No it wasn’t. McTominay ultimately had to go.
Going against the grain
- Thread starter NicolaSacco
- Start date
For PSR reasons it was a must
Absolutely .
I firmly believe that Amorim is the right coach at the wrong time. He hasn't been backed by INEOS/Glazers, which is frankly ridiculous bearing in mind the total change of style, but I honestly think he has also not got the most out of the players he has. If I am honest with myself, he has not shown enough to have a team built in his style.
For me, United is all about speed and width - the system he is trying to play is just not suited to where we are, and I am not sure it is right for the Premier league. At least he should have gone with a back 5 counter attacking style to keep us relevant, and then made more changes organically in the summer. Instead, it is all burning down as we don't have the technical ability, football intelligence, or the money to fix this.
I can see where Amorim wants to go, and I find him charismatic and a great communicator, but I can never ever see this working with the current structure. This is not the United I've followed for 40 years... tbh at this point we are irrelevant.
For me, United is all about speed and width - the system he is trying to play is just not suited to where we are, and I am not sure it is right for the Premier league. At least he should have gone with a back 5 counter attacking style to keep us relevant, and then made more changes organically in the summer. Instead, it is all burning down as we don't have the technical ability, football intelligence, or the money to fix this.
I can see where Amorim wants to go, and I find him charismatic and a great communicator, but I can never ever see this working with the current structure. This is not the United I've followed for 40 years... tbh at this point we are irrelevant.
I tend to agree here - they are utter parasites and I want them gone. But they spent a billion, albeit not of their own money. The problem is that Woodward and his cronies pi55ed it up the wall. If we had invested correctly things would have been very different.
Maybe it was.
Maybe it's a sign that selling academy players to get in line with rules that you've only potentially broken because of spending hundreds of millions on absolute shite is not a good thing.
My other going against the grain is that the only noticeable difference (off the pitch rather than tactics etc) between Ten Hag and Amorim is that Amorim is a better communicator. This has probably bought him some time with the fans. If Ten Hag had this run of form in his second season, he wouldn't have lasted until Christmas.
My final going against the grain is that history will be a lot kinder to Ten Hag (and probably even to Ole and Mourinho).once more of what's been happening behind the scenes over the last 10 years gets revealed.
Everything bad that's happening now stems back to them, the leveraged buyout, and every decision they've made since then
There’s two parts to this though.
On the surface level - there’s no escaping recruitment not Glazers austerity is the reason for our issues.
But as soon as you get context, and understand how they bought and run the club you realise they couldn’t really be much worse.
I totally agree. They are a stain on the club and what they have done is criminal. But, imagine if Woodward had been shrewd and competent - we have spent more money than anyone in the last 10 years, and made the absolute worst footballing purchases and decisions.
I hate the Glazers as much as the next person, really a lot, and I want them and the Jim Reaper GONE. But, really, I have never ever seen $1BILLION spent worse in the history of football. I actually can't conceive of the decisions that have been made to bring us to where we are.
The issue with the Glazers from an investment point of view is that (with the help of people like Woodward) they haven't spent the big money needed in things like the ground, the academy, scouting etc. Spending 150 million on transfers where the fees are probably spread out over 2/3 seasons.
If they'd invested in decent scouting/staff etc you don't end up wasting some of the money we have.
Totally agree, but I honestly think that Woodward was behind a lot of this, and a board without any real football knowledge. The lack of investment in OT, the academy, youth, it's criminal. We have spent 550MILLION+ in the last 5 years I can't conceive how it is possible to have spent it in worse ways.
If you gave any fan 600M they would make better decisions - 70M on Hojland, 70M on Mount, 50M on Onana... it's mindless. The money was spent, just spent in the worst possible ways.
But he was their man. He had no business being CEO of one of the biggest and most successful football clubs in the world. He was a child trying to steal a sip of wine at the adult's table. If he'd had sense he would have put people around him to run the club and concentrated on signing all those commercial deals and earning his fat paycheck.
It wasn't so bad when times were good and the debt was at least manageable, but that debt stopped investment in infrastructure, and the broadcasting money slowed down. We stopped being successful, stopped getting UCL money every year, Old Trafford started falling apart, and so the slow slide began.
Now, the debt is still there, the squad is of poor a quality as it's ever been in my lifetime, and the banks are going to start knocking for their money back pretty soon. I'm fairly sure the Glazers refinanced the debt during COVID when interest rates were really low, but that runs out in a couple of years, so will need to be repackaged, with a much higher interest rate.
The club is in serious danger of actually going bankrupt if something doesn't change, which is why they were so desperate for outside investment. United was one of the few clubs in the world that could compete with state owned clubs off its own back, but the Glazers have completely run it into the ground.
Perhaps this would be better placed in the post-match thread but my "against the grain" take from today is that our performance wasn't actually too bad and we were a tad unfortunate to go out to what is largely a lottery.
I'm not saying for a moment that we were exceptional, nor even that there weren't spells where we were poor. The first-half generally was, in fact, quite uninspired and perhaps it'd be more correct to say that "our performance in the second half and throughout extra time wasn't actually too bad".
With that said, I was more encouraged by what I saw today than I have been for basically any of our matches since Amad got injured. It's unfortunate that Dorgu was suspended as I think if you introduce the added width that his presence on the left gives the team, we'd have had a pretty solid chance of beating them before it got to penalties. Even without him, though, I saw some genuine quality in transitions and besides their goal also thought we defended fairly well.
Perhaps most pressingly, though, for the first time in Christ knows how long I think I'd say that over half of the side played quite well, and there weren't many poor performances. I was particularly impressed by Yoro, Heaven, and Obi, all of whom I believe performed well beyond their years. De Ligt was immense at the back. Bruno put in another great display. Maguire was pretty solid whilst he was on. Onana made some strong saves when called upon. Zirkzee, Dalot and Mazraoui showed real quality at times. There weren't many players who I thought were really disappointing.
Obviously, will all that said it's still fecking gutting to go out of the cup in a home game we really should be winning. With that said, I think that display finally showed me something I think could be built upon.
I'm not saying for a moment that we were exceptional, nor even that there weren't spells where we were poor. The first-half generally was, in fact, quite uninspired and perhaps it'd be more correct to say that "our performance in the second half and throughout extra time wasn't actually too bad".
With that said, I was more encouraged by what I saw today than I have been for basically any of our matches since Amad got injured. It's unfortunate that Dorgu was suspended as I think if you introduce the added width that his presence on the left gives the team, we'd have had a pretty solid chance of beating them before it got to penalties. Even without him, though, I saw some genuine quality in transitions and besides their goal also thought we defended fairly well.
Perhaps most pressingly, though, for the first time in Christ knows how long I think I'd say that over half of the side played quite well, and there weren't many poor performances. I was particularly impressed by Yoro, Heaven, and Obi, all of whom I believe performed well beyond their years. De Ligt was immense at the back. Bruno put in another great display. Maguire was pretty solid whilst he was on. Onana made some strong saves when called upon. Zirkzee, Dalot and Mazraoui showed real quality at times. There weren't many players who I thought were really disappointing.
Obviously, will all that said it's still fecking gutting to go out of the cup in a home game we really should be winning. With that said, I think that display finally showed me something I think could be built upon.
There has to be a lot of WUMs on this thread 
United needs to hire serial winners and only proven coaches. We had the chance to sign the likes of Conte, Luis Enrique or even Ancelotti. Murinho's era of Man Utd was still the best one. Three trophies in his first season and a 2nd place finish in the second season with no backing.
The last three coaches of Man Utd never worked in the big 5 league before Man Utd. Conte was a free agent after Spurs so why why didn't we try to hire him or even Zidane? The owners are still a problem but we didn't have a world class coach since Jose Mourinho. Ten Hag and Amorim were solid but they never won anything big like the league title in Spain or England or UCL.
The last three coaches of Man Utd never worked in the big 5 league before Man Utd. Conte was a free agent after Spurs so why why didn't we try to hire him or even Zidane? The owners are still a problem but we didn't have a world class coach since Jose Mourinho. Ten Hag and Amorim were solid but they never won anything big like the league title in Spain or England or UCL.
I'm referring to the centre midfield/8 position (ahead of/ alongside the anchoring midfielder/6 and behind the two 10s, in Amorim's standard setup) specifically rather than the midfield area generally.
I mostly agree with this take, apart from maybe Dorgu and Yoro.
There are plenty of the rest that can be complentary pieces, just not key members of the squad.
I agree with this is take. If we had rich owners, funding the club but the results were still as they are, the sentiment towards the owners wouldn't be all that different. Maybe framed slightly differently, but they would be hated all the same.
The main reason the glazers are hated is that the people they hired to run the footballing matters of the club have spectacularly failed.
Most people don't care about alot of the background noise like staff lunches and all the other stuff, if you're winning.
Højlund is a decent striker albeit poor form and low on confidence but he's hurting in a system that doesn't currently work. But history will tell us that lots of very solid strikers/players will go through tough times and it's in these times you need to support young players the most. I don't think he'd struggle as much in lets say Ruuds 4231.
It’s irrelevant at the moment. We’re 14th. I don’t disagree, although I think Mainoo has a higher ceiling than you do. I’ve been pretty consistent that I don’t think Amad is good enough for a title winning side, but I’ve accepted we’re so far off that it’s a pointless argument.
Amad, Mainoo and Garnacho could be world class players. They need proper coaching, mentoring etc for them to get there.
This is the issue we've had with Januzaj, Depay, Martial, Elanga and countless others since probably 2013.
Did those managerial names want to come to Old Trafford? The managerial job here has become the proverbial poisoned chalice, maybe they let it be known they weren`t interested. Ancelotti would have been a great choice.
We spent €165m on Lukaku, Matic, and Lindelöf in the summer of 2017. Describing that as "no backing" is insane.
(oh and then we gave a truly ludicrous salary to Alexis Sanchez in January)
Dalot is really important to this team. He has many faults, and is probably not good enough, but in a team lacking character and leadership i think he displays those in abundance.
He threw his dummy out because the club didn't want to buy yet another CB.
He wanted to get better center backs and aside from Lukaku the transfer window was horrible. That year City had 100 points and had the likes of David Silva, De Bruyne, Kompany, Otamendi and Aguero in their squad squad. Utd's center backs were Smalling, Lindelof and Jones while city had Otamendi and Kompany.
Man Utd was already lagging behind City and Chelsea and you saw yesterday how bad Lindelof was. Lindelof is only 30 and he plays like he's semi retired. I don't know how you expected Utd to win the league with that kind of squad.
I didn't claim that Lindelöf was some sort of top player. Nor did I say I had expected United to win the league back then.
My comment was about backing Mourinho. Who signed two CBs, Bailly and Lindelöf. We saw how bad Lindelöf was. That's not a good argument in favour of giving more money to the manager who signed him. Quite the opposite, in fact.