Stopped reading there. He clearly wasnt. Our other midfielders were consistantly better than him last season, Petrucci etc. anyone who follows the reserves will tell you that.
Paul Pogba
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Stopped reading there. He clearly wasnt. Our other midfielders were consistantly better than him last season, Petrucci etc. anyone who follows the reserves will tell you that.
Well he must have progressed massively since the start of last season given he has been able to adequately cover anyone of the midfielders in one of the best midfield trios in Europe this season.
Cognitive dissonance is amusing.
Cognitive dissonance is amusing.
People are proper obsessed with that blackburn game. Just because somebody plays in that position doesn't mean they should automatically start if the other centre mids are out. Experience is important after all and Pogba only had experience of reverse team football.
It's frustrating as feck because it was clear as day that both players were unbelievable talents, despite most of the forum doing a u-turn on that once they started making life difficult. Maybe it was still the best decision for the club, we can't really say, but I'd like to assume so given we would surely try harder to keep players of their potential. It's no surprise at all to hear Pogba is developing into a great footballer.
It's hindsight. We looked terrible in midfield that game, I'm pretty certain Pogba would have done no worse than Rafael/Park, who had no/barely any experience of playing in midfield themselves.
They won't make it past the group stage mate!
Exactly. I hated Pogba leaving, Morrison not as much because his attitude problems had been well documented. He looks set to become a fantastic player.
Then how he became ready in a space of only some months to play in a midfield better than us?
A question to those who think he was ready.........despite being regularly outplayed by his team mates and looking nowhere near the same prospect as the previous season. Often disinterested etc. Does that not mean anything anymore, ie lack of respect for the club and the manager? Or is that ok now depending on how natually talented you are?
Physically he may have been ready. Technically he may have been ready. But if he's not mentally ready, which you'd need to be to be introduced into the title race against your biggest rivals so late on, then Fergie had every right not to play him over experienced players.
Does he face that same pressure at Juve, playing against much weaker teams (especially since the two Milan clubs have crumbled)? No he doesn't. Especially at the start of a season too, there's a much more relaxed feel to the games than there is in the penultimate month of the season.
He's going to be exactly the type of player we needed to fill that hole in our midfield. Fergie and co screwed up. It's not shocking, it happens. We should move on. And certainly shouldn't put the blame on Pogba. Fergie called him 'first team' and never let him anywhere near it. I'd of left too.
You can hardly argue with leaving our reserves and moving straight into the Italian champions lineup.
You can hardly argue with leaving our reserves and moving straight into the Italian champions lineup.
Given nobody on the internet has a fecking baldy of what actually happened you should probably steer away from making such definitive statements.
But thats not what you said originally. You said he wasnt ready, which many would have disagreed with at the time and has been proven not to be the case now. Him playing as though he is disinterested is another matter.
We need to remember though that Pogba had a real stop start season in the end because he was often sitting out reserve games only to sit on the bench for the first team and not come on. I calculated at one point he hadnt playrd footy for two weeks because of this. We seemed to have learnt our lesson with Powell though and he is being managed better.
Kids gonna be world class, knew it from the first time I saw him.
atleast he is at a foreign club rather than a rival.
atleast he is at a foreign club rather than a rival.
Ok fair enough. Answer me this though...what made him ready in the intervening 7-8 months since Fergusons midfield crisis and the composed form we see now? Surely can't be 7 subsitute appearances for United...or more reserve games..a level he was clearly too superior for. The thing is man when you are that good, there are only so many reserve games you can keep playing, before you need 1st team games to prove that you can handle the pressure and play your game. Pogba is proving that right now so I doubt so much has changed within him during those intervening months when he was not included.
And by the way I have watched plenty of reserve matches, if that somehow validates my opinion.
I watched Juve get beat on Sunday and he didn't get on.
Watching him this season he seems to have matured physically over the summer. Not that he wasn't a big lad anyway but it seems he filled out a bit more and looks stronger and that is a factor in judging when a player is ready for the thick of it, especially a central midfielder. Fergie may have been waiting for this and trying to ease him into it.
Last season in the reserves he had a couple of games where he showed his class but mainly looked like he couldn't be arsed and thought he was above it all. Less talented players around him impressed more because they were putting the effort in. If he carried this attitude in training then Fergie may have picked up on it and decided he needed to show more hunger, desire and professionalism in everything he does before he throws him in full time. Make him earn his chance so to speak.
Big shame he has moved on as he is a talent but there is plenty more fish in the sea (our academy) and no point crying over spilt milk.
Watching him this season he seems to have matured physically over the summer. Not that he wasn't a big lad anyway but it seems he filled out a bit more and looks stronger and that is a factor in judging when a player is ready for the thick of it, especially a central midfielder. Fergie may have been waiting for this and trying to ease him into it.
Last season in the reserves he had a couple of games where he showed his class but mainly looked like he couldn't be arsed and thought he was above it all. Less talented players around him impressed more because they were putting the effort in. If he carried this attitude in training then Fergie may have picked up on it and decided he needed to show more hunger, desire and professionalism in everything he does before he throws him in full time. Make him earn his chance so to speak.
Big shame he has moved on as he is a talent but there is plenty more fish in the sea (our academy) and no point crying over spilt milk.
This is it, again. Midfield trios and youngsters being ready. The more we play 2 in midfield, the less chance we have of bringing players like Pogba through. It is at least less frustrating to hear that Pogba is playing with 2 other midfielders, because he definitely wasn't ready to start next to any other one of our own. Defensive and off the ball work (with and without possession) was simply nowhere the standard required. There is and has been a lot of criticism of our midfield being incompetent in various ways, but last year's Pogba paired with Carrick really wouldn't have been a good idea at all based on past performances. He was not ready for that if his previous performances were to be used in evidence.
What still makes it annoying though is this rigidity with which we seem to be tied down to this 2 central midfielders business. I keep moaning about it in every thread possible but it's genuinely going to be make it really difficult to bring through even the most talented of central midfielders. It's things like this that were massively influential in not being able to afford him enough time, although him being impatient and us being in a very decisive period didn't help either. From what I remember of last year's title race, we didn't really kill off games early enough to risk bringing him on.
Juventus play him now because they promised they would in order to sign him, had he been in their reserves he may have got a few chances, as he probably would've by now at Utd, but not as many.
I seen him play twice for them and though he looked good, like he will become a very good player, I wasn't as impressed as others seem to be.
With players like Anderson, Cleverley and Powell all struggling to get a consistent number of games I'm not sure keeping Pogba, when he was contemplating leaving, would've been a good idea.
Still far, far more devastated about Morrison turning out to be such a Ihni binni dimi diniwiny anitaime in all honesty. Now if he turns out to be world class, I will be very annoyed.
I seen him play twice for them and though he looked good, like he will become a very good player, I wasn't as impressed as others seem to be.
With players like Anderson, Cleverley and Powell all struggling to get a consistent number of games I'm not sure keeping Pogba, when he was contemplating leaving, would've been a good idea.
Still far, far more devastated about Morrison turning out to be such a Ihni binni dimi diniwiny anitaime in all honesty. Now if he turns out to be world class, I will be very annoyed.
I disagree. No one knows what happened, but the outcome is clear - we let go a very talented player from our own youth team who plays in a position where we're critically weak at the moment.
And he is good enough to walk into Juve's team.
I don't really care about the dynamics. If you believe that having Pogba with us this season would improve our squad and possibly even our first XI, then Fergie and co screwed up. It really is that simple.
Contracts, wages, attitude, personality - all of these things are just factors influencing the above. If we would be better with him, it is down to Fergie and his team to sort it out.
So either you believe that there is some personality or wage issue that means we're better off without him, or Fergie screwed up.
Good post. Far more eloquent than my attempt. I think it has to be mentioned that outside influences and his agent played a massive part in his departure. The club has standards in this respect and the second we let them slip and bender over backwards for an individual will be a dark dark day imo.
For a player of his age and position looking at our current squad if he had any real desire to play for us he would have committed for at least another year. His agent seems to have a huge factor in all of this. Its a different generation of footballer and fan these days i suppose.
I think we could have found more room for him even if it was just as a sub. From a starting perspective, jones got a fair few games in the middle, as did park, rafael got 1, so I think there was scope to play him more. He didn't even go on tour with us so it's questionable how much fergie was gonna involve him but then at the same time I don't know how competitive the italien league is. I'm not sure how much juventus won the title by but in England we have ever decreasing margins at the top, there just isn't the room for mistakes and so it makes it tough to take a chance on youngsters because of this.
Ideally we'd have got him a loan but that depends on how open he was too that and if there were issues over wage. If he is starting to how his potential then that is sad for us but I'm sure we'll get by.
Ideally we'd have got him a loan but that depends on how open he was too that and if there were issues over wage. If he is starting to how his potential then that is sad for us but I'm sure we'll get by.
We had to keep Jones happy, having just signed him and for such a fee. Same with Park, a senior player who was hardly playing needs to get game time.
Yeah, not entirely sure how much desire was actually there right from the start of last season come to think about it. It's a real kick in the teeth losing players of his and Morrison's quality whatever the reason, but he really didn't do himself any favours whilst in the reserves. He spent a lot of the time walking round the pitch and doing something amazing/quality every now and then, but I can't ever remember much urgency or willingness to dominate a game. Perhaps with him it was a case of knowing how good he was, and that he'd be alright in the end no matter what happened. That or his head was turned earlier than we thought...maybe those quotes from Fergie about him leaving if he didn't get game time were in response to something that was already happening?
Yeah but he was getting a lot of games in defence and park was a player we clearly didn't have a long plan for. Better players than him have been marginalised. Tbh though I think last season was just tough in general to blood people in. Injuries to the defence and midfield crippled us in Europe where normally we would have won that group leaving 2 or so games where we could have played him. We didnt and haven't had easy draws in the FA cup to work with and with only carrick around as an experienced midfield for most the season it was even tougher to bring in another raw player. Had fletcher been fit we might have been able to bring Pogba in and still have an experienced head next to him.
It's not as simple as in FM.
There are heaps of variables we'll never consider or even know, heck even SAF might not know what's inside of the kids head.
It's not as simple as technically good = improving squad.
Let's take an extreme example, do you think if we bought Tevez and plug them in the team we'll play better? Probably not, as human feelings are a meticulate and strange things.
Perhaps the senior players don't rate him, perhaps they're not confident with playing with him, perhaps SAF himself is not playing him due to instinct and gut feeling that he won't make it, and all other X factor we will never be able to fully judge and fathom.
Should Ronaldo comes for the Scouse, he will not be the player he is today, or he could have been better, but nobody will ever gonna find out, the same with Pogba.
We got a bit too sentimentil with youngster, but SAF got most of his decision correct so far, and to think he simply screw is up is a 20/20 hindsight which are yet to be proven.
The important thing for me is not that we lost Pogba. No matter how well he's doing now for Juve, I don't think he'd be starting ahead of Carrick, Cleverley or Anderson for us. We haven't missed him yet.
The important thing is having a system in place to prevent it happening again. Our current generation have a few likely looking players coming through, particularly Lingard, Cole and Will Keane (without whose injury I don't think we would have bought Henriquez). The generation below them, the current U18s, is packed full of potential stars. It's hard not to gush about them, they're so promising.
The direct cause of the Pogba thing may have been money, as some claim. But ultimately it comes down to playing time, and that's the factor over which we'll lose or keep the next lot. Ultimately you can convince a young player who wants more money to stay by giving them game time in the first team, but you won't keep a player who's desperate to play and thinks they're ready by simply bumping the financial offer a bit.
We've spent the last five years buying a couple of young talents each year. Most positions on the pitch now have one or two of them either starting or pushing for a place. Smalling, Jones, Fabio, Buttner, Cleverley, Anderson, Powell, Welbeck, Hernandez. It's time to stop doing that for a summer or two, and let the fruits of our own much improved acadamy system start to feed in. If we don't do that, then we'll be stalling their development, the development of the academy, and our development towards the youth-based model which everyone wants. And they'll all be swanning off to teams who will know that they're guaranteed a great player, a la Pogba.
The important thing is having a system in place to prevent it happening again. Our current generation have a few likely looking players coming through, particularly Lingard, Cole and Will Keane (without whose injury I don't think we would have bought Henriquez). The generation below them, the current U18s, is packed full of potential stars. It's hard not to gush about them, they're so promising.
The direct cause of the Pogba thing may have been money, as some claim. But ultimately it comes down to playing time, and that's the factor over which we'll lose or keep the next lot. Ultimately you can convince a young player who wants more money to stay by giving them game time in the first team, but you won't keep a player who's desperate to play and thinks they're ready by simply bumping the financial offer a bit.
We've spent the last five years buying a couple of young talents each year. Most positions on the pitch now have one or two of them either starting or pushing for a place. Smalling, Jones, Fabio, Buttner, Cleverley, Anderson, Powell, Welbeck, Hernandez. It's time to stop doing that for a summer or two, and let the fruits of our own much improved acadamy system start to feed in. If we don't do that, then we'll be stalling their development, the development of the academy, and our development towards the youth-based model which everyone wants. And they'll all be swanning off to teams who will know that they're guaranteed a great player, a la Pogba.
The question is, are they better than those we bought?
United first, the rest is just bonus, it's proud to have our own youth going thru the ranks, but first and foremost, they are there on merits, and not just because they're our youth.
I don't think Macheda, and everyone else are better than Chicarito, and if they happens to be, they got time (Welbeck)
I really don't think SAF buying youngster just for the sake of it, he see something we don't, and most of the time he justified his young player signing (ronaldo, chicarito, jones, etc etc) would we fare better if we didn't buy Chicarito and play Macheda instead?
Yes.I say we forget about Pogba and move on.
I am not saying that he should have played in every game. But, he should have played a lot more, there were many cup games when he should have played, there were a lot of games when we were winning with a lot of goals and he could have played in second half and there were many games against shit oppositions.
Fergie didn't believe him, he felt he was ready and deserved to play more and left the team. It looks that he was right. Now, let's hope that we learnt the lesson which I believe we have cause Powell has played more minutes for us in these three months then Pogba has played in his entire career. And Powell is not better than him ('till now, who knows what will happen), and we have same midfielders as last year.
He could and probably should have been introduced a lot sooner than the penultimate weeks of the season. Fergusons midfield was a mess before December, the last group game in the Champions League he played Jones, Park and Giggs for gods sake. When Scholes returned that was basically it for Pogba.
Ferguson was so scared of City pulling away he opted for experience through until May. Of course he was ready mentally he was desperate to play in the first eleven and prove himself. In the moments he did get there was a definite assuredness in his play. You only have to look at Ryan Tunnicliffe's baptism last week to gauge whether a player is ready or not.
As for the difference in pressure, I don't agree. He is playing for a big club in a major league, playing Champions League football against the best on the continent. He is surrounded by supremely talented players with whom he must compete with for a starting spot in the first 11. You perhaps need to check out Serie A more often, Inter ended Juve's 49 match unbeaten run at the weekend, leaving them 2 points behind in the table...they are not crumbling they are improving all the time under a talented young manager. Plenty of good sides left in Italy it just happens Juve are the best of the current crop.
Agree but i think the final straw for him was when SAF played Rafael, Park & Gibbo ahead of him...
How do people even know he's ready now? New players often outperform expectations. playing well in 3 or 4 league starts does not make someone ready. You've seen the same with Jones and you're seeing the same with Sterling.
Either way, thankfully Sir Alex cares about more than just potential talent.
Either way, thankfully Sir Alex cares about more than just potential talent.
Agreed. (Before I get to my point, I personally think it's time to cut our losses on Macheda. He was worth a try, but clearly isn't quite a United quality player.)
As I see it, those young players purchased fall into two categories:
1: Potential world-class stars who you have to get if you can. Ronaldo, possibly Jones at the time if you listen to the way Fergie spoke about him, potentially Anderson and Nani. I think both Hazard and Lucas were thought of in this category, and the amounts of money that were paid to prevent us getting them seems to support that.
2: Replacements for old players, back-up for weak positions, and basically the players who you hope will be the bulk of the future team. Smalling, Buttner, Powell (may be somewhere between the two groups, hard to say what SAF thinks), the da Silvas, Henriquez, Hernandez etc.
Obviously you have to keep buying the first type. Purchases like that are the difference between CL finalists and PL runners up in modern football. Barca are still on top because even they make them, and Neymar is a great example of that.
As for the second type, although most of those examples were crucial and brilliant at the time, I honestly believe that the huge increase in quality in our academy means we should be making fewer of them now. If Fergie sees that we are weak in, say, central midfield, I'd just like to think that before buying he looks at our reserves. Rather than thinking 'That lad's brilliant but I've never played him in the first team before, he's not ready', he might think 'that lad's brilliant, the coaches say he's one of the best they've ever seen, maybe I should try throwing him in at the deep end.' Personally I think he could have stood to not buy Powell and let Petrucci have a go instead. And if Keane hadn't got injured, the same goes for him and Henriquez (but the injury does make that one more tricky.)
Ultimately, a good academy deserves that sort of trust. But it can't earn that trust until you've gambled on it a couple of times.
(Also I've just realised that in the post you replied to, I named Cleverley. But obviously he's an example of what can happen if you do give a home-grown a chance. I reckon if we'd been Arsenal, his career would have kicked off just as successfully earlier, like it did for Wilshere.)
Sterling has been really brilliant. He's a perfect example of why sometimes it's worth gambling with an untried youngster. He's been at least twice as effective as Downing.
Thanks for replying to my questions by the way, after you deliberately and petulantly dismissed my initial post. That's fine if you don't agree but you should at least have the decency to fecking reply to me once you have blatantly dismissed most of a post. Smacks of arrogance mate.
Kudos to KingEric it is a good post, but pretty much everything you have said here is pedantic, overly pretentious folly. The club have "certain standards" what happened with Rooney then? Or Saha? Or Stam? Even Bebe that is dodgy as feck. You are living in a fantasy world if you think Manchester United don't bend rules or bend over for certain individuals. Lay off the sentimentality its not applicable in this scenario. Pogba wants to play football and gain a respectable wage for his efforts. United couldn't offer him this so he went to another big club and got his wish, now its paying off for him...he is looking after himself the same way Rooney did, its the way shit works. Ferguson does it himself...its human nature.
Easier to blood a winger than an central midfielder. The whole team can revolve around central midfield.
And a hell of a lot easier to blood players when you're not competing for the title against City and Chelsea.
Really, youth development at United has been severely screwed up since Abramovich came. To compete with teams who don't give a damn about youth development and put out lineups with 20m+ players in every position then you just can't take risks anymore, certainly not in the run-in.
Nick Powell would have played loads of games for United by now in the pre-Abramovich era.
Only a matter of time I think
City were/are a possibility
Good post, all true. I still think it's possible in a post-Abramovic era. Barca do it on a big scale against Real. But much, much harder.
Chelsea finished about 35 points behind last season.
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