NO manager can fix this!

Daydreamer said:
Nothing you've written relates to being able to:
  • To find their team mates with ball
  • Press with coordination
  • Develop repeatable patterns of play to create chances.
Something each of the Coaches I mentioned have done in the Premier League well within 15 months of taking over with squads comprising mostly of players they didn't sign. The fact that Emery was sacked despite doing so is testament to the fact that it's not really all that high of a bar. It's the bare minimum expected of a Manager.

Yes, Pep had Txiki. Klopp had Edwards. But the Sporting Directors are not the cause of their teams being well-coached. Strangely enough, that's primarily to do with... the Head Coach.

I know that ETH played some lovely football with Ajax, I saw it with my own eyes when I visited Amsterdam. That's pretty irrelevant if he can't reproduce it in a far tougher league with a different set of players.

I'm not saying that football structures are unimportant. They obviously are. But consider the following questions:
  • Are United playing like a well-coached side?
  • Have any players been markedly improved by ETH?
  • Is ETH getting the best out of any of his players?
If the answers to some or all of those questions is no, it really doesn't matter who's supporting the Manager as he's failing in the core competencies of his role.
Click to expand...

You need players with intelligence to understand pressing structures and triggers to press with coordination. You also need the players to follow instruction and not be lazy.
Since you are throwing buzzwords around though, where does United currently rank in the PL this season for high turnovers? Isn't it top 3/4 in the PL

In order to develop patterns to create chances we need to fix our build up, which is difficult to do when your back 4 and connecting pivot are injured / being chopped and changed consistently.

Arsenal struggled to create chances early on under Arteta for similar reasons.

Of course though you must be right and Pep would do it with the current squad, even though he struggled also in his first season and had to replace players he signed in his first summer to get it right. Even though he took over a team that recently won the league
 
Yeah they can

If a competent manager was given 400m to spend on defining his team, formation and style etc he would succeed here. ETH was never a man in charge of transfers and he’s blown a feck load of money on former players from Holland and elsewhere who are simply not good enough and don’t fit into a system of style of play. Scatter gun approach and in all honesty absolute random transfers that make little sense will be the end of ETH.

60m on Mount who plays in Bruno’s position the club captain who plays 99.9% of games. Antony looks like a West Ham player at best for 90m. Casemiro who is his best signing but at almost 70m he’s turning 32 in Feb and we will need to replace him before long it’s a terrible deal signing that type of player during a rebuild.
 
lex talionis said:
We play Bruno and Rashford match after match because they are a marketing engine for the club, not because their form warrants it.
Click to expand...
I think this is a bit far fetched. We can't be great for marketing when we are regularly playing shite. Moreover, we got rid of Ronaldo quite quickly who is arguably the most famous footballer in the world
 
Cassidy said:
You need players with intelligence to understand pressing structures and triggers to press with coordination. You also need the players to follow instruction and not be lazy.
Since you are throwing buzzwords around though, where does United currently rank in the PL this season for high turnovers? Isn't it top 3/4 in the PL

In order to develop patterns to create chances we need to fix our build up, which is difficult to do when your back 4 and connecting pivot are injured / being chopped and changed consistently.

Arsenal struggled to create chances early on under Arteta for similar reasons.

Of course though you must be right and Pep would do it with the current squad, even though he struggled also in his first season and had to replace players he signed in his first summer to get it right. Even though he took over a team that recently won the league
Click to expand...
Are we honestly saying that your players lack the intelligence to understand simple pressing triggers?

They're hardly buzzwords. We can just say defending and attacking effectively, if you'd prefer. There was very little evidence of either against City. Or in any of United's defeats this season. I'll concede that I'm not a United fan, so I only watch you play against the bigger sides. Perhaps you look like a well-drilled unit against opposition lower down in the table - I genuinely don't know.

Arteta won an FA Cup within six months of taking over, beating City and Chelsea in the semi-final and final. We scored goals that resulted from very clear patterns of play. In fact, my criticism of him at the time was that we sometimes played as if we were overly coached. Arteta wasn't randomly given time by our Board. They extended his contract during a run of bad results because they could see he was building something.

And yes, City struggled in Pep's first season. But they still looked like a well-coached team. Because they were.

I think we're probably talking past each other at this point. You keep responding to points I'm not even making. If you think ETH is coaching United effectively, or that it's somehow impossible for him to do so because he doesn't have an Txiki / Edwards / Edu alongside him, then we'll have to agree to disagree
 
Last edited:
bosnian_red said:
Well that's what I mean, we know the Glazers don't know how to implement the right structure and by that I mean they don't care to hire the right people in the right positions, or create those positions and give those positions real authority. The hope is Ratcliffe will. We don't know either way really, but we'd never know on that perspective until they are in. So that's why there is always hope in the unknown!
Click to expand...

Understood thanks.
I see the Ratcliffe situation as an opportunity to restore the club we all love at least in part, back towards the top.
And especially Sir David Brailsford implementing Marginal Gains. We all know that there are huge gains to be made.
 
horsechoker said:
I think this is a bit far fetched. We can't be great for marketing when we are regularly playing shite. Moreover, we got rid of Ronaldo quite quickly who is arguably the most famous footballer in the world
Click to expand...

I understand your logic, the logic of a proper club supporter, but real life doesn't work that way. Fathers and their sons who buy tickets and casual fans around the world expect to see the big names play and aren't happy when Rashford or Bruno is unexpectedly benched.

The situation with Ronaldo had become untenable and the situation with Sancho had become intolerable and even little Johnny understands that.
 
Recruitment has got to be a focus going forward, and that will require extensive changes, far beyond EtH.

14 players have been brought in by EtH, if you include loans. As things stand ONE of those 14 - Martinez - have clearly improved the team. A further two (Casemiro and Eriksen) improved it in the short term, but it is already evident that's in the past. That's simply not sustainable - no club can become a contender with a record like that, especially not one that is right up against FFP limits and habitually overpays both for fees and salaries. We're in as bad a situation now as we were when EtH took over, if not worse.

Clearly we can't continue to let EtH or any successor dominate transfer decisions like this, and equally clearly we lack the quality elsewhere to do it better. It's high time for a massacre and rebuild, with a record like this there is no case to be made that the current football department can be considered competent. It clearly and obviously isn't.
 
In our current situation it is hard for us to get top players to sign up for us. We are not attracting players like FdJ, Bellingham, Tchouameni and we are having financial issues.

So, we have to perform well with what we can get and academy players, until the state if the club gets healthier. I back Ten Hag to do that.

Indeed no one is going to come and poof just fix everything.
 
Recruitment is key. Look at Arsenal their recruitment has been excellent and now they are challenging for titles.
 
If the football structure is good enough you don't really need a manager. You can just get the physio to pin the starting eleven on the dressing room wall the morning of the match and the lads will just get on with it.
 
Ghirahim said:
Recruitment is key. Look at Arsenal their recruitment has been excellent and now they are challenging for titles.
Click to expand...

Exactly this. A manager intelligent enough to say I want x but Am I the driving force here in the decision..if I am..I instead need to push for recruitment department changes until this is no longer the case. Perhaps Antony will teach our manager to be careful over his involvement next summer. If you are going to choose the players at least also step in when the value isn’t there as Wenger and Fergie did in latter years to various degrees of success.
 
I think most managers would have worked out that they don't have the players for the system they would like to play and adapt to make best use of the players they have, ETH seems incapable of this..... I think many managers would manage to insert half a team from the reserves to cover the current injury/performance crisis and get better performances
 
You must log in or register to reply here.