland was a nonfactor but on that point all credit goes to Varane and Martinez for shutting him down. I don't recall many stretches of dominance over City or Liverpool, nor Arsenal or Liverpool. We had a good win over West Ham though.
Which is funny because I actually think ETH has been the most supported signings wise of any manager we've had as far as who he wanted vs. who we got.
And this is the heart of it. He says that had he done so it would have set us back and cost even more points later. Who knows. If he gets sacked it's for being inflexible in the face of constant demands to compromise. A compromiser would last longer but would he do better? Isn't that what Ole was?
Don’t know if anyone else responded to this and I didn’t see anyone right away but I thought this was a beautiful post and really enjoyed reading it.
He can say that all he wants, he's fecking wrong
there were hardly any points to cost, we just lost a record number of games in a season. It's not like we had a bunch of kids out there just making individual errors within a quality system. The system itself wasn't good to begin with, and then was exacerbated by squad capabilities. So yes any half fecking decent manager takes a look and realizes that getting battered every game isn't sustainable and looks to adjust the team to that.So many here just seem to be fine with a manager in his 2nd season after spending 400m just playing coinflip suicidal tactics in the name of "progress" while rinsing an entire season. It boggles the mind. It's not like we were getting one off games of this thrilling dominance in the new system to point to where we just needed to stick at working on it. From the first kickoff of the season against wolves we had the exact same issues endlessly. That isn't progress. Trust me if we were just inconsistent but had pockets of form where we blew teams away when it ocassionally "clicked" I'd be all for persisting and dealing with growing pains.
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