Have we been unlucky?

FootballHQ said:
Scrolling through the 4 pages and not one mention of the Wolves game....
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There was no luck involved with that. As displayed by it happening a dozen more times in the mean time and no one mentioning it or caring.
Goalkeepers are allowed challenge for the ball. Taking out an attacker as the ball sails in to row z isn't penalised. Much the same as the attacker challenging for a loose ball is allowed some leeway with making contact with the keeper.
It being mentioned a month later and referee's apologising for getting the decision right doesn't feel very lucky.
 
The games we were shite in we won, we were good today and would have been worthy of the win.

Save for a terrible refereeing decision we would have hammered Spurs, and we lost through sheer bad luck today. Its not all doom and gloom
 
I am trying to upload the Hojlund penalty shout but I can't; however, it is so blatant that it beggars belief that it wasn't given. He's knocked it passed Gabriel who has basically thrust his arm across him and stopped him getting near the ball. Stone wall.

The Garnacho one - we've seen it before - incredibly marginal calls that you basically have to trust the technology to be right on. That being said, how the lines are drawn appears abitrary when the centre line and the offside line are not parallel. It's like someone has drawn the line to suit the decision.

I always felt that the offside rule existed so as not to give the attacker an undue advantage, but what advantage has Garnacho actually profitted from there? He's centimeters offside and to the naked eye it's on. It's a mathmatical rather than a sporting interpretation of the rules. It's just galling but all teams are subject to the same arbitrary judgements.
 
K Stand Knut said:
Literally any other club would have replaced their players who aren’t good enough adequately
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Any other club dont have Glazers and Woodward given silly contracts to mediocre players who are happy to sit on the bench rather than play. Why we sell on the cheap and feck ourselves over with ffp.
 
11101 said:
The games we were shite in we won, we were good today and would have been worthy of the win.

Save for a terrible refereeing decision we would have hammered Spurs, and we lost through sheer bad luck today. Its not all doom and gloom
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We weren't shit against Forest.

We started the game poorly, but dominated them and fought back to win 3-2.

The same Forest side went on to beat Chelsea at the Bridge.
 
Nice of Mike Dean to come out straight away and clarify all the decisions against us.
 
caid said:
There was no luck involved with that. As displayed by it happening a dozen more times in the mean time and no one mentioning it or caring.
Goalkeepers are allowed challenge for the ball. Taking out an attacker as the ball sails in to row z isn't penalised. Much the same as the attacker challenging for a loose ball is allowed some leeway with making contact with the keeper.
It being mentioned a month later and referee's apologising for getting the decision right doesn't feel very lucky.
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Take away the last minute penalty and just look at the game though. Home team playing a relegation struggler and being completely dominated for large spells with no serious shot at goal until 75th minute.

Play that game another 9 times and it finishes 0-0 or 0-1 to Wolves as say Chelsea-Forest did and I don't think Chelsea were as outplayed as you were that night.

So bit odd to claim luck and just ignore that game which was a real steal of a three points.
 
Luck is a one off reframing of probability. You create your own "luck" through consistency, concentration and creating/taking chances. We don't do enough of that, and we have the points on the board to show for it right now.

When we are performing to a consistent level, have players back from injury, and create/take more chances, we'll be ok, but it's a waiting game until then. I believe we'll have a good run this season under ETH, but more of the same between now and December and he's skating thin ice unfortunately.
 
Tom Van Persie said:
I mean

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Then Dean came out and said it’s hard because Rasmus is holding his arm, I mean way to show you have no understanding of the game…what else is he going to do? He’s trying to get a round a player who has essentially rugby tackled him.
 
King7Eric said:
Something that will get lost amongst the furore, it's our inability to win the second balls and recycle possession that cost us multiple times last season, did today and will do so in the future unless we improve.
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Rice was recycling possession yesterday like he was Greenpeace. If he played for us instead of Mason Mount we would have won both those games. That's the difference. It's not luck it's Glazers.
 
It's been a combination of bad luck and our own incompetence. We should have had the Spurs game won by half time. A mixture of poor finishing and being denied a clear penalty. We should have come away with a point yesterday. You can look at the tight offside call, Evans being fouled and another clear penalty waved away for the foul on Højlund.
 
We have been very unlucky but also mostly very poor.

Felt we were better against Arsenal. Not very inspiring but took the sting out of the game and ultimately were a midges dick away from a win.
 
Remember the geese said:
How was someone with this level of ineptitude allowed to referee football matches at the top level?
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Because reffing is a sorry job that’s not particularly well paid especially in relation to how rich the sport is. Everyone I know who tried it seriously got to a stage where you get physically assaulted or threatened as soon as you get into men’s football and packs it in swiftly thereafter.
 
You cant bank on luck with poor performances. If United up the performances the results will come.
 
tomaldinho1 said:
Then Dean came out and said it’s hard because Rasmus is holding his arm, I mean way to show you have no understanding of the game…what else is he going to do? He’s trying to get a round a player who has essentially rugby tackled him.
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Yeah I mean why do you think he has his arm and what is he trying to do with it, Mike Dean is a simpleton, refs on games is honestly one of the worst things in the history of football the one on BT is atrocious
 
Losers complain about luck. Winners make their own. Im sick and tired of excuses
 
No, we deserved to lose both matches.

Sadly, football matches don't last 45 minutes (Spurs game). Once they found a way around our plan A, they were out of sight. As for yesterday... passing the ball in your own third, defending with 5 or even 6 players in the box (when Case and Eriksen were keeping tabs on Havertz and Odegaard) and then talking about fine margins and complaining about ref decisions with which you would be incandescent if they had gone the other way is just so painfully Mourinho-esque.

Let's assume it's all bad luck and unfortunate coincidences. How confident are you about the prospect of getting three points in the next away games against a top-six side?
 
fergiewherearethou said:
Or ETH prefering Mount over Rice.
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He couldn't afford Rice who is obviously a much better player. And given a slightly different tactical requirement Mount was a decent option. But Rice is approaching world class and Mount is just quite good.

I thought we weren't hugely worse than Arsenal for great stretches of the game but they were clearly better at home. Onana in particular was fantastic and should have been our MotM. 6 weeks without him will feel like a long time.

We could have won and were unlucky to miss out on the draw but they probably deserved the points. If Martial had not started and Maguire and Evans had not come on we would have been in a much better place, so there is hope of a decent starting 11. What we have lacked is squad depth and freedom from injury.
 
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We’ve been unlucky and crap, a deadly combination.

On another day the Garnacho goal stands and we get the penalty. If the Garnacho goal had stood and we’d won the game, the conversation would be very different as that was a very solid second half performance and I don’t think anyone would say it’d been undeserved if we’d walked away with three points.
 
Nope it's just poor game management yet again because they are too emotional. Reacted utterly dreadfully to that disallowed goal and Arsenal took full advantage of it
 
Arsenal were the slightly better team. But the second goal was very lucky for them, as it was quite clearly a foul. And of course a penalty wasn't given. So yes we were unlucky, but that's football.
 
We beat Wolves when we shouldn’t have done, it evens out most of the time so yeah we are where we should be.
 
AndyMUFC said:
We beat Wolves when we shouldn’t have done, it evens out most of the time so yeah we are where we should be.
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Well, so far, Wolves should have had a pen against us. We should have had two against Spurs and Arsenal. Guess we wait for the Brighton game for it to even out.
 
We're sounding more like the scousers with each passing season. Refs and the FA conspiring against us and bad luck, if not for that we'd be great
 
We've been slightly unlucky overall, but that wouldn't matter if we could reliably score goals. Our lack of goals means any moment of bad luck can lose us the game. Against Spurs, the ridiculous penalty decisions shouldn't have even mattered if we'd put one or two of our good chances away.

This team needs 15-20 more goals than last season if we're going to do anything, and I'm not sure we've got the attacking depth to achieve that.
 
We deserved to lose to Wolves, probably overall deserved to lose to Spurs and probably deserved a draw with Arsenal. 2 points better off than we really should be, so I’d say our luck has been ok so far.
 
Yes, we have been but we also have caused ourselves problems. In the Wolves game we played like the season starting was a surprise, in the Spurs game we didn't make our strong first half performance tell and missed a sitter and the bizarre penalty decision isn't the whole story, Forest we started and ended terribly but were great in between and we played well at Arsenal but it didn't just go our way (a deflected goal from a debatable corner, with a strong shout for a foul on our 6th choice centre half who happened to be playing with our 5th choice by the end of the game sums it up really). However, I feel that there's a lot of good in there and with an actual centre forward things'll look at lot rosier soon enough.
 
We've been very unlucky with injuries but beyond that, no, I don't think we've been unlucky overall. Some unlucky moments, for sure, but we're probably about where we deserve to be at this point. For what it's worth, I thought we were pretty good against arsenal for about 70 minutes, but they deserved the win. Spurs we were decent first half, rubbish second.
 
FootballHQ said:
Take away the last minute penalty and just look at the game though. Home team playing a relegation struggler and being completely dominated for large spells with no serious shot at goal until 75th minute.

Play that game another 9 times and it finishes 0-0 or 0-1 to Wolves as say Chelsea-Forest did and I don't think Chelsea were as outplayed as you were that night.

So bit odd to claim luck and just ignore that game which was a real steal of a three points.
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Wolves will run rings around a lot of teams this season and lose. It wont be due to luck. They'll play that exact game another 9 times and will lose the majority of them.
Losing Matheus will probably cost them some moral victories but he couldn't score, create or defend like most of their players so wont matter to their results.
 
Should've lost wolves game
Draw/win vs Spur
Draw vs Arsenal
So overall should've gotten 7 points instead of 6. Not that much of a difference
 
FootballHQ said:
Scrolling through the 4 pages and not one mention of the Wolves game....
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In the Wolves game we had 2 or 3 penalty shouts of our own turned down but people only ever seem to mention the one Wolves had turned dowm which in my opinion wasnt a penalty anyway.
 
Wolves game wasn't lucky they had there chances and didn't take them that's not lucky that's ineptness from them? Spurs we didn't take ours and a stone wall pen as well, that's unlucky and ineptness on utd part. Forest we just took our chances in a game where we gifted them a 2 goal start, It was a pen on Rashford, that's not lucky...

Arsenal well wow 88 mins goal ruled out because they can't draw a line in the right place? Evans gets fouled from the corner no VAR?. Lindelof goes off ill Martinez injured Varane non starter Shaw non starter, against Arsenal's strongest side and bench bar 1 player, and we concede in the 90+7 90+11 .. wow is that unlucky? They weren't better than us that's for sure...
 
Hughie77 said:
Wolves game wasn't lucky they had there chances and didn't take them that's not lucky that's ineptness from them? Spurs we didn't take ours and a stone wall pen as well, that's unlucky and ineptness on utd part. Forest we just took our chances in a game where we gifted them a 2 goal start, It was a pen on Rashford, that's not lucky...

Arsenal well wow 88 mins goal ruled out because they can't draw a line in the right place? Evans gets fouled from the corner no VAR?. Lindelof goes off ill Martinez injured Varane non starter Shaw non starter, against Arsenal's strongest side and bench bar 1 player, and we concede in the 90+7 90+11 .. wow is that unlucky? They weren't better than us that's for sure...
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But they were. Their xG was 2.2 or so, and ours was 0.96. They had almost double the shots we had, they had more than double the shots in goal than us, they had 12 corners to us 4, and they had 57% possession. They had around triple the number of touches in our zone compared to us in their zone, and they had more than double the number of passes in the final third compared to us. They were definitely far better than us.

Could we have won the match though? Absolutely. I think that Hojlund's case was more than pen than not, that Garnacho was marginally offside and that Saka could have been sent off. If even one of those decisions would have gone in our favor, we could have easily ended with 3 points, or maybe with one, despite that Arsenal were the superior team. Same as how we ended with 3 points despite that Wolves were the better team.
 
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