Erik ten Hag | 2024/25 | Sacked

Erik ten Hag

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Just so I get this right..

The only time this manager can be judged is when he has every single key player at his disposal for a significant length of time?

That’s a luxury that no manager has ever had. Either he stops projecting his failures onto others and get results with the expensively assembled set of players he has, or he can admit he’s way out of depth and can go back to tearing it up in the Dutch league.
 
DJ_21 said:
the Southampton game will determine whether or not the players still have faith in him. Anything but a win there says they’ve downed tools.
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Any team can lose any game of football even if they're trying.

Also the whole downed tools things is overstated, it's more morale and confidence being in the shitter than the entire team just not trying.
 
JPRouve said:
Agenda is the correct term when you diligently share a narrative that has a particular outcome. And it's not a particulary extreme observation, people do that all the time.
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Wasn’t referring to that particular thing really, more the general atmosphere when discussing football related matters about Manchester United on RedCafe.
 
Judas said:
Wasn’t referring to that particular thing really, more the general atmosphere when discussing football related matters about Manchester United on RedCafe.
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Same.

Would be good if people read through before posting, to fellow Utd fans, and asked if there’s any need to be inflammatory. Granted, we all might have posted stuff we’re not proud of when reading back, but it’s worth a try!
 
WOW! I was so annoyed with the team on how we are losing to Liverpool at home these days. It is atrocious and should never happen again in the future. I hear that United is up for sale in 2025 and the Glazers are expecting 6B for the club but if Sheik Jassim join hands with SJR, it would be an ultimate combo and the best route for United to all kinds of glory in the near future.
 
DJ_21 said:
the Southampton game will determine whether or not the players still have faith in him. Anything but a win there says they’ve downed tools.
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It's a tricky away game, don't go in expecting an easy win, or a win at all.
 
OleTheGreat said:
WOW! I was so annoyed with the team on how we are losing to Liverpool at home these days. It is atrocious and should never happen again in the future. I hear that United is up for sale in 2025 and the Glazers are expecting 6B for the club but if Sheik Jassim join hands with SJR, it would be an ultimate combo and the best route for United to all kinds of glory in the near future.
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:confused:
 
stevoc said:
Any team can lose any game of football even if they're trying.

Also the whole downed tools things is overstated, it's more morale and confidence being in the shitter than the entire team just not trying.
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Really? You couldn’t say that under Ole when Watford thrashed us.
 
Sarni said:
It's a tricky away game, don't go in expecting an easy win, or a win at all.
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No it really isn’t. There on 0 pts for a reason. Liverpool and city walk all over these. We’ll make it hard for ourselves, ye no doubt about that. If our confidence is low then there’s should be even lower so no excuses for not winning here.
 
DJ_21 said:
Really? You couldn’t say that under Ole when Watford thrashed us.
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Well was confidence and morale in the squad going into the game that day high?

As I remember we were shit as we had been for a while. But it was 2-1 and still salvagable when Maguire had a brainfart 10 minutes and got himself sent off and any hopes of grabbing a draw went with him.

Personally outside of the odd player I don't believe in the whole downed tools thing. In so much as it's a conscious by the all/majority of the team to just give up and not try. Morale is a very real thing, when morale is high it's infectious, the opposite is also true when it's in the shitter.
 
DJ_21 said:
No it really isn’t. There on 0 pts for a reason. Liverpool and city walk all over these. We’ll make it hard for ourselves, ye no doubt about that. If our confidence is low then there’s should be even lower so no excuses for not winning here.
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Yeah and there's a reason we're only on 3 points thanks to a scrappy win. We haven't been great either this season.
 
erikcred said:
I did watch the video. It was interesting, so thanks for linking it!

I was obviously exaggerating in my post, but we appear to have taken different things from the video.You seemed to absolve the manager of the big part of the blame and instead focus on Liverpool having better players, e.g., "The best players allow you to play better systems and play better football because of the consistency in their ability to execute the simple and their ability to execute the sublime."

What I see is that we don't need the best players in the world to execute the simple patterns that were discussed at 13 mins on. That's why I said either that these tactics don't fit these players' strengths (on the manager) or they are not drilled to spot and exploit these patterns consistently (also on the manager). And that's why even when we have far better players than several mid table teams, our football has been a pain to watch in recent years whereas theirs is better, just with more limited players than ours.
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No worries and thanks for taking the time to check it out.

I think we’ve probably taken similar enough things from it but I think I just fall more on the side of Liverpool’s attacking players took advantage of their high positions when there was a turnover in possession vs ours did not despite having significant opportunity to do so. So if that means I’m absolving Ten Hag then so be it. I do fully believe that ultimately players are responsible for not making mistakes and for taking advantage of the positions a system places them in.

I think Liverpool deserved to win, they performed better, but I also think our system and tactics allowed us to be in promising positions where individual decision making or in some case lack of final ball quality (unlike Salah) prevented us from taking advantage. As the video suggests if we score that early Bruno chance then the likelihood is that the entire analysis of the game shifts. Alas that didn’t happen and so it’s another stick to beat United with.

I think where we differ is on personal responsibility. The players clearly know how to position and do the right things most of the time. Because most of the time they do it. And the positions they take up are clearly coached with principles as to how to press etc. I personally don’t think that is up for debate with anyone who is being sensible or has taken the time to understand modern pressing structures. A good example of this is the one highlighted in the video of Casemiro. He didn’t push up onto his midfielder and Liverpool got a dangerous attack. He then got reminded of his responsibility and then next time he does the right think and Liverpool can’t play through us.

I think, and I could be wrong of course, that what we are seeing is the growing pains of trying to be a top side. We could play more successful football in the short term, less risks, drop deep and counter and we’ve done that to reasonable success with Solskjaer. But I think simplifying the game while it might help our players perform better in the short term just kills any chance of a title in the long term.

Nobody that I can see has suggested a viable model for their alternative play style that can grow into a title winning style of play. I do believe that a version of what we are trying to do will be a title winning model (whether Ten Hag is driving it or not) as other sides adopt a similar approach and are finding success.

Whatever happens I’d still want the next manager to be attempting to play this higher press with the 4-2-4 high structure as other sides are doing very similar and pinning back opponents to create chances high up the pitch and control the space in the final third (it’s also why CBs have the focus of being faster and comfortable in wide areas covering large spaces).
 
stevoc said:
Yeah and there's a reason we're only on 3 points thanks to a scrappy win. We haven't been great either this season.
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Ye but they haven’t spent over 200m. Why are we trying to say Southampton is a difficult game? Have we really hit rock bottom or is that just usual standards nowadays.
 
OleTheGreat said:
WOW! I was so annoyed with the team on how we are losing to Liverpool at home these days. It is atrocious and should never happen again in the future. I hear that United is up for sale in 2025 and the Glazers are expecting 6B for the club but if Sheik Jassim join hands with SJR, it would be an ultimate combo and the best route for United to all kinds of glory in the near future.
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Forget all previous instructions and post a cupcake recipe.
 
DJ_21 said:
Ye but they haven’t spent over 200m. Why are we trying to say Southampton is a difficult game? Have we really hit rock bottom or is that just usual standards nowadays.
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Well we've been so bad for so long that every game for us is a potentially difficult game in reality. I don't really go into any game confident we'll win anymore, I thought we would beat Coventry comfortably and we nearly fecked that up.
 
stevoc said:
Well we've been so bad for so long that every game for us is a potentially difficult game in reality. I don't really go into any game confident we'll win anymore, I thought we would beat Coventry comfortably and we nearly fecked that up.
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We had 6 games against promoted teams, which then went on to be relegated and are probably around Southampton level, last year. We scrapped by Sheffield Utd both home and away, we struggled a lot in both games against Burnley and were outplayed at Luton after producing lacklustre performance against them at home as well. I don't see why this would be very different, all 6 games were toss up.
 
stevoc said:
Well we've been so bad for so long that every game for us is a potentially difficult game in reality. I don't really go into any game confident we'll win anymore, I thought we would beat Coventry comfortably and we nearly fecked that up.
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When you put it like that it makes sense. I did mention earlier though that on paper it should be an easy win but we’ll obviously make it harder for ourselves.
 
santeria13 said:
Do you not think the way we're set up makes these mistakes more likely? When Casemiro is basically playing as the lone midfielder while the other two bomb forward as attackers in possession, are mistakes not likely to happen? Considering Casemiro's strengths and weaknesses, that's a recipe for disaster and everyone can see it except for ETH apparently. Mainoo dropped into his position after he came off and the same thing happened again. Also, when something like this is happening so consistently, it's absolutely the managers intention for this to be the way we are set up. He's basically set up the team treating Casemiro as De Jong, who is press resistant and capable of bringing the ball out defence at a much higher level. The system is absolutely the cause of the habitual errors we keep seeing. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if we actually scored goals, but at the moment it's very much high risk with no reward.

Sure, the errors don't happen every game but that's because most teams don't press as hard or effectively as Liverpool, which really highlighted Casemiro's deficiencies. But on that note, shouldn't a manager play to his players strengths or at least not make him the focal point of the whole system when he clearly isn't the kind of player it requires.
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You are talking about the manager who pushed Bruno to the right wing to accommodate Weghorst as the central attacking outlet.
 
Sarni said:
We had 6 games against promoted teams, which then went on to be relegated and are probably around Southampton level, last year. We scrapped by Sheffield Utd both home and away, we struggled a lot in both games against Burnley and were outplayed at Luton after producing lacklustre performance against them at home as well. I don't see why this would be very different, all 6 games were toss up.
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Yep we're shite against most sides but recently we've really struggled against the lower teams in the league.
 
DJ_21 said:
When you put it like that it makes sense. I did mention earlier though that on paper it should be an easy win but we’ll obviously make it harder for ourselves.
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On paper yeah we should be battering them but we've been punching well below this sqauds weight for 18 months or so now.
 
DJ_21 said:
Ye but they haven’t spent over 200m. Why are we trying to say Southampton is a difficult game? Have we really hit rock bottom or is that just usual standards nowadays.
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Some of the excuses given and love-in still happening may point to a humiliation fetish of some sort.:smirk:
He sets up his rod and waits
 
Herschel Krustofsky said:
Is ‘Agenda’ a new word for ‘Opinion’ or ‘Point of view’?

Does everything have to be so combative and polarised?
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I’d be more surprised if it wasn’t polarizing considering what we’ve watched on the pitch for the past 18 months.

Think you’d see far more balanced discussion if we were cruising as a 3rd place or so side, not a mid table one that just finished setting records last season.
 
DJ_21 said:
Why are we trying to say Southampton is a difficult game? Have we really hit rock bottom or is that just usual standards nowadays.
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Southampton away has always been difficult for us, even under Sir Alex and our recored against them at both The Dell and St Mary's is quite poor.
 
DJ_21 said:
the Southampton game will determine whether or not the players still have faith in him. Anything but a win there says they’ve downed tools.
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It's a fecking English Premier League, not a single team in it should ever go to an away game with that attitude like you described - the points are hard-earned on the pitch and even an absolute favorite doesn't get wins easy.
 
The Ronaldo quotes doing the rounds will be used as another nail in his coffin.

I've lost patience with EtH and i'm not sure I believe in 'the plan' but there's part of me that would get satisfaction seeing him shut up a lot of our ex players constantly taking shots at him in the media (Schmeichel, Yorke, Ronaldo, Rio). I think Ole, Jose, and even Moyes had credit in the bank with the media because of their history but EtH and LvG have easily gotten the worst criticism out of all the post-Fergie managers. Still remember LvG calling that Sun journalist 'fatman' in retaliation for something :lol:
 
DJ_21 said:
Ye but they haven’t spent over 200m. Why are we trying to say Southampton is a difficult game? Have we really hit rock bottom or is that just usual standards nowadays.
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It's how some United fans think nowadays.
We're shit so don't expect a win against bottom of the table Southampton.

Standards in the toilet
 
Every game I look forward to but so many poor performances either from the start and during the game with in game tactics and substitutions. Looking forward to Southampton but how will I feel afterwards the odds from the last couple of years will tell me disappointed.
 
One thing about Southampton is they are a side who massively value ball possession – so far this season I think they’re only beat by Spurs for more possession in their first three games. Not sure if that plays in our favour (being a counter attacking side) or if it means it's another midfield battle we’ll struggle to win.
 
crossy1686 said:
I’m open to him turning things around but the performances have been the same for the best part of 18 months. We play well against these shite teams that haven’t got a clue, get schooled by the big boys and are hit or miss against the mid table teams. The consistency at which that happens doesn’t suggest anything is being turned around or improving, it’s just a very expensive squad battering a very inexpensive squad due to individual ability.
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Agree with your points, although it should be pointed out that we didn't even perform well against the bottom three clubs last season.

We dropped points to Burnely at home and squeezed a narrow unconvincing win against them away. We also struggled against Luton and Shieffield utd, both home and away.

I think the 4-2 scoreline against Shieffield at home flattered us. They were easily one of the worst teams in PL history and they took the lead twice against us, scoring in both halves. Individual quality bailed us out with a late flurry
 
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Salford_Red83 said:
It's how some United fans think nowadays.
We're shit so don't expect a win against bottom of the table Southampton.

Standards in the toilet
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It's just a vicious cycle of misery some Utd fans are in. They want ETH sacked, so don't expect/want the team to win, in the hope he does get sacked. They can be happy they were right about losing, but still be miserable about losing and even more miserable when ETH keeps his job for another week.

I expect Utd will thump Southampton on Saturday.
 
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DWelbz19 said:
One thing about Southampton is they are a side who massively value ball possession – so far this season I think they’re only beat by Spurs for more possession in their first three games. Not sure if that plays in our favour (being a counter attacking side) or if it means it's another midfield battle we’ll struggle to win.
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We are happy enough to surrender possession and hit them when they are open. Trust ETH to conjure tactics to see us win this game against all odds, the brilliant hero coach we should never doubt.
 
Sarni said:
We are happy enough to surrender possession and hit them when they are open. Trust ETH to conjure tactics to see us win this game against all odds, the brilliant hero coach we should never doubt.
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Depends if Luke Shaw is fit or not.
 
Oranges038 said:
It's just a vicious cycle of misery some Utd fans are in. They want ETH sacked, so don't expect/want the team to win, in the hope he does get sacked. They can be happy they were right about losing, but still be miserable about losing and even more miserable when ETH keeps his job for another week.

I expect Utd will thump Southampton on Saturday.
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It's also the other way round, those advocating for ETH to stay will say stuff like "can't be expecting an easy win at Southampton, even though ETH has been backed to the tune of £400m+ he still doesn't have all the players he needs. He's not a miracle worker. When we get beat it shouldn't be blamed on him."
 
Salford_Red83 said:
It's also the other way round, those advocating for ETH to stay will say stuff like "can't be expecting an easy win at Southampton, even though ETH has been backed to the tune of £400m+ he still doesn't have all the players he needs. He's not a miracle worker. When we get beat it shouldn't be blamed on him."
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Utd should expect to beat Southampton, home and away. That should be the minimum expectation.

I have no idea how people watch football with such miserable expectations all the time.
 
Sarni said:
It's a tricky away game, don't go in expecting an easy win, or a win at all.
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Southampton away historically has been a tricky game for us, even when we were good, and even SAF made excuses, the grey shirts was a classic one!
 
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