Erik ten Hag | 2024/25 | Votes can now be changed

Erik ten Hag

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3KDré said:
Those two games, Brighton and Brentford were his ideology/system. We got battered so he changed it.

Then we got more players for his system (last year) and the same issues we had those first two games extrapolated over a whole year. We got outplayed probably in a good 80% of games last year, and I don't think I'm exaggerating.

This basically means, the closer we get to what he wants from us - the worse we look. The improvement in form this year is mainly due to players being more available. We have more control in games Eriksen, we pressed well when Mount played. It wasn't the system.
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That's a curious point & you may well be right, he definitely changed the system to have 2 pivots following these results relying more on the counter attacking football we were used to under Ole. However crucially, I think we all as fans looked to the players from Ole's era as the problem given it was only 2 games in for ETH. It would be really interesting if someone had the time or interest to do a recap on those 2 games, to see if the warning signs really were present that early on in his tenure.

Interestingly though, he showed a desire to change system to suit in that first season after those 2 results and we scrapped to 3rd albeit with an overperformance by all the usual metrics. Why on earth he's now dying on his current tactical hill whilst leaving the defense routinely exposed after proving he's able to come up with a solution is beyond all comprehension.
 
Sticking with ETH for the rest of the season and ditching him in the summer will pretty much ruin the preparation for the next campaign.

We need a clear identity in our play, not this...whatever it is.
Now's the time to move him on.
This season alone can be saved.
 
Werd. said:
I was browsing various online platforms during the game, and we still had some fans saying BS like 'let him cook, he is building something' when we went 2 up. Only then, for them to start saying 'nah, get rid of him when we went behind.

Some people are suckers and will never learn.
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"Building something"? Christ on a bike. How can anyone be even remotely positive about what they are watching.
 
I am serious when I say any other manager would immediately get us playing 10x better than we have been, Big Sam, Neil Warnock... wheel Rednap out of retirement, any manager who understands the basics of football looks at the way we play and can see how horrific the coaching, formation and tactics are, and we are easy to beat because our weaknesses are easy to exploit.
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Dinosaur football doesn't exist anymore In top football for a reason, modern tactics destroy it.

That's not our problem.
 
Robbie Boy said:
I don't think that can really be a thing anymore.
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He was better in season 1 than Ole ever was, so for me the latter season is redundant. Both not nearly good enough but one brought 2 trophies home. That's all I want to say, don't want to get drawn out into a debate over it.
 
Robbie Boy said:
"Building something"? Christ on a bike. How can anyone be even remotely positive about what they are watching.
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I play football a few times a week with a mixture of lads. Some are in their early/mid twenties and some in their 30's (including me). You'd have the odd chat about football in general. Some of them are United fans. And it's amazing how much support he had from younger United fans. I suppose most of them were 11-14 when we last won a league title. They can probably barely remember the 2006-2009 period of success. A League Cup probably felt like a CL to them after a 6 year barren spell.
 
Rodgerzzz said:
That's a curious point & you may well be right, he definitely changed the system to have 2 pivots following these results relying more on the counter attacking football we were used to under Ole. However crucially, I think we all as fans looked to the players from Ole's era as the problem given it was only 2 games in for ETH. It would be really interesting if someone had the time or interest to do a recap on those 2 games, to see if the warning signs really were present that early on in his tenure.

Interestingly though, he showed a desire to change system to suit in that first season after those 2 results and we scrapped to 3rd albeit with an overperformance by all the usual metrics. Why on earth he's now dying on his current tactical hill whilst leaving the defense routinely exposed after proving he's able to come up with a solution is beyond all comprehension.
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It's an interesting point. Well to be fair, Guardiola changed his 4-3-3 tiki taka also to make it work in Premier League & Klopp his heavy metal pressing etc.. it's normal to adapt, but our adaption is so confusing not many analyst could see the Original Ajax ETH tactics in our current setup anymore.
 
Fallon d'Floor said:
I don't like Jamie Jackson at all. I'm not a big fan of Mitten either. I know he's well liked by some, but he played a big part in getting fans behind the manager last season.

He was even chuffed with his Twitter poll. :lol:
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Yeah, that was really pathetic. Bigging up a silly Twitter poll posted five minutes after an FA Cup win, showing it to ETH, talking about it again and again. I mean, come on...
 
There would be more smoke about potential replacements by now. He's going nowhere soon.
 
hobbers said:
To be honest the only way for Ashworth and Berrada to inspire any confidence is for us to beat Villa and then for them to still sack Hag 2 days later.

That would be a perfect scenario and go a long way to showing they're not clowns like Ineos are.
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I refuse to believe that Ashworth and Berrada have looked over the last 18 months of data and have decided "you got two games to show us you're worth it". They aren't stupid people, I think ETH is clearly gone.

If he does survive, then I have no hope for this club. If they can't make a decision on him after all this then we truly are doomed.
 
golden_blunder said:
There’s always a slight flaw in the plan
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Yep but you can't help but admire the manager defence hustle. Not only the current manager but retrospectively defending previous managers with the "these players" mantra.

Imagine if we'd still had most of the 2013 squad circa 2021? I wonder where we'd have ended up? :confused:
 
Rista said:
We 100% deserve all this when even a random schmuck from the internet could have told you how it's going to pan out. Our "best in class" people had a long review and ended up not only keeping him but actually activating his extension as well making it much harder to sack him. The most incompetent managerial decision we've ever made. Great start for Ineos.

Ten Hag is the most unlikeable manager we've had by far. Imagine gloating about how "I will always win" while putting these kind of performances week in week out, embarrassing himself and the club in the two actual important competitions. He goes on about "his" cups like he won the CL and like one of them wasn't a mickey mouse competition. Or like in the other cup he wasn't incredibly lucky to not lose to fecking Coventry. Absolutely sick of him using these cup wins to prop himself up. So small time and for some reason fans bought into it. This "winner" of a manager has won only 1 game out of the last 10 in Europe, and some people still have the nerve to say he's a good cup manager. I guess he needs easy home draws for his system to work.

One thing that does my head in is people still trying to make a claim that "there were no good options out there" so it was reasonable to keep him. Liverpool and Chelsea needed a manager and easily got one. It's only us who apparently either need this perfect manager who checks all the boxes or we rather just persist with a proven failure instead. We still somehow have people saying we've sacked too many managers. Only our fanbase can't comprehend that statistically most managers will fail. It's part of the game, you replace him and move on. But no, not with us. A flukey win vs Villa will give him at least another month. You'd think the best in class people wouln't base their decisions on a one off game but they already did exactly that.
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I find him extremely unlikable as well but to be fair I've found him this way since the beginning. I remember how after Brentford disaster he asked his players to run 14km in heat to 'punish' them for the lack of effort, which most on here found so incredibly impressive but to me it was a ruse of a glorified PE teacher and reminded me of certain Polish old-school coaches who had these methods, just always found them a bit pathetic.

All big clubs fail with their appointments, they are usually very quick to rectify that though. Bayern failed with Kovac and fired him despite winning the league because they saw they were not going anywhere, Barcelona failed with multiple coaches since Pep and fired them all in a timely manner, Madrid fired Lopetegui within weeks of him taking the job and had previously been quick to dismiss the likes of Ramos, Pellegrini when they saw them fail. All clubs do that, it's not just Chelsea, every club appoints managers who they think are going to be good but then see them struggle and have to part ways with them. Every single club would have fired ten Hag after last year's CL debacle, there's no way a top club is keeping a coach that failed to get out of a CL group with Copenhagen (who lost to Jagiellonia in Conference League yesterday, yet outplayed us) and Galatasaray, and that's without even considering our league performance which was utterly abysmal and unseemly of a highly esteemed football organization. No club would gloss over 38 league games and a disaster of a CL campaign because of 2 good cup games.
 
pratyush_utd said:
Although it was painstakingly boring football under LVG, but at least LVG had much worse squad than ETH.

We sacked after LVG won 7 in his last 10 and drawing some 2 games in that. Playstyle was given as a reason for that.

Now we dont even play any style and somehow ETH has survived relegation form for months
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That's the worrying thing about INEOS so far. They're refusing to cash it a day for whatever reason and it almost feels like they genuinely believed that Ten Hag just needed better people above him for him to become better at his job.

I get the arguments about constantly sacking managers, but these people that say this are the and ones that wanted a modern structure. And a modern structure is great because it makes a manager/ coach more dispensable. So you can't have it both ways like some fans wanted - all the perks of this structure for ETH, but none of the negatives.

All in all though it's time for this new leadership panel to put their money where their mouth is and come up with a good solution that doesn't involve eating yet another year.
 
hobbers said:
And...?

By football people I dont just mean the decision makers like Woodward, Murtough, Arnold. Also the United media, the ex player pundits and the fans. I dont think any other big clubs have several make-or-break moments over months, or years in ETH's case, for their failed managers. This is now our third manager in a row where we waste a season on a failed manager, stumbling around in a stupor for half of it before finally sacking them. It's a United exclusive thing because we have a uniquely deluded reverence for the manager position.

Ineos sport have already proven to be infected with this delusion. If Ashworth and Berrada dont sack ETH after the Villa game they will have proven to be infected with it too.
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What if they sack him after Brentford they are still infected? What if they have already decided to sack him and are planning/lining up life after are they still infected?

You can’t bring the past into the judgement of the new. We’ll see if they are infected or not and it won’t be based off some arbitrary timeline set by the media
 
LawCharltonBest said:
Laurie Whitwell on the Talk of the Devils podcast said he doesn’t think this is the “end game” for Ten Hag and the hierarchy insist his job is not under pressure

Seems implausible that he could survive a Villa defeat but there we go
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This is more plausible and aligns with his demeanor. I think he knows he's safe for the next 1.5 - 2 years regardless of results.
 
I actually looked back at some highlights from his Ajax teams during 17/18 &18/19 seasons.
His football is indeed similar in many forms to what he tries to do at United. Some things I noticed and compared to what we see now:
- Ajax teams scored a lot of goals through front pressing as a result of errors from opposition. We try it here too, but the success rate is way lower which may be an indication of simply lower quality of dutch leage compared to PL.
- One of their favorite ways to penetrate opposition box was through half crosses from the wings especially from the left to the far post. We dont do it in here as much for some reason and again this may be an indication of different setup PL teams have compared to dutch league
-He had many gaps on the midfield making his team prone to runs from the opposition, which is one of his trademarks at United also. Again we concede a lot of goals just because PL teams have way more quality on their teams.

As a conclusion, if he is basing his setup to his Ajax teams, which they are indications that we do, we are doomed as there is just a big gap of quality in opposition his teams faced.
 
RedSky said:
I refuse to believe that Ashworth and Berrada have looked over the last 18 months of data and have decided "you got two games to show us you're worth it". They aren't stupid people, I think ETH is clearly gone.

If he does survive, then I have no hope for this club. If they can't make a decision on him after all this then we truly are doomed.
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I think they more likely looked at the previous 18 months and persuaded by various factors, cup win, Tuchel and co interviews not going well etc... decided to give ETH the start of the season to show improvement, so it will have been 10 games in all competitions this season, the decision to keep or sack has already been made barring some amazing turn around against Villa, it is about the optics of it, sacking Ten Hag after the Liverpool match after backing him in the summer would have been too soon, once the backed him they had to give him enough time and rope to make the decision for them, that time is Villa, may well even have been decided that this was a decision point when they kept him
 
Mr Pigeon said:
I'm guessing he needs until the end of a third season to finally fix something. I'm standing in front of a wall with my brushes and a tin of paint. Hours go by and my missus finds me sitting on my arse doing feck all, none of the walls painted. I tell her I'll get it done before next week, yet I do nothing. Just sit there looking at the wall. Eventually, two months later, she finds me still sitting there doing feck all. And the only thing on the bare walls is a cruedly painted cock and balls.
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:lol:
 
Zed 101 said:
I think they more likely looked at the previous 18 months and persuaded by various factors, cup win, Tuchel and co interviews not going well etc... decided to give ETH the start of the season to show improvement, so it will have been 10 games in all competitions this season, the decision to keep or sack has already been made barring some amazing turn around against Villa, it is about the optics of it, sacking Ten Hag after the Liverpool match after backing him in the summer would have been too soon, once the backed him they had to give him enough time and rope to make the decision for them, that time is Villa, may well even have been decided that this was a decision point when they kept him
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To be frank, it's almost a poisoned chalice now, the United Manager job. Who'd want it, frankly? The only person I can think of is...............Frank (not Lamptard).
 
Zed 101 said:
I think they more likely looked at the previous 18 months and persuaded by various factors, cup win, Tuchel and co interviews not going well etc... decided to give ETH the start of the season to show improvement, so it will have been 10 games in all competitions this season, the decision to keep or sack has already been made barring some amazing turn around against Villa, it is about the optics of it, sacking Ten Hag after the Liverpool match after backing him in the summer would have been too soon, once the backed him they had to give him enough time and rope to make the decision for them, that time is Villa, may well even have been decided that this was a decision point when they kept him
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If they were going to sack him they'd have done this after Spurs game. It was perfect opportunity, a heavy loss at home to a side that on paper looked worse than us, after failing to win yet another easy European game against Twente, both at Old Trafford. There was always some small possibility of him going to Porto/Villa and getting results, which he actually did yesterday at Porto, which would have made the whole process more cumbersome. It's not like he hadn't fluked a win at Villa before.
 
Dans said:
To be frank, it's almost a poisoned chalice now, the United Manager job. Who'd want it, frankly? The only person I can think of is...............Frank (not Lamptard).
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Is that intentional? bit harsh if true for a footballer (anybody actually) he has a surprisingly high IQ, 150 I believe
 
Sarni said:
If they were going to sack him they'd have done this after Spurs game. It was perfect opportunity, a heavy loss at home to a side that on paper looked worse than us, after failing to win yet another easy European game against Twente, both at Old Trafford. There was always some small possibility of him going to Porto/Villa and getting results, which he actually did yesterday at Porto, which would have made the whole process more cumbersome. It's not like he hadn't fluked a win at Villa before.
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Sorry are you classing last night as a result? geez
 
Zed 101 said:
Is that intentional? bit harsh if true for a footballer (anybody actually) he has a surprisingly high IQ, 150 I believe
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The p and the t are miles away from each other on my keyboard. Call me harsh.
 
Zumbi said:
Because we don’t sack managers after finishing bottom of CL groups, 8th in the league, getting humped 7-0 by Liverpool or 4-0 by Palace etc. So it’s definitely not happening after a win.
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Touché. I guess it’s too much to expect any semblance of reasonable standards here.
 
stevoc said:
Yep but you can't help but admire the manager defence hustle. Not only the current manager but retrospectively defending previous managers with the "these players" mantra.

Imagine if we'd still had most of the 2013 squad circa 2021? I wonder where we'd have ended up? :confused:
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In an old folks home?
 
Dans said:
To be frank, it's almost a poisoned chalice now, the United Manager job. Who'd want it, frankly? The only person I can think of is...............Frank (not Lamptard).
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Yet, teams like Madrid, Bayern and Chelsea manage to find new managers. I think many of them would see the United Manager job as a great challenge.
 
He's going to scrape a result this weekend, get through the International break, get a few more bad results, then it all hangs on one game again, he scrapes another result there......and we keep going in circles.

I wanted to give him a bit longer this summer, but its time to put him out of his misery.

We need that new manager bounce, get anyone in and give them a contract until the summer then reasses the situation. If we get a few more bad results, 4th will already look unachievable and its not even Christmas yet.
 
All this talk about having make or break games is just bollocks. The decision regarding his sacking has already been made. If he stays after winning against Villa it'll be because he was always going to stay, not because of that result. I'm hoping we win at Villa and he is still gone the next day.
 
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