‘Een koe in de kont kijken’
Occasions where the clueless fans were spectacularly right
- Thread starter Oscar Bonavena
- Start date
I should rephrase it, I hope that it's never used seriously, like Hindsight is 20/20. Those are some of the dumbest things that people use seriously.
Say what you want about Ole's credentials but the period he managed us was one of the only times post-Fergie where I consistently enjoyed watching us. I mean you're right that I would agree he wasn't good enough to take us back to the top, but at least it was fun.
Maybe I was blinded by the 'vibes', but the players definitely seemed to want to give everything for him. We had some terrible losses, but we also had some great comebacks.
It’s used when for when people say I would have done things differently when they couldn’t possibly have done so, and when saying it solves nothing and is only a distraction.
Most of the time we were absolutely shoddy, the great comebacks were generally 15 good minutes inbetween 75+ minutes of lazy and disorganized Football. Now the first 4 months of his interim were glorious.
My point was that any fan who put feelings about him as a player aside, knew that he doesn't have skill and knowledge to manage big club. Especially in PL when rival clubs had Pep, Klopp, Jose, Conte and Emery.
Same as we knew it for Lampard in Celski and same as we would be delighted if Liverpool would hire Gerrard.
A broken clock is right twice a day.
By the time of the Porto Europa League game, for reasons best known to himself, Erik had put Amad back to being 4th choice wide player, behind Antony in the pecking order. Inexplicable.
Unless it’s a smart watch, then it won’t display any time at all.
Is this a self bragging, "I was right" thread?
Which makes the saying even dumber because that's not hindsight that you described nor is it hindsight that the saying should have an issue with. In this case the issue is someone not understanding that hindsight isn't foresight, now the reason the saying is particularly dumb is because the hindsight that you gain from a particular even can help you develop your insight on a future similar event which to some extent could lead to some foresight.
So hindsight isn't futile, that's how human have learned almost everything.
PS: I know that I should STFU but it's one of my pet peeves.
Boom. Close thread
Hindsight can be futile. The problem at United has never been the manager imo, it was the people above who were appointing the managers. The same people who failed to properly facilitate all the managers post Fergie. So the whole discussion about what Ten Hag or whoever should have done is futile. None of them stood a chance. Let’s hope Omar Berrada & co do things differently.
Ooooh I remember that one all to well.
I believe that years later I read an interview with Rene Muelestein (sp?) where he said "the players didn't play according to our gameplan, and that's why we lost".
Pfffffffft. some gameplan that.
It can't, it simply is the state of understanding an event after it occured or gaining some knowledge. What should have been done isn't hindsight, what you are describing is fantasy which is indeed futile outside of entertainment.
That's why the expression that we use is "In hindsight" because the following statement is done with newly found knowledge also known as hindsight and the issue that you are targetting is people who confuse hindsight with insight and make fantasist claims. Basically the expression that actually matches your problem is that "you can't unscramble an egg", which is something that we learned in hindsight after scrambling eggs and failing to unscramble them which led us to a better understanding of eggs' thermodynamic, which lead to the foresight that if you scramble eggs there is no unscrambling that will follow.
I sincerely apologize for that.
I would argue that he was our best player for the majority of his time here. He wasn't the problem in my opinion. He barely had any service and a lot of his goals were created out of thin air.
Ronaldo caused ripple effects through the team though, opposition managers were gleefully pushing up as they knew Ronaldo refused to press whatsoever. He also couldn’t dribble or beat a man anymore. He could certainly still strike a ball sweetly and head a ball but the circus was not worth it for that. His tantrums, wages and how he was indulged caused rifts in the squad.
It felt like he was solving problems that he created himself. You think how bad last season was and we still got more points than that Ronaldo season.
Moyes, Fellaini*, Mount... it's not that often that people get discouraged by our transfers during the honeymoon period, usually the muppet mode kicks in.
* I may be projecting, not sure if there was a consensus on here about him?
* I may be projecting, not sure if there was a consensus on here about him?
I agree with this take, as much as Ronaldo was/is a great player, he messed up our team as a whole and we haven't really recovered since
Yea i was disappointed, I wanted the Dortmund manager, didnt know his name. Shlopp as I called him. Moyes was obviously not going to work
Not at all. This is not about me.
I've been wrong a shitload of times about United.
This is about times where the dogs on the street could see something which was blindingly obvious, but the manager and/or club did the exact opposite of what the fans wanted, and it turned out that the fans were correct after all!
Hm. I’m trying to see what you mean, but I’m not sure … Van Nistelrooy went with starting Rashford and Garnacho for the first 50% of his tenure, and it looked to me he had about the same instructions and positions that Rashford/Garnacho had when he came on. He has different tools in his toolbox, but generally he found humself very often wide with the option of cutting in, going to the line or letting the ball inwards to Dalot or Bruno. It looked quite similar to me as under Ten Hag, just with a bit more careful position during the pressing. I don’t know, I might have missed something.
I think I see were you are getting at, but I think it’s hard to tell. Often with players like Mata or Sancho, technical, not superfast players who work more through gaining a metre and passing than by beating a man in a 30-metre sprint, we tend to assume that they will be more effective a bit more centrally, but in fact it doesn’t always work that way when tried.
I guess it will tell a lot what Amorim ends up doing with him: on of the 10’s or one of the WB’s. My guess is he will try out bith - at least in training - and end up using him where he seems to get the most out of himself. Maybe it will give more of an answer.
This.
We sacrificed the team to accommodate this high maintenance diva who was long past his best.
Yeah that was me. Still annoys me that the thread got locked so I couldn't bump it . Linked it further up though
Easy done. I've been quite anti Ronaldo ever since his slave comments in 2008, and even I got caught up in the hype around him returning and started calling him a club legend.
Looking back, I'm a tad embarrassed that I didn't stick to what I had known all along - the knowledge that he was long past his best and that due to his planet sized ego, he was going to be a major headache for whatever club got stuck with him in his twilight years.
Doesn't mean much to say it now, but you were right.
I didn't mean you. I meant every fan. They would have had opinions that they got it right.
Fellaini, Ronaldo and Mount all come to mind.
Throw enough shit against the wall, and eventually some will stick.
I can't recall, was fan sentiment overwhelmingly against the appointment of Moyes in 2013 or was it a mixture?
I remember I wasn't exactly excited about the appointment but I (mistakenly) thought that United was such a well-oiled machine, that any competent experienced manager should be able to have us competing for and winning titles every season. We hadn't finished outside the top 3 in over 20 years so it shouldn't have been a problem, right?! How wrong I was!
I still maintain that to get to the good times we'll have to have the courage of our convictions to actually stand by a manager having a few poor seasons like Arteta finishing 8th for 2-3 years.
Possebon was never the same after that injury
Bebe
Don't remember what yhe consensus was but I wanted a more modern direction for us. I'm sure that was the consensus, but we trusted SAF judgment and it was all so new to us. This changing manager lark
I was right about
Mourinho (knew he would always be short term)
Ronaldo (knew he would cause dissension and end Ole)
Amad (it's still in question how good he could be, but he is much better than Antony)
Antony (at first I liked him then I gave up on him sometime last year)
Hojlund (I'll be right he will fail because he is not quick enough at this level)
I have been wrong many times but I won't list them.
Mourinho (knew he would always be short term)
Ronaldo (knew he would cause dissension and end Ole)
Amad (it's still in question how good he could be, but he is much better than Antony)
Antony (at first I liked him then I gave up on him sometime last year)
Hojlund (I'll be right he will fail because he is not quick enough at this level)
I have been wrong many times but I won't list them.
From memory it was a bit of both. Some people were excited about Moyes and thought that it was a natural next step for him, and that he'd grow into the role and take the bull by the horns in the same way that Fergie did when he started.
Others were saying that Moyes was (and would only ever be) a mid table manager, and that this was a disastrous appointment that would set us back years.
I personally remember having some degree of optimism about the appointment, especially when he talked about reinforcing the midfield.
However, despite that, I still had this awful gut sense that this was a calamitous appointment, that it was all going to go pear shaped very quickly, and that we were a minimum of ten years from a league title.
Even when we beat Swansea City 4-1 in the opening match, I couldn't shake this sense that our downfall was beginning.
Meh. A manager or a club official is putting his reputation, and potentially his career, on the line when taking a decision and there is a real cost to them being wrong.
Fans on the other hand, especially online fans, can say whatever and whenever. There is absolutely no cost to being wrong or contradictory. For every Amad, there is a Martial and Van De Beek. With a big enough fan base and enough stuff spouted online with no real cost to spouting it, some will be right sometimes.
Fans on the other hand, especially online fans, can say whatever and whenever. There is absolutely no cost to being wrong or contradictory. For every Amad, there is a Martial and Van De Beek. With a big enough fan base and enough stuff spouted online with no real cost to spouting it, some will be right sometimes.
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Posters and fans are not a monolith. Theres a majority opinion usually, but there are almost always other posters who are saying the opposite or providing a different solution.
Because thats the case the "fans" are always right, and always wrong.
In most cases at least one poster was right and far more often than any manager we've had post Sir Alex. But nobody has got it right every time.
Because thats the case the "fans" are always right, and always wrong.
In most cases at least one poster was right and far more often than any manager we've had post Sir Alex. But nobody has got it right every time.
Ole by faaaar, while everyone was blinded by nostalgia after his first 3 months, the timing of permanent contract was uttery awful. There were some dissenters who wanted to wait until the summer but they were clowned upon by masses "He has already won 13/14 in a row, what is going to change in next few months? "We aren't getting a better manager than Ole for this club in summer".
We then proceeded to win just 2 games for rest of the season, with some utterly humiliating defeats such 4-0 at Goodison after which Ole put the entire squad under the bus and said there will be big changes in the summer, only for him to make a grand total of one change (i.e. selling Lukaku) for next season. A theme which would continue throughout his tenure where he constantly latched onto narratives to save his ass.
Looking back at the amount of damage Ole did during his tenure here, atrocious signings, extremely poor squad at the time of his departure, abysmal attitude and culture he had cultivated by chummying up to the players. For those who were being called "clueless" at the time actually turned out to be spot on in their assessment of Ole.
We then proceeded to win just 2 games for rest of the season, with some utterly humiliating defeats such 4-0 at Goodison after which Ole put the entire squad under the bus and said there will be big changes in the summer, only for him to make a grand total of one change (i.e. selling Lukaku) for next season. A theme which would continue throughout his tenure where he constantly latched onto narratives to save his ass.
Looking back at the amount of damage Ole did during his tenure here, atrocious signings, extremely poor squad at the time of his departure, abysmal attitude and culture he had cultivated by chummying up to the players. For those who were being called "clueless" at the time actually turned out to be spot on in their assessment of Ole.
Bingo. That abysmal home loss against Cardiff in the final game of 2018/19 was the final straw for me. I didn't say it out loud but I knew full well right there and then that the chances of Ole returning us to our former glory was a big fat zero.
I also find the revisionism of his tenure with us to be slightly nauseating. Under him what we saw were periods of Indian summers, not signs of clear progress.
Same. I was never enthused about Moyes. I just knew that we’d be shit after Fergie left. I didn’t expect us to be this shit.