Fans hear what they want to hear based on their Football Manager fantasies.
Ten Hag’s first press conference July 2022: “The style of football will be based on the type of players we have.”
Redcafe November 2023: “Why dont we play like Man City yet?”
He told us from day 1 but we didn’t want to believe it
That's not true though, is it? A manager leads by his principles and ideology. That defines them; even if you don't recreate an exact replica of one system, the core principle will always remain. This is how we identify every coach on the planet from Pep to Zidane to Allardyce to Mourinho or Conte to Klopp. You know exactly what they are about and even if they modify slightly, as all have them have done over the years, you immediately have a broad identity, which will always be bourne out on the pitch.
Ten Hag never had to come here and play exactly like Ajax did, but his core principles should be rock solid and unyielding. You can modify the surface layers, but their should always be an identity.
Re. The kind of players we have. Would boil down to the kind of players he blindly selects whilst neglecting the rest of his squad. He is solely responsible for what we field come match day, and from there, how we will play in terms of approach is predetermined; player X, with a massive proclivity to gifting the ball to the opposition, sets you on a different path to player Y, who likes to play a shorter passing game, and so and so forth, problems compound as the pieces fielded are almost diametrically opposed to one another. That's on the manager to address - he dictates the football we will attempt to play the moment the XI is set.
Evidently, we do not have an eclectic coach who can get a tune out of the team no matter what he fields, we also do not have eclectic players for the most part, so trying to force things along will give us what we see mostly: very uncohesive play massively lacking fluidity as each cog in the machine fails to fit snugly with another. There's a reason we make basic passing chains look tortuous as opposed to practically any opposition we face who all progress the ball to the optimum level their players are capable of (see even Sheffield United before they ran out of steam).
Individual brilliance should not be the only thing separating a big club from a smaller one. We have - even in this depleted state - far better resources and are supposed to be far better coached. It's what big clubs pay big money for, is it not? And if leading minds are at these smaller clubs, bigger ones will soon snap them up. So with that said, why are we so poor at showing this great divide? Why are dead certs for relegation and relegation battles playing us off the park for large periods of time, usually until they tire? Why do we never look greater than the sum of our parts?
The City game, alongside the comments after it, has become pivotal because we are screaming for an identity - something to hang our hat on as fans and say at least we're working towards this or that, but we've instead had suspicions confirmed that we are essentially blagging our way through the season with performance dictated by personnel and not an identifiable system of play. It can be said that that's actually a lead on from last season and the utter dependency we had on Rashford's goals.
Rashford has essentially become a single point failure, as we see this term, and no coach should be utterly reliant on any one player to that degree. It points to the manager and coaching more so than the player because there should always be contingencies in place. Rashford is being torn to bits on here, when a step back tells us others should be stepping up to bat, which is what happens at any club worth its salt.
In line with the above, the gamble the manager took to address this issue over the summer was to purchase a very, young, raw player who has never played in the PL before and has to find his feet as the leading man in wretched circumstances. That's a decision the manager took, at great expense. A lot of posters said he can become something special, but that he's not ready for the burden yet. Some even going as far as to say it's unfair to put that kind of pressure on a kid instead of blooding him in stages, behind an experienced forward. All of this is on the manager - if it works out, he's hailed a genius, but if it doesn't, many said it wasn't the right move for us and our circumstances.
Suffice it to say you can run through the squad and scrutinise the composition and the decisions made, as ten Hag has spent a lot of money on players he's not getting much, if anything, out of, so 'the players we have,' is a large part his own doing, which is why that reasoning doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
There's an irony to the above, too. Given that Mount, Antony, Reguilon were barely utilised on Sunday and weren't deemed suitable for whatever it is ten Hag set out to do. That's £130m+ of his own signings he benched. We're not talking pennies here. So that line about personnel carries little weight when the manager is going out if his way to field teams that are making fans uncomfortable before a ball is even kicked.
Sadly, nearly everything that's gone wrong has been spoken about in great detail on here before it even proved itself a failure, and that's not from people willing it to fail, it's from concerned fans who immediately idenfied things that just looked wrong from the outset.
