Who? I feel the same but not convinced anyone else attainable would do better. I’m not concinced by Zidane.
The Mourinho Thread: Should he stay or go? | Sacked
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I never believed in the football moves on stuff people spout from time to time but I honestly feel he's a one trick pony and that his reputation is that damaged through years of bad treatment of players and clubs boards that now nobody wants to play for him. His system and style of football is so dated, he's all about power and defensive shape when now it's all about teams playing out from the back and fullbacks that are effectively wingers.
The Valencia fixtures in Europe are so important, we could struggle to get through the group if they don't go well.
The Valencia fixtures in Europe are so important, we could struggle to get through the group if they don't go well.
We haven't see the best of them yet and they have potential to succeed....if give proper chance.
There was still the small matter of finishing above Barcelona lead by Pep the saviour of the worlds.
Also, he did win a title with Chelsea after that.
I do think he should go, just am not buying into the narrative that he completely lost it at some point.
When he was at Real, no one was saying that he was a dinosaur. cnut yes, dinosaur no.
Yes, of course. I was exaggerating slightly. But clearly if you have absolutely world-class players in every position, and loads of great replacements, then you're pretty much inevitably going to end up with a great team. You'd have to fail monumentally to have a squad almost entirely comprised of world-class players, and then perform poorly.
It's not even that - the op said it wrong - there is a difference between plotting them out on the pitch & expecting them to do the best. They need to be positioned better to get the best out of them in a regular manner where they build confidence by every match.
We have Rashford playing left & right - getting trampled on when he suddenly doesn't score upfront as a makeshift target man for the rest of the team.
Martial plays on the left when he has the best short passing, 1-2's, dribbling as well as first touch - ie he should playing central to bring others in to play in my opinion rather than expecting a world class cross again in to a single target man. Same could be said about Sanchez.
Lukaku himself is better just off the centre on the right to utilise his left foot after running behind the defence - not to be the one who initiates play from the centre.
Would Firminho be good on the left wing supplying crosses for Sturrridge? How would Salah be on the other side - he isn't all that good when Sturrridge plays himself. Just as an example - players need to be positioned well - not just put on the pitch to get the best out of a very few players.
The point is that you can't really point to his Real Madrid team as evidence of his attacking coaching ability, as he simply had world-class players, at their peak, in every position, plus ten absolute quality replacements.
If you look at his recent seasons:
2012-13 was a disaster for Real Madrid, he fell out with everybody and left.
2013-14 was a reasonable season for Chelsea, but nothing special, they didn't win anything.
2014-15 Chelsea won the league.
2015-16 was a disaster for Chelsea, they were on the verge of the relegation zone, clearly Mourinho had lost the dressing-room. Sacked.
2016-17 was a poor season for United in the league. They won two trophies of minimal importance.
2017-18 was an okay season, but after a strong start United tailed off badly, and won nothing.
2018-19 this season has begun poorly, and United are almost falling out of the title race already.
He's only really had one good season in the last seven. His big triumphs are disappearing over the horizon.
Never should have allowed both Klopp and Guardiola go somewhere else. They look light years ahead of Mourinho.
I would do whatever possible to get Pochettino. Don't care if he's under contract or not. We are reactionary. You get the feeling our next manager is the next available guy. Personally, would give it to McKenna till we can bring Pochettino in if he gives an indication that he's willing to come. We are not coming top four with Mourinho so imo, there's no risk.
Mata is past his best unfortunately, and they are not good enough at this moment in time. Martial doesn’t seem to have the determination to fulfill his potential and Rashford is a lot of hype and is not as great as people think. He has great pace but not much of a footballing brain. He should go out on loan.
This needs a new thread -
This season looks lost & it is the best available time for a neo - manager be that Carrick, Butt or McKenna - give them half a season & see how they do - if they suffer then give it back to a more tried & tested manager.
Pep would utilize Rashford the way Gabriel Jesus would - almost minute differences ; Lukaku would be the one that is not good enough for him. I don't see much of a difference between martial & Sterling either - except one has manager that has made him better by making him play as a forward rather than a supplier to his one central striker.
Yet Jesus doesn’t start that often and the difference is that he has David Silva and KDB behind him.
Sterling is stacks ahead of Martial. He runs behind the defence and his movement is great. He also seems to ghost past people like the Martial of old but he seems to have lost that. Martial stands still and waits for the ball to come to feet with little off ball movement. Sterling has that. If Sterling had better finishing he would be unbelievable.
Not only that, but Mourinho’s style is not great. The last 20 minutes vs Wolves was just hoof ball i to the box. Even the best players in the world would struggle with that. He probably doesn’t trust the players to actually play football and win the game without that tactic.
Out of our starting 11 today 5 of them were José signings.
The others were de Gea - best GK in the world, Shaw - our in form player and potentially a very good one, and Smalling, Fellaini Valencia and Lingard - all four he chose to keep and persist with even though they could've been sold and/or he could've bought replacements for.
This is his squad so if our current squad isn't good enough it falls on José's head, too.
Tired of hearing about squad quality. We drop points against recently promoted teams on a reg.
But does it fall on his head? Woodward and whoever else deals with transfers failed to sign Mourinho targets this season. Which makes me wonder how many other 1st choice players on Mourinho’s list did Woodward and co fail to sign since Mou has been here.
Maybe he didn’t get the number 1 players he wanted. Yes he has to get the best out of them, but the transfer dealings are not on him.
I remember when people would say the supposed weaker teams raise their game against us, they simply know they can get something from us. There is zero fear about playing us these days.
I don't understand why he keeps on breaking things in the team that are working.
We had a fairly good CB partnership in Blind and Smalling when he took over. He spent £60m and we have ended up with a worse one.
Herrera was brilliant as a DM in his first season and partnered well with Pogba. Almost £100m later on Matic and Fred and our midfield looks worse.
We had Martial playing fantastically on the left last season. He signed Sanchez to play instead of him and we look worse in that position too.
We had Lingard playing the best football of his career as a #10. He moved him back to right wing where he's always looked extremely average.
It's ridiculous. Watching him try to construct his United team is like watching someone do a jigsaw and every five minutes they stop and rip up the corners.
We had a fairly good CB partnership in Blind and Smalling when he took over. He spent £60m and we have ended up with a worse one.
Herrera was brilliant as a DM in his first season and partnered well with Pogba. Almost £100m later on Matic and Fred and our midfield looks worse.
We had Martial playing fantastically on the left last season. He signed Sanchez to play instead of him and we look worse in that position too.
We had Lingard playing the best football of his career as a #10. He moved him back to right wing where he's always looked extremely average.
It's ridiculous. Watching him try to construct his United team is like watching someone do a jigsaw and every five minutes they stop and rip up the corners.
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None of us know, really.
All we can assume is that these players must have been on his list in some capacity and Ed got them for him. Fact is, whilst it's not the best squad, it is a good one which cost a lot of money so José - an apparent top manager - should be getting a lot more out of it after 3 years now. This is my, and seemingly many others, take on our current situation.
Willian & Aldeweireld are short term plasters over a problem he himself causes - ie using 4231 when we had makeshift left wingers the first two seasons & no winger on the right at all. Easiest thing for him to do was to switch 352 - get two strikers upfront with the wing backs providing the width instead of having our main attackers providing the width.
I ultimately don't think it matters anymore - there was a time when Sanchez - Lukaku - Willian could win the PL - not anymore; the football I am seeing here in the UK has gone up a notch. Proven to me by Jose's title winning 81 points last season, his best season - yet it wasn't good enough.
So surprised to see another overreaction to a bad result.
Not really.
Not really.
It’s like playing Football Manager for the first time. You lose 3 of your first 5 league matches and start to change everything for every game and you lose even more.
Then you turn the game off and start smashing the house up in a drink and drug fueled rage. Then you start shouting at the wifey whilst pissing all over the dog.
Oh wait...
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I agree and have thought the exact same regard every point you've made. Watching Lindelof and selling Blind still hurts. Freezing Martial out of the team when he was on fire was just absurd. Like you, I said Herrera should've remained as our #1 DM but hasn't played there for ages despite always doing well.
Lingard I kinda get but, with the form he was in, I wouldn't have argued against him staying in the #10 slot for longer. I thought he was one of our better players today as well.
It's not just one result, though. It's 3 years of this. I don't know why you like sweeping this under the carpet, trying to make out all this criticism is based off one result.
Because we actually finished 2nd last season and got two trophies in his first season. Every single time we don’t win a game it’s the same old song over and over again as if people are genuinely waiting for our slip ups to be able to moan.
"A bad result"...really?
1st season - even though I didn't want him here - I praised José big time. I think that's when we played our best stuff under him for sure, and the Europa win was a great achievement from him so I praised him big time there, too.
Last year was awful for me. The football was, in my opinion, really bad to watch, and I felt like 2nd wasn't as big an accomplishment as many made it out to be. Mainly because I felt we got there due to the magnificence of de Gea, and as we can't rely on him in ever game I knew, without trying to sort out our tactics, there'd be no chance of repeating that, nevermind building off of it. Like, Spurs and Arsenal have finished 2nd in recent years and both fell down the table the following years. Finishing 2nd isn't a guarantee of anything, and the awful football we played in finishing there just left a bad taste.
This year hasn't gone so well either. Started off poorly, but in recent weeks we seemed to be addressing out tactical problems only for us to revert back to the slow style and lack of off the ball movement and pressing as before, which is why I personally criticised tonight.
& I've been José out before most, but it isn't a case of "waiting for our slip ups to be able to moan" as I praised José and the team after the 3-0 defeat to Spurs hoping we'd build off the way we went about that game in future games, which we were doing until tonight. I was more optimistic after the 3-0 defeat than after most of our lucky wins last year. Young Boys was a bit off, too, but under the conditions of their pitch and whatnot a 3-0 win was great regardless of continuing said approach.
Anyone pointing to our squad is being a bit ridiculous. We lose to significantly worse teams (where the whole squad have a lesser transfer value than say Pogba) almost regularly , and guess what? Improving players is a job of the coach - bar 1 or two most have stagnated or gone backwards. When so many of our player's forms are patchy at best, surely you look at those in charge? If we need 11 world class players to beat wolverfeckinghampton then dayum!!
Mourinho's strength was his dynamism and ability to adapt but he's shown no evide ce of that at United. His record - which he likes to bring up oh so often, sometimes even as a stick to beat United with - means sweet nothing for us in the present, we can only go on what he's done/doing here and it's simply not good enough. If anything we are getting worse. There's no light at the end of this tunnel.
That second place last year was more down to our competition being poor than us being the second best team in England. With a few games being the exception, we were shite and we're embarrassed by in Europe. We've become Arsenal if thats being used to illustrate 'achievement'.
Mourinho's strength was his dynamism and ability to adapt but he's shown no evide ce of that at United. His record - which he likes to bring up oh so often, sometimes even as a stick to beat United with - means sweet nothing for us in the present, we can only go on what he's done/doing here and it's simply not good enough. If anything we are getting worse. There's no light at the end of this tunnel.
That second place last year was more down to our competition being poor than us being the second best team in England. With a few games being the exception, we were shite and we're embarrassed by in Europe. We've become Arsenal if thats being used to illustrate 'achievement'.
starts breaking records from the off, like moyes did
Didn't we do that with Moyes?
Big difference between the brands of football played by Moyes and Niko Kovac.
A better equivalent would be Spurs taking a gamble on Poch.
We really didn’t get second because of De Gea, we got it because we were fairly good throughout the entire season.
De Gea has been amazing for us but he had probably got more points for United in the previous three seasons than he got last season.
I'm sure there are more imaginative and appropriate choices out there than Moyes.
It's like saying we shouldn't buy any more unproven young players because we took a bath on David Bellion.
Well, there's where we'll have to agree to disagree. I thought we were rubbish for the most part. A few good games (City away, Crystal Palace away, Liverpool home, Chelsea home, Everton away) but by and large it was, to me, akin to van Gaal's 2nd season in how boring we were to watch, and disjointed we looked as a team. Even in van Gaal's 2nd season he had some good games, too. That off the back of a season where I did think we played really good stuff at times under José and won 3 cups so it was even more disappointing.
That's why myself and plenty of others aren't surprised by our struggles this year. We needed some serious work done on our tactics as we wouldn't get as fortunate two seasons in a row. We seemingly did a bit of work before the Spurs game after looking as poor as we did last year, which was evident as you could tell with how we were playing and the players commenting on the new training stuff they were doing, so I'm just hoping we focus on working out these tactical problems instead of thinking all we need is a new player or a change in formation as it runs a lot deeper than that.
If we will take the unproven choice option, I'll prefer Nagelsmann then.
Too late he's going to RB next season
Hmm shite.
Can't think of any other unproven choice better than him. Still if he does well there we can try and lure him the season after next.
I like Tuchel, but don't think we could get him from PSG.
Don't know about Mou but I'm ready for bed now.
It's a rollercoaster this. I finally started joining the Mourinho in brigade, only to get let down once again. We're back to creating nothing and only attacking option being long balls to Fellaini. How I'd have loved to have Sarri here...
No way. He had PSG badly organised again Liverpool and defensively they were terrible. Keeping Mourinho is a much better option than him.
To be fair I can't think of one manager in world football who can make Neymar track back. But yeah, a midfield of Rabiot, Di Maria and Marquinos was really naive.
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