Only Man City have a better home record than United this season in the league, have only conceded 8 goals in 16 home matches the next best is Newcastle with 11. continue that home form and improve on the road and United will be become title challengers under Erik next season.
Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24
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Ironically the comment under yours from another poster that was replying to my comment got a like for basically saying: "You're right mate".
Don't really care about the like, but found it that funny
hes so sexy. i love him
anyone that is honestly complaining about EtH and the job he's donig is a fuking muppet
Fecking typical. I missed the game so we won. Next game I'll watch so pretty sure it'll be shit and we'll lose.
We played some great football in the first half today. That was his imprint that we saw post WC too. Second half we got a bit sloppy but this team generally struggled with having a good 70 -80 minute game.
We barely create chances and barely score. We are very poor at keeping possession and controlling the match. Lack composure all over the pitch against decent opponents.
Might be better than Rangnick's time, but still we need to improve by an awful lot. Let's see what happens in the summer.
At least he has taught us how to win penalty shootouts.
You speak far too much sense for this place mate!
Ha oh really? That's a strange one alright!Ironically the comment under yours from another poster that was replying to my comment got a like for basically saying: "You're right mate".
Don't really care about the like, but found it that funny
Ironically the comment under yours from another poster that was replying to my comment got a like for basically saying: "You're right mate".
Don't really care about the like, but found it that funny
Both comments now got likes from different people actually. And anyway, we can't always read everything, we sometimes miss good posts, it happens.
I've been critical of the playing style for the past month or so but today was more like it. We actually pressed as a team and got into good scoring positions regularly (which we failed to take advantage of). We did take our foot off the gas in the second half but that's understandable with our schedule. However, today's performance proves that it is indeed possible to play on the front foot even if the players are tired. Winning the ball back quickly is great investment in terms of saving energy as well.
What's really surprising to me is that our away form should be 4th with the two dropped points at Spurs as well and a couple of weeks ago it was 7th or 8th.
It just goes to show that not only did we have a hectic schedule but played all our tough games in that period with some key injuries and suspensions to boot. Looking at Arsenal who have massively dropped off with a strong of tough games and some bottling playing one game a week just proves there was a bit of a false narrative in the table.
The guy has done a stellar job and gets a solid A for me for the season. If we manage to stop the inevitable Citeh treble, it'll be a season for the ages.
Ah yeh I know that mate, that's understandable
Amen… people complain and complain over and over about results for season after season, then for some reason many are now trying to minimize the job ETH has done by saying our results were a given. He’s been exceptional, and has exceeded expectations with…largely…an Island of misfit toys.
Looks like he tried to return it.
Very possible. It was surprised ETH took him off as one the first double sub against Spurs. Spurs just knows how to play against him correctly.
He may be back next game against Brighton though. Dealing player who is prone to dribble at him like Mitoma is his speciality.
Views of two Ajax fans at last nights match & what we can expect from an ETH team going forward:
To me, yesterday's game shows that we get into good positions a lot, mainly through collective play. Also, when we play out of our own half, there are quite visible patterns to how we want to do it. There is more than one player moving at the same time and good positions taken by several players. At the same time, the players look like they know where their team mates are supposed to be when they receive the ball.
However, the individual quality let us down a little when attacking yesterday. People like Sancho, Sabitzer and others were too slow when a chance to play the ball in behind presented itself. There were also a few cases where individual problems like failing to control the ball properly (Sabitzer, Rashford) or being inaccurate in the passing (Eriksen, disappointingly. Normally you'd back him to complete four or five passes to create great chances, but he wasn't quite on) prevented great opportunities. This could be tiredness for some of the players.
Also, there is enormous improvement when it comes to getting people into the box when we have attacking opportunities. At the same time, we are not as vulnerable to counterattacks as we could be as a result of this. However, we do see in some matches that there is still work to be done with the balance when attacking.
I think the collective improvement on the ball is quite clear to see. However, since we play two games/week, it is impossible to do much coaching when it comes to getting proper rhythm in the play. Because of this, and having players who are a little too keen to go straight for the opposition goal at time, we lose the ball too easily when we should be keeping it. I would expect improvement in this next season. As some have pointed out earlier in this thread, other teams may have shown more improvement in a shorter interval of time. Most of these teams, however, do not play twice every week, so they have a few days to actually train and improve things the manager wants.
However, the individual quality let us down a little when attacking yesterday. People like Sancho, Sabitzer and others were too slow when a chance to play the ball in behind presented itself. There were also a few cases where individual problems like failing to control the ball properly (Sabitzer, Rashford) or being inaccurate in the passing (Eriksen, disappointingly. Normally you'd back him to complete four or five passes to create great chances, but he wasn't quite on) prevented great opportunities. This could be tiredness for some of the players.
Also, there is enormous improvement when it comes to getting people into the box when we have attacking opportunities. At the same time, we are not as vulnerable to counterattacks as we could be as a result of this. However, we do see in some matches that there is still work to be done with the balance when attacking.
I think the collective improvement on the ball is quite clear to see. However, since we play two games/week, it is impossible to do much coaching when it comes to getting proper rhythm in the play. Because of this, and having players who are a little too keen to go straight for the opposition goal at time, we lose the ball too easily when we should be keeping it. I would expect improvement in this next season. As some have pointed out earlier in this thread, other teams may have shown more improvement in a shorter interval of time. Most of these teams, however, do not play twice every week, so they have a few days to actually train and improve things the manager wants.
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We’ll get there. Think there could be legitimate concerns if we hadn’t seen us perform well and dominate in big games.
However we’ve seen that (Chelsea, spurs, Liverpool) and though it’s frustrating we can’t do it for the full 90 at the moment, there’s enough there to know we’ll improve going into next season.
That does somewhat depend on ownership and if he’s backed this summer as the shortcomings come from squad depth and quality.
City for example are able to perform at the high level every week because they’ve built that squad and Pep has had the time to mould the club into his brand on the pitch. That was never gonna happen fully in one year with us, but the building blocks are there.
However we’ve seen that (Chelsea, spurs, Liverpool) and though it’s frustrating we can’t do it for the full 90 at the moment, there’s enough there to know we’ll improve going into next season.
That does somewhat depend on ownership and if he’s backed this summer as the shortcomings come from squad depth and quality.
City for example are able to perform at the high level every week because they’ve built that squad and Pep has had the time to mould the club into his brand on the pitch. That was never gonna happen fully in one year with us, but the building blocks are there.
He certainly seems to favour Dalot more than AWB. Unless he's saving AWB for Thursday v Brighton, where, hopefully, he will keep Mitoma quiet again, if he plays him.
I think it could certainly be a case of keeping Wan-Bissaka fresh for later. However, he did show a bit of bad attitude against Spurs. He let in a lot of crosses, would be too far from his man, less intense in his work...this could be attitude, tiredness or a combination. Likely, a good decision, since I thought both Dalot and Malacia were decent.
Look, while I find your reasoning plausible and all but you can't just take your perspective on things as a general objective rule. If your expectations are exceeded, thats great. But I am sure you don't assume that anybody has to have the same expectations than you, do you? Such things will only increase the heat in discussions and this isn't some sort of dig at you but really a constructive criticism.
Expectation can and should evolve. If you want to define your "expectation" as based off start of the season stuff, thats fine but don't expect everybody else to do the same. What are expectations - it is achievable and reasonably ambitious results based on a few assumptions. Over the course of the season those assumptions fade away making room for actual events, trends and achievements. If expected United to be in Top4 then it was probably based on the assumption that Liverpool and City will fight for the two first places plus maybe Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs and us going for the rest. The season showed that Liverpool and Chelsea took themselves out of the equasion while Newcastle get themselves in and Arsenal overperforming to go for the title. So while pre-season expectations were based on squad comparisons to clubs A, B, C the comparison is now between A, Y and Z.
Again - if your expectations are met, thats great, nobody wants to take it away. And as far as I am aware of nobody disagreed with United having a good to very good season. But anything above that is met with skepticism.
Plausible standpoint but I wouldn't agree in the absoluteness. I mean, ETH did a lot in terms of organisation and built-up play. Who knows what he can do when investing time and effort into chance creation as well. And one of the reasons the squad is gassed right now is that he hasn't been great with rotation over the course of the season. Which might have contributed to the bench players not hitting any form which then made it even more necessary to play the same team over and over again.
Even then it probably won't work. Players need to settle in. Systems and plan have to adjusted and set in for them to maximize their effect. If anything should be learned from past seasons then it is that there are not shortcuts. You have to have a plan for your squad. Just throwing in more and more players just because they "have been good" is nothing more than turning the wheel of furtune hoping that you suddenly end up with a working solution coincidentally.Unless we get the Qatar owners
You made a study yourself?
You take things extremely literally don't you?!
66 posts in this thread, and every single one expressing a negative about ETH. I'm not really sure you are the correct person to be giving out advice out being balanced.
You must be fun at parties.
Literally on the wrong side of everything there.
Expectations don’t evolve if the statement is “At the start of the season” or “After 2 matches”. You simply can’t evolve expectations unless all parameters stay the same.
If we had Varane and Martinez staying fit and Casemiro didn’t get two incredibly harsh Red Cards, and we didn’t play 120 mins plus pens, and Martial wasn’t made of paper, and Lindelof was this trustable in the first half of the season to enable the resting of Varane/Martinez, if Rashford had started the season well and if Eriksen hadn’t got injured in a properly foul incident… on and on and on we could go.
If everything went well, sure, evolve your expectations. Trying to pretend that rotating average players in, to not exhaust good players… straw man nonsense. If we’d played poorer players, we would have suffered poorer results. There’s no argument there. It’s silly.
But, bottom line, every single fan worth listening to, would have taken Top 4, getting rid of Ronaldo, establishing a clear idea of shape, winning the league cup, making an FA Cup Final and going deep in Europe as a wonderfully successful season.
Also worth saying: If we were playing Sheffield United in the Cup Final, everyone would be so positive right now, too. The looming embarassment colours things bad.
Obviously loads of positives around him and hopefully we can wrap up top 4 to prepare for the FA cup final. My main question at the moment is whether it's really the right call for us to be so aggressive in how we attack, almost like a punch for punch strategy where we push players fwd so high for that run behind. I'm just not convinced our attack is ruthless enough, and our defence strong enough to warrant it as we leave ourselves open to a counter if the pass doesn't come off and it feels we have to work quite hard to run back to cover. We were generally in control yesterday but we almost let them back in because we'd try an over the top, it wouldn't come off and then they had us on the counter with barely anyone in the middle which was similar to Spurs, just feels unnecessarily aggressive.
I can’t wait to see what ETH will do with this team next season! Almost every player have improved, I just hope we can get the club sale sorted soon, so he hopefully can get a decent amount of funds to spend in the summer!
We could have beaten Aston Villa easily, we need runners and a midfield who can spot runs. ETH really study teams and knows what the team has to do. If Cavani decided to stay, I am 100% sure Utd would have additional 5-8 points. I hope Utd will fund 3-4 of his top targets.
It happens. I am not going to assume what each and every posters motives in here are. I am going to rely on what is written. In case I get something wrong, I am happy to correct it.
Yeah great job. Isn't it concerning for yourself, that the first thing that seems to come to your mind is digging into somebodies posting history to construct some agenda narrative to attack the poster with? I wrote quite a few things, shouldn't be too difficult to stick with what I wrote and attack the arguments there. But nevermind.
I get by, no worries.
But isn't that what I was saying? I made the distinction that pre-season expectations and expectations over the course expectations - it isn't the same thing. If we only talk about expectations and one group means pre season and the other one means the other it will always lead to disagreements.
You are aware that such things occur to opposition teams as well, right? That is why starting such lists is BS from the very start onwards. When such reasoning or excuses (based on your perspective on a specific topic) are used, it will always cause conflict. (Not that thats something bad in principle, could as well be just a debate - even though knowing this place the chances are good it becomes personal pretty fast)
I don't think its silly at all. If we are 2:0 up against a tricky customer and there are 30minutes to go, it is possible to sub for example Bruno or Rashford. Nobody asked about playing players that are known to be worse than the starters all the time, but some players have been overused in situations where there might have been the chance to sub them. I am also pretty sure I said it MIGHT have been ONE of the reasonS, which should indicate that I see different reasons as well. Primarily the brutal schedule. (I feel the view points of some posters are pretty United-centric, everything is connected with United, it is always United that acts and the whole world reacts. It is a give and take, and if teams that you consider as rivals based on squads and ambition are taking themselves out of the equasion due to bad luck or being unprepared, why wouldn't you adjust expectations. Imagine this season some sort of illness had struck that took out the whole teams of Arsenal, City, Liverpool, Brighton, Spurs and Chelsea - would you be fine getting Top4 behind Newcastle, Aston Villa and Brentford or Fulham? Of course not, because you didn't consider their squads to be equal to ourselves. Or turn it around, imagine a long term injury to Rashford, Martinez and Bruno at the world cup - do you think that many would have sticked to their pre-season expectations of top 4?)
To be honest, pretty difficult to consider you "worth listening to" if you make assumptions what other people should think or not or make statements about their listening-to-worthiness. And only to do you a favor: sure, from pre-season perspective such a season would sound pretty good.
Well I am not sure what to say about that. You might be right, context always matters. But (in case this might be a thought of yours) I wouldn't draw conclusions that there wouldn't be some criticism if we had a chance of adding one additional trophy.
a) We don't know if we are to witness an embarassment, the odds are probably against us but who knows. B) I can tell personally that I'm not going to change my seasons evaluation based on one final. Whether we bring in one or two cups isn't that important to me, we managed to get into two finals, which is great. Great cup runs with a bit of luck in terms of draws but still great runs. Painful end of it in EL but whatever. Makes two great runs (national cups), one good to very good run (EL) and a season that is shaping up to be good to very good as well.
Is that really so far from your evaluation? Good to really good?
Not concerning in the least. On a forum you share your opinion and read other people's - occasionally someone might make a really good point that makes you change your own opinion. But reading posts takes a lot of time - especially ones like yours above that are overly verbose. So a quick scan of posting history can save a lot of time in the long run. I think most people would agree (although, when I say 'most' I haven't conducted a survey, so maybe I'm wrong) that if somebody has posted 66 times in the ETH thread - during a season where we are doing really well - and every single post is negative then that person's opinion probably isn't worth spending much time on as it is clearly heavily skewed by some kind of bias, or insanity.
Least goals conceded at home in the league. I think the recent absence of our first choice defence has clouded things.
I would really advise you using the ‘Ignore’ function for NZT-One. It helps keep this thread interesting and balanced.
yeah, probably for the best!
Oh how things during first season for ETH could have been different if United had bought Rangnick requests on Enzo and Alvarez ( if this is a true story). 2 winters with no purchases I wonder if anything has changed behind the scenes. Has the back room team regarding such things changed since ETH has arrived or are we just on the same travel of direction where we overpay for talent discovered elsewhere.
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Alright then. Lets just leave it at that - don't think there is the need to discuss things with somebody who seemingly doesn't know the meaning of the word "negative". Have a good day.
Yeah I really advise that as well. Must be so hard for some folks on here. Being confronted with different opinions and standpoints. Thank god the forum offers this livesaving feature for such delicate flowers.
Really guys I invite you to check my post history - if my standpoints are -negative- to you, then my time on this board is over. I consider my stance as trying to be levelheaded when surrounded by over the top praise. The world is more than black and white, some of you might need to be reminded of that.
12 wins 39 points!
Pretty dumb how this is portrayed even if I agree OT has become a fortress. Arsenal have the same points and better GD.
I suppose Old Trafford and the Etihad are "fortresses". Old Trafford is Hogwarts and the Etihad is Castle Huntly (feel free to Google that one)
The top bald guy looks like a person who would listen to AIsis, thinks Oasis made a new album and preparing himself for another concert.
It was similar against spurs away and our goals conceded overall would suggest we give up a lot of chances. Some of that might have to do with the defenders but personally I think think the issue starts with the attack and how many people we push forward. Clearly as I said overall plenty of positives, I just think this is something we've not yet quite got the best balance on yet.
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