Static, slow motion zombie passing

They were never going to attack us. The problem was we didn't have any width and there was no space through the middle...but we're a bit short of wingers at the moment.

I thought the passing was very good, apart from when De Gea and the two centrebacks started dicking around as soon as we went a goal up.
 
It was like watching Liverpool during Benitez' reign.

Shit on stick.
 
Very hard to judge or take much for the game last night.

I think we still desperately need Scholes to play, but it’s who we play along side him is the issue
 
I don't like the idea of all three of Fletcher, Anderson and Cleverley starting unless it's a tougher opposition and we need to play possession, extremely defensive football.

I would like one of Ando and Clev paired with Carrick or a fit Fletcher with the Kagawa being one of the three in the midfield. For opposition like yesterday, who are just hell bent on defending and nothing else we need someone who has the ability to make that defense piercing pass through the middle. Someone who can also do little step-overs and has the ability to charge into the box and force the defense to make mistakes. Kagawa is better suited for that than Cleverley.

Also, like you guys already mentioned, we need to play with at least one of our wingers to provide width to spread the field. Yesterday was too narrow and too easy to defend for my liking.
 
Randall Flagg said:
Very hard to judge or take much for the game last night.

I think we still desperately need Scholes to play, but it’s who we play along side him is the issue
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As someone pointed out last week Scholes is not only good for our game and not suited for all opponents we play against.

In general, we are too slow in the build up and there is not enough movement off the ball. Another thing is the attitude that we have which sometimes is just not right - too casual, no urgency in our play and we are not pressing enough
 
In a 4-3-3 the fullbacks need to be the width.

Raf and evra played too conservatively yesterday, but we were clearly wary of their counter attacks.

Some of you are never happy. Run the game and keep possession = boring.

4-4-2, be wide open and score goals/let goals in and people complain we don't keep the ball
 
Escobar said:
As someone pointed out last week Scholes is not only good for our game and not suited for all opponents we play against.

In general, we are too slow in the build up and there is not enough movement off the ball. Another thing is the attitude that we have which sometimes is just not right - too casual, no urgency in our play and we are not pressing enough
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Scholes is suited to play anyone assuming he is fit. We need to work out who plays around him to make it click.
 
There is a difference between complaint and observation.

We have not perfected a system yet. Neither of the two approaches is ideal. Perfection lies somewhere in the middle, imo.

I keep repeating it, and will do it once more, we are a team in transition with regards to a 3 man midfield or variations of a 4-2-3-1 formation.
 
Talking Vulture said:
The joy has been sucked out of this team. We don't play fast, exciting football anymore. We're so fecking boring to watch it's untrue.
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True

We've only played decent 45 minutes during this season. That's because Nani, and Rooney were at their best.
 
Thing is that sort of game is perfect for scholes, they were sitting if us completely. Against a team with more ambition who will attack that's where he struggles.
 
Randall Flagg said:
Scholes is suited to play anyone assuming he is fit. We need to work out who plays around him to make it click.
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Not against teams that press us and play fast attacking football. He is perfect for games when the other team sits back and he has the time to distribute the ball and make us play
 
noodlehair said:
They were never going to attack us. The problem was we didn't have any width and there was no space through the middle...but we're a bit short of wingers at the moment.

I thought the passing was very good, apart from when De Gea and the two centrebacks started dicking around as soon as we went a goal up.
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Yeah, I agree. Yesterday's passing through the central areas coupled with wide players like Nani to run at defenders and open up space is ideal. While yesterday we passed it around much better it didn't do much damage most of the time because they Cruj knew there was no threat from out wide and hence could crowd up the central areas.
 
Escobar said:
Not against teams that press us and play fast attacking football. He is perfect for games when the other team sits back and he has the time to distribute the ball and make us play
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I disagree with this and always have done. Scholes is great at finding space and if he has one or even two mobile midfielders either side of him there should be no problems.
 
Nice to see how yesterday's lineup is bringing out a lot of intelligent discussion.

I think there's a good reason for all the: "Hmm, this actually looks a bit interesting. What if we tossed a winger in there somewhere?" reactions. Yes, it was against a Cluj side who weren't going to pressure us, but at the same time I think we were one wide player (and him occasionally drifting wide and beating some men and whipping in crosses) away from the caf being almost unanimously positive about last night's display. We definitely have the personnel to play that sort of interchanging system. Hope we see some more of it this season.
 
Randall Flagg said:
Scholes is suited to play anyone assuming he is fit. We need to work out who plays around him to make it click.
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No...he's really not.

Scholes is a midfield liability against teams that have energetic midfielders who can sit back and soak pressure when we are attacking but have the pace and awareness to hit us on the counter attack. Spuds did that well in the first half when they overran our midfield with shocking regularity. Other teams will do the same because Scholes offers very little cover in a defensive sense.
 
Talking Vulture said:
The joy has been sucked out of this team. We don't play fast, exciting football anymore. We're so fecking boring to watch it's untrue.
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This.

Even against teams that barely attack us we're passing side to side for 20 minutes and constantly going backwards trying to keep the ball but doing feck all in an attacking sense.

People used to say that tiki taka football Barca / Arsenal play is boring and it definitely can be...but we're just as bad, if not worse.
 
It sure is a bother that we slack off so much after a one goal lead.

This always has the potential to backfire but I felt we played quite well over large parts of the game yesterday.

But like some have mentioned our FBs need to get forward more if we play without wingers.
 
What the feck is the complaining about here?

We were away from home in a competition that we got knocked out of last year for being totally inept. We are notorious for playing cautiously away from home and dragging out the wins/draws we need in the CL and that's exactly what happened last night. The only thing wrong with the performance was the defense, who were shambolic at times.
 
Cina is right. Exciting games in the CL group stages featuring Manchester United are a collectors item these days and have been for some years. We did the job and looked completely in control. For exciting games and attacking football, this was never the right place to look.
 
Twiggs - apart from 45 mins v Spurs and arguably the CC game v Newcastle, how much good football have we actually played? And v Spurs, we were forced into attacking, we didn't play like that because we wanted to. We'd have been just as shit to watch if we went in at half time 0-0
 
good football?

Has anyone been watching our defense or midfield lately?

On what planet is that considered good?

Name one player besides Scholes in our midfield who has been good...Anderson, Clev, Carrick, Valencia, Nani have all been ok. That's about it. Giggs has been poor.

The same is true for our defense. Besides Rafael who's been good? Rio, Evans have been ok that's about it. Evra has been gash...

It's only in attack we have a few really good / great players...and even there i'd be hard pressed to say Hernandez or Welbeck have been wowing us with their performances.

People say we've been good and i'm not quite sure if we're watching the same team to be honest.
 
The last time we got into the final we were boring as feck in the group stages despite playing well in the league, including (if I remember correctly) two really boring draws against Rangers and Valencia, which is what prompted Randall Flagg to make his thread.

We dominated the game yesterday and other than terrible defending from some of our defenders we had no real issues, which is a far cry from the joke performances we saw last season.
 
I was referring to last game where most of our team looked promising.

Okay it was against cluj but I think it was a positive development the way we played yesterday especially because we have been so bad the games before that.

So if recently refers to our last game I'd say they are right but if recently includes our last handful of games of course we haven't been good, not even okay most of the times.
 
I didn't see the issue with last night. You generally don't get exciting games against teams that defend with every player on the edge of their own box, even when they're losing.

Our passing and tempo was actually pretty good I thought...a lot better than it generally has been in the previous games league and champions league games. What we were missing was anoyne to stretch the game out wide. Evra kept cutting inside for some reason, which didn't help.

The only annoying thing was we got slack just when they started tiring and leaving gaps everywhere.
 
Quite a few of the people moaning about our performance last night are also people who didn't like the idea of us playing without wingers, cause it's so against club policy and all.
 
Cina said:
Quite a few of the people moaning about our performance last night are also people who didn't like the idea of us playing without wingers, cause it's so against club policy and all.
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Well at least they're consistent.

I'm not happy with our performance last night, for one reason: we stopped playing football after taking the lead. That seems to be a club policy as well, a fecking retarded one.
 
You can understand people sort of wondering what we were doing just walking round with the ball and not showing much adventure. I suppose there was probably a bit of caution given the worry of conceding a late goal to a team that were so obviously quite poor in a competition that we really bollocksed up last year.

We need to sort out our willingness to move forward with the ball and our movement off it though, no doubt. These are very simple things that would improve us tenfold.
 
I was pretty happy with last night. Some of the "shit on a stick, sucking the life out of football" complaints are fecking retarded if you don't mind me saying.

We've been notoriously awful in midfield lately, with everyone (rightly) blaming our static central mid and reliance on wingers, so we tried something completely different and it looked like the germ of something interesting. It wasn't perfect, and it's not going to happen overnight, but with the important partnerships of Rooney & RVP/Ando & Clev not having a huge amount of game time together, I was heartened by their performances and when it did click, it clicked well. Certainly compared to the predictable dirge of the last few weeks.

Suck a dick haters.
 
It's always going to be diificult when you have 11 behind the ball!

I thought Clev found himself in some great positions.
 
We need to play something like this:

Rafael - Evans - Ferdinand - Evra
-----------Carrick-------------
---------------Anderson
Valencia-----------Kagawa
----------Rooney
----------------- RVP

One winger for width so we dont end up congesting the middle like yesterday. We cant play two out and out wingers if we want to utilize our front 3 of Kagawa, Rooney and RVP to the max.

And no Scholes - Carrick partnership. That just leads to a huge gap between them and the attacking players that the opposition midfield can use to do whatever they want.
 
Good away performance I thought, Cluj are no pub team as some would have you believe and considering we've got another big game at the weekend it's not surprising we just played keep ball once we took the lead, especially considering the amount of defensive injuries we have at the minute.

You have to remember as well that Fletcher, Anderson, Cleverley, Rooney and Hernandez haven't played that much football recently and were playing in a pretty unfamiliar system which I though they adapted to quite well especially in the first half. Anderson actually contributed right up until the final whistle as well which is progress for him.

I agree that we haven't been at our best pretty much all season but I have no complaints after that performance considering last years campaign.
 
We were hardly playing one of Europe's elite teams to make much of a judgement from that performance.

I want the orgasmic United back, once in a while.
 
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