Erik ten Hag | 2024/25 | Sacked

Erik ten Hag


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I don't think those 3 coming in will change the overarching plan though, which is my point and the same reason I rolled my eyes at people using the injury excuse last season. It's not like I'm watching us constantly make individual errors where better personnel might have done differently. Sure it happens occassionally but not so consistently to be a pattern. I'm watching this gameplan consistently amount to us blowing our load of energy in the first hour of a game, and then when we struggle to score (due to having to play Mount in the first place to have this pressing shape come off properly), we throw caution to the wind and turn every match into a coinflip. It's utterly unsustainable unless you are rolling out prime CR7 and co in attack and know they'll be lethal enough to just win you games, but when instead you're rolling out young attackers still developing in the PL you need to be giving them the best platform possible to succeed, not just saying "hey you'll get 2 chances to bag us a goal in these isolated scenarios, but in return we'll be conceding chances on the other end so don't feck up!".

I've had the same complaint about Ten Hag since the start of last season: it never seems like he knows how exactly he wants his team to function. Half the time we are trying to be this high pressing unit playing technical, intricate stuff while the other half we are looking to play hyper direct and put teams to the sword within 4 or 5 passes end to end. The end result becomes a team that doesn't really excel in either game state and results are predictably hit or miss.

Now that's a much more valid criticism of ETH.
 
Any manager can fluke a cup. Southgate almost won a Euros.

ten Hag handed us our worst PL season in history. To say we didn't look good is an understatement.
You just said it there...Southgate seemingly can't. Not any manager can fluke a cup and ETH's cup record with us is to his credit and speaks against the idea that he's fluked them.
 
Keeping him was one thing.
Extending the contract absolute mania.
 
If you call that control, I just don't know. Maybe in comparison to the shit show that was last season it perhaps looked like control, but it's certainly not my idea if it. Brighton easily getting at our back four time and time again again.
We had more of the ball, do you realise how big a deal that is? Compared to what we’ve seen. We were solid. We were good. Not perfect. Didn’t deserve to lose. Stop the drama.
 
Top 4 after 5 games was the benchmark of my patience given how dire on the whole last year was and I can see he won't make it. So fek it, 2 games in I'm ETH out.
 
I'm not sure we'll even finish higher than 6th again with him in charge. His first season is looking like an anomaly in that regard.
You're probably right, though maybe if we're lucky we'll finish 4th place here and there.

If INEOS was really serious about wanting to win top trophies and their comment was more than just lip service, they should really be looking at other managers throughout this season.
 
Utd are now committed to Ten Hag, bringing in the players he wants means it has to work otherwise a new manager will be ripping up the squad again, which Utd can't afford. Ugarte will cement that, another hyper presser rather than an all rounder.
I can see a central 4 of Martinez, De Ligt, Mainoo, Ugarte/Casemiro only continuing to get dragged all over the place chasing the ball with how they play. But that seems to be kind of chaos that Ten Hag and most here want.
 
Unlucky? Brighton hit the woodwork, and had a chance cleared off the line, and generally looked more threatening and more cohesive after our decent 40 min start. They are also embedding multiple signings and a 30 year old manager.

It’s embarrassing.

What has the age of the manager got to do with anything?
 
He's not entirely responsible for today - even if I'm still not impressed with the way he sets us up or his generally principle of play - so not need to pull the rug from under him for this alone.

Will watch to see how we evolve as a team this season. That first half looked like we were trying to be a bit more calm on the ball and find teammates even if we were static as hell. The second half though, we resorted to last season's ping pong ball, which although rewarding (in terms of creating chances), is unsustainable, and with the players we have is straight up suicidal.

If he does end up getting fired during the season I will never forgive Ineos for having us waste and entire summer and more on him when better, more adept managers were available.
 
I've seen enough from our players to be confident in saying we have a really good team and squad this season once the Ugarte signing goes through. There's no excuses for Ten Hag not performing well. We need good football and results. Simple as. There's no excuses for him this season and it's time to play like a quality team.
 
Utd are now committed to Ten Hag, bringing in the players he wants means it has to work otherwise a new manager will be ripping up the squad again, which Utd can't afford. Ugarte will cement that, another hyper presser rather than an all rounder.

I somehow doubt SJR will tolerate another season of 8th place mediocrity with the manager he came within a whisker of sacking just two months ago. A likelier scenario is ETH is let go early following a string of poor results and Ruud takes over for the rest of the year. That way, the Dutch contingent of ETH players don’t suddenly become surplus to requirements. Then, at end of season they can look at permanent solutions. Sad that we’re already discussing the manager’s job just two games in, but then again the decision to keep ETH wasn’t without risk.
 
Let me tell how he plays:

0-15 mins - players are told to control possession with meaningless passing from CB to GK to CB to FB. It is like he is trying to see our opponent setup.
16-30 mins - we start looking for opening or mistakes by opponents.
30-45 mins - players are tired from pressing, body language will show and players starts shaking their heads.
We have control 1st half with a few chances but we don't score. In some games, the opponent will score thru' a mistake or quick counter.
2nd half
We becomes more aggressive and desperate with clocking ticking down. Games becomes more and more open with chances both sides. We will win by an odd goal or we will lose by more goals if we are behind. That's ETH football. Brighton also caught us sleeping at the start of the 2nd half, that's a clever coach. I don't understand why Ineos renew his contract. He isn't the manager who can bring us to the next level. I want a manager to wants the team to attack from the get go. A manager to tells the wingers to run at defenders. I see a lot of back passing in this game again. I honestly think we will finish 6-8 again this season.
 
Just need another 200m window, and we'd eventually reach that dreamland top 4.
 
I don't think those 3 coming in will change the overarching plan though, which is my point and the same reason I rolled my eyes at people using the injury excuse last season. It's not like I'm watching us constantly make individual errors where better personnel might have done differently. Sure it happens occassionally but not so consistently to be a pattern. I'm watching this gameplan consistently amount to us blowing our load of energy in the first hour of a game, and then when we struggle to score (due to having to play Mount in the first place to have this pressing shape come off properly), we throw caution to the wind and turn every match into a coinflip. It's utterly unsustainable unless you are rolling out prime CR7 and co in attack and know they'll be lethal enough to just win you games, but when instead you're rolling out young attackers still developing in the PL you need to be giving them the best platform possible to succeed, not just saying "hey you'll get 2 chances to bag us a goal in these isolated scenarios, but in return we'll be conceding chances on the other end so don't feck up!".

I've had the same complaint about Ten Hag since the start of last season: it never seems like he knows how exactly he wants his team to function. Half the time we are trying to be this high pressing unit playing technical, intricate stuff while the other half we are looking to play hyper direct and put teams to the sword within 4 or 5 passes end to end. The end result becomes a team that doesn't really excel in either game state and results are predictably hit or miss.
Yes, can see where you're coming from, particularly around the 'death or Glory' approach as opposed to trying to control games. I think the thing I find tough is that we do show passages of cohesive, intricate play where it looks like if we get the balance right we can build something special. Like I said, it is looking increasingly unlikely that ETH is the guy to bring it all together but I will be interested to see how we look when the new bodies slot in properly.
 
Was Ten Hag at fault for today's result? I think he was. HOWEVER, after reading so many comments the freak out is unbelievable. I see now why the likes of TalkSport are popular. Last week everyone said Ten Hag did a great job and today he's been called a clown, muppet and out of his dept. A lot on here need to chill. I know emotions are running high but we have improved. We are so far behind the top teams in the league and so many are acting as if we are back at that level, we're not. Expectations are too high for the point we are at.

Our pressing is better. It's far from perfect but nobody can say it hasn't improved since last season. We created chances and we had two goals unfortunately but fairly disallowed. My point being we put the ball in Brighton's net 3 times.

Casemiro is odd. He makes a great tackle then the next one he's a mile away. He makes an unbelievable pass then makes a terrible one.

Ten Hag's biggest mistake today was probably taking Bruno off. We stopped playing football when Bruno came off. Rashford just isn't right, he needs to find his edge back, he needs his mojo back. I don't think he should start the next game. Garnacho needs to start the next game - he was playing in Copa America and arrived back later than the others for pre season but we can't afford to rest him, unfortunately. Felt bad for Zirkzee, he just couldn't stop sliding when he was running in through Brighton's defence and cost us the goal and, he wasn't amazing but he didn't do anything wrong I don't think.

And lastly, a reminder its the second game of the season. The club invested heavily in Ten Hag and backed new coaching staff behind him. Ten Hag is not going anywhere anytime soon. The powers that be won't freak out over one game but, they won't want to be seeing Ten Hag make mistakes like today too often.

Buckle up and keep the faith, we will bounce back. When? I'm not sure. But what I do now, when we do.... it's going to be sweet :cool:
 
If you think we looked good against Fulham then I'm not sure you can remember us when we were actually good.

We went life and death with them for large parts of the match and at one point, it looked like they were the more likely winner.
We used to crush teams like them. They're absolutely shit.
This is absolutely not true. We had the better chances and the stats suggested the same.

Today was a much trickier tie and I don't even think Brighton deserved the win on balance of how the game went. We made a big mistake positionally at the end for the goal, but to paint a narrative that it's all the same as last season is quite poor. It's nothing like that.

I remember a lot about when we were good by the way, we weren't average against Fulham. We weren't red hot either but I'd say the performance was solid enough.
 
The result was a coinflip basically at the end. Which is the entire issue, as it's how I feel every fecking Ten Hag game goes. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.

We lost 14 games last season in the league. Seems like more than just a coin flip. We're already two games in and experienced our first loss in very similar fashion.
 
Our disallowed goal is incredibly unlucky which completely then affects the rest of the game. Also, at the end is on the players, football is about in game intelligence and not enough of those players smelled danger. The manager can’t do anything about that.

We cleared a ball of the line and had a ball headed onto the bar. We also looked generally clueless going forward and shaky at the back. We had Casemiro as pretty much our only midfielder for the second half again and played against a team with a new 32 year old manager fielding Milner and Danny Welbeck. Still lost after spending over 100 millions on a manager hugely backed financially in the last seasons as well.
 
#weweresolid
#betterteam
xG is absolutely awful for determining who was the better team or who 'deserved' to win any given game.

That Garnacho goal for example is zero xG because it'd technically just be an offside 'pass' to Zirkzee.
 
Pretty sure the offside goal doesn't get added to that
Right, plus the two we gave them were basically +1 each. It doesn't really tell the story, xG, and especially not today.
 
The strength of Brighton's team is subjective, but even by your own admission losing to a team ranging anywhere between 10th-8th is a poor poor result.

On the backend of last season it is certainly a disaster because the worst thing for the players is becoming accustomed to defeat, there are a few in the squad that collapse under pressure and we're already two games in and United will be taking the rounds for the headlines this weekend.

The result today was a disgrace.
A disgrace?! Losing to a last minute goal away to Brighton? That's a bit melodramatic, no?
 
Unlucky? Brighton hit the woodwork, and had a chance cleared off the line, and generally looked more threatening and more cohesive after our decent 40 min start. They are also embedding multiple signings and a 30 year old manager.

It’s embarrassing.
They played a single new signing.
 
This wasn't a poor Brighton team, though. They will end up top eight or thereabouts. Not a good result but a loss away at Brighton to a last minute goal is hardly a disaster.

At some point we gotta start wanting more than this, right?
 
Brighton don't really have a first choice striker, do they? In mf they're missing march but who's the other miss? And estup was in and out of the team last season whether available or not. So no, their absentees aren't as significant as ours. De ligt has had mins in both matches but he's very, very much just being brought up to speed. Maz is our second choice right back; I don't think he starts when everyone is fit.

I admire your ability twist the reality to be in favour of Erik. Ferguson's injuries have prevented him from being their preferred 9. Estupinan missed most of last season solely due to injuries (just like Shaw). He was dead-cert to start at LB otherwise. And unlike us, we managed to secure a back-up already. A 40-year old and and a player they have been looking to sell won the midfield battle today.
 
As for being unlucky, one could make the case that Brighton were unlucky not to be up 3-0 after Welbeck hit the bar and they had a sure goal cleared off the line. Also, they had more shots on goal and shots on target than us, so its hard to make the case we were unlucky when they were just as if not more interested in scoring than we were.

One couldn't seriously make that argument - Welbeck's header hitting the bar was a very low percentage effort, and it's not a sure goal if it's crawling along slowly enough for Dalot to get back and clear it 2 yards off the goal line.

We were legitimately unlucky with an actually certain goal being ruled out for offside because it hit Zirkzee before crossing the line.

We had numerous great attacking opportunities today that were wasted due to poor passes or decision making, and the goals we conceded were due to awful defending. The latter is something we need to work on, no doubt, but we never deserved to lose this match and the histrionics in this thread are just silly.
 
People are so unable to objectively ingest football. We played well and controlled large parts of the game, we are a very unlucky team. That’s what happened yet again today.

I'd be interested to see a heatmap to see how the possession signified ball progression because United kept the ball mostly by recycling passes among the defense, much of the same argument could be made for LVG.

Alternatively the stats signify 53% / 47% so its still a match that was shared predominantly on an even basis. I would have expected better given the midfield of Brighton consisted of James Milner and Billy Gilmour.

I understand United have improved from last season but as the stats show we are talking increments and not substantive strides which isn't good enough for both the club's stature and a manager approaching 36 months in charge backed to the hill of 600+ million.
 
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