Turning on Rangnick

It was time for Ole to go, to be sure. But let’s not forget Ole guided the same squad (inferior, actually) to 2nd and a club record unbeaten away streak.

Those of you who are dismissive of Ole’s accomplishments, just look at what Rangnick has done. We are further from a philosophy or style than we were under Ole. The players clearly don’t respect Ralf, nor the new coach Armas. How can you? Neither has won anything or even played in a top league.
Really, really shite. Was so disgusted after watching Wolves, I couldn’t bear to watch post game interviews.

So, so disappointed.
What has Ralf done? The players clearly don't respect him? You need to calm down buddy.

The guy has been in charge for five games and his record is 3 wins 1 draw 1 loss. Let's see where we are around the end of feb and make judgements then.
 
I'm increasingly convinced that he sold the vision of a front 2 to the United board as the way to get the best out of their Ronaldo investment, and that has completely tied his hands in terms of his options.

I don't want to get into the Ronaldo debate and whether he's a net benefit or not, but what can't be argued is that he limits our tactical flexibility. He needs a partner.

So if we play with an extra striker next to Ronaldo, then we're lacking a body in midfield. But the lack of a top quality controlling midfielder on top of the lack of numbers means we will continually get overrun there.

And we can't even go 3 at the back to add bodies in midfield because we have no top quality wingbacks.

So I think Rangnick's tactical solution simply can't work and basically he's screwed.
 
You can't blame Rangnick for the laboured unconvincing efforts the players seem prepared to put themselves out to perform. The Board have instituted an 'Interim Manager', gives him no power, he's not here to build a team, just somehow persuade all of those big team egos to play for him, the fans or their money and not take the piss out of fans paying over the odds for the pleasure. It's not as if the Board didn't have enough time to plan for a future while Ole was in place, instead, do you think your board and players are doing a job for you?
 
Why does the new manager think this? He can only pick who he has available to him
In the end it is his job to get the best out of the players, and we have looked poor no matter who has played.
It’s laughable you think are players have the same footballing iq as de bruyne
It is more laughable that you think there are no players that we have no players that can have 'football iq' that matches De Bruyne. Put De Bruyne in our team and he will also look like someone who has low 'football iq'.
I get it, your a Man Utd fan, but you need to balanced in your options
You get nothing, me being a fan has got feck all to do with my opinion. I have given a far more balanced opinion than you so far, so look in a mirror before before trying to give advise on being balanced.
Finishing second and third has clearly given you false hope, reality is we were a country mile away from winning with this squad of players and have been under multiple managers now
Finishing second and third is not false hope, just the reality. Considering we have played and performed much better than this for two season now, this is the blip rather than our actual level.
But yer, must be the managers, we won’t win anything with anyone until the standard of that midfield is raised and until we get some players who understand how to play wide.
It’s painfully obvious
It is the managers, and if we get someone competent we can certainly win something. The midfield can be improved, but unless we start performing better as a team we will fail no matter who plays.
 
I understand people jumping on the bandwagon (maybe I am as I'm writing this), of course I hope Rangnick will be successful but I as wrote when we hired him, the guy barely managed any club in the last 15 years let alone big club... Ok, I know, you'll say he did a miracle with Leipzig but that is all
I never understood why we went for him anyway.
But I do agree this squad have some major problems, not just our managers. Totally agree with Judas
 
Yep 100% agree with you
It’s like He was watching a different game
The Manager is actually there to help the team
It wasn’t that difficult to fix
My problem Ralf is not on the formation but the make up of the two behind the striker. Yesterday they were 'hug the touchline' wingers, suicidal to play a midfield two against Wolves of all teams. The substitution just killed us off because Mason is only one of the three players who played with pride yesterday.
 
The fecking state of this place. If I hadn’t been here so long then I would assume this thread was a thorough attempt at trolling, a satire against the modern football fan.
 
I understand people jumping on the bandwagon (maybe I am as I'm writing this), of course I hope Rangnick will be successful but I as wrote when we hired him, the guy barely managed any club in the last 15 years let alone big club... Ok, I know, you'll say he did a miracle with Leipzig but that is all
I never understood why we went for him anyway.
But I do agree this squad have some major problems, not just our managers. Totally agree with Judas
Calm down he was hired as interim manager for six months only ,once we decided not to pursue Conte choices were hardly inspiring .
 
In the end it is his job to get the best out of the players, and we have looked poor no matter who has played.

It is more laughable that you think there are no players that we have no players that can have 'football iq' that matches De Bruyne. Put De Bruyne in our team and he will also look like someone who has low 'football iq'.

You get nothing, me being a fan has got feck all to do with my opinion. I have given a far more balanced opinion than you so far, so look in a mirror before before trying to give advise on being balanced.

Finishing second and third is not false hope, just the reality. Considering we have played and performed much better than this for two season now, this is the blip rather than our actual level.

It is the managers, and if we get someone competent we can certainly win something. The midfield can be improved, but unless we start performing better as a team we will fail no matter who plays.
You're a typical modern football fan who ignores circumstances and expects managers to make instant impacts regardless, as if a manager is some sort of magic wand and can achieve miracles.
You're going to be whinging about not only Rangnick but also our next manager for quite a while yet, because this team isn't making significant improvements any time soon, it's broken on many levels.
 
Nothing to do with the coach or the coaching staff.
Moyes failed, van Goal failed, Mourinho failed, Ole failed, Rangnick will fail. What is the common here. The players.!
Extremely poor attitude from the players. And they can't even combine 4 passes. My sons U7-team have more passing ability and want to fight and win more than this group of players. Embarrassing..
 
Players clearly don't respect him. He's only here for 6 months so why do they care? Most will still be here next season under the next guy. In fact I'm certain at least 25 to 30% of the squad had to Google him when he was appointed. He wasn't a household name was he?

Should have hired a manager not an interim. Aston Villa, Norwich and Spurs didn't hire an interim but we have to? We're Manchester United ffs.

The club is finished until someone buys out the Glazers. It's will be more of the same. One step forward and two back under every coach they appoint because the whole club is toxic.
 
Nothing to do with the coach or the coaching staff.
Moyes failed, van Goal failed, Mourinho failed, Ole failed, Rangnick will fail. What is the common here. The players.!

Well, the players aren't really the common here because so wev'e had so many of them over the last nine years...
 
Players clearly don't respect him. He's only here for 6 months so why do they care? Most will still be here next season under the next guy. In fact I'm certain at least 25 to 30% of the squad had to Google him when he was appointed. He wasn't a household name was he?

Should have hired a manager not an interim. Aston Villa, Norwich and Spurs didn't hire an interim but we have to? We're Manchester United ffs.

The club is finished until someone buys out the Glazers. It's will be more of the same. One step forward and two back under every coach they appoint because the whole club is toxic.

Would you rather we'd just rushed into hiring Rogers or Poch then? I'm glad we didn't. Of course we could end up with a stinking hire in the summer anyway, but at least then it will have been a well thought out stinking hire.

Hiring an interim made total sense.
 
Would you rather we'd just rushed into hiring Rogers or Poch then? I'm glad we didn't. Of course we could end up with a stinking hire in the summer anyway, but at least then it will have been a well thought out stinking hire.

Hiring an interim made total sense.

This is what our fans keep telling themselves. If we miss out on top 4 will it make sense? Sets us back another 2-3 years again.

This guy hasn't got the new manager bounce. If anything we look worse but we've just had a very easy set of fixtures. If we were playing any of the really good teams we'd have been battered.

Never a fan of this appointment and it's turning out the exact way I thought it would.
 
This is what our fans keep telling themselves. If we miss out on top 4 will it make sense? Sets us back another 2-3 years again.

This guy hasn't got the new manager bounce. If anything we look worse but we've just had a very easy set of fixtures. If we were playing any of the really good teams we'd have been battered.

Never a fan of this appointment and it's turning out the exact way I thought it would.

So you'd happily have had Rogers or Poch instead then, alright.
 
So you'd happily have had Rogers or Poch instead then, alright.

Didnt want Brenda but I'd take Poch over this fellow any day of the week.

However because we now have less hope of the CL we become a poorer option for top managers in the summer.
 
ronaldo
Sancho fernandes
Fred VDB Mctominay
Back four

he’s gotta try it. See if vdb can hold possession and honestly i would prefer not having McTominay in there but we have none else. Freds positioning is poor but he can make his passes.
 
I said that if we got rid of Solskjaer mid season things would get worse not better. Regardless of the squad the players still liked him. It will get worse from here I feel, the players will start to fall away.

Ronaldo is starting to work harder and harder but I do feel that this type of signing has just completely fkt the dressing room, feels a Woodward signing, he did sign him in Linekars garden.
 
The recruitment has been poor.

I look at yesterday's team, there is no way you can play a PL game with a midfield that cannot control a game.

We are a dysfunctional team, players in positions that are not good enough.

AWB cannot cross a football.

Ronaldo cannot lead the line

Greenwood isnt a CAM
 
It was time for Ole to go, to be sure. But let’s not forget Ole guided the same squad (inferior, actually) to 2nd and a club record unbeaten away streak.
The same argument can just be applied to Jose who finished 2nd with more points with a squad that Ole then took over and finished 6th with and lost 5 of the last 9 games of the season with only winning 2. That's obviously a dumb argument to make against Ole's results in that half season just as it is now against Rangnick.
 
Rangnick I really like. Can see us growing well as a team with this style.

He’s literally been here a few weeks and the squad has barely trained together properly & aren’t even up to full fitness yet.

We are gonna drop more points btw at various stages and that’s natural. It’s about being calm when the bad days come & understanding it’s a learning process.

Sacchi in Milan took around 15 games for his style to click properly in 87’ so maybe by the 15 game mark we will see more pressing / passing through the lines better.

It’s far too early with this unbalanced squad as Pogba injured isn’t helping us either.
 
I don't particularly get the complaints that he's a second-rate manager, because obviously he's a second-rate manager. That's why he is currently caretaking in that role rather than being a permanent hire. Expecting him to be or perform like a top level coach is stupid, he isn't one and wasn't hired to be one.

Rangnick's reputation is largely built on work he did above the manager level and most of the potential upside of having him at the club comes in the shape of having him in a consultancy role at that level too. He just happens to be filling in as interim manager for the time being, because we stupidly put ourselves in a position where we had that vacancy and had to fill it with a second-rate manager of some stripe. And if you have to hire an interim manager, you might as well pick the one you get some potential longer term benefit from. But some of the posts here seem to be treating him as if he's a Tuchel or a Klopp, someone we brought in to have massive impact from the manager's seat.

People need more realistic expectations. Once we were at the point where we reluctantly had to bring in Rangnick in as interim manager then the questions for this season were already a) how much of a salvage job could he do and b) how many of the issues involved in getting this group of players organised and pressing like a top level side could we expedite into this season, so the next manager isn't starting from absolute scratch. Obviously we hoped we'd get the most positive possible results but when the club had already fecked the season that badly you can only expect it to get unfecked so much by your not-top-level interim appointment.

I absolutely see the logic in this. But at the same time, Rangnick is making decisions I wouldn't expect a second-rate manager to make, let alone someone that is supposed to move upstairs and become our all-seeing footballing overlord (see noodlehair's post below).

I don't want to turn on him but picking Matic in a two man midfield AND having two 35 plus year olds up front AND then trying to remedy this by forcing a fullback to play as an extra centreback...this isn't good or even acceptable management. It's just self destructive idiocy and the exact reason why he ended up replacing Ole in the first place.

And the Greenwood substitution was absolutely pathetic. He was the only forward player making runs for the team, creating things for team mates. Cavani and Ronaldo were both guilty of ignoring him, including once when he should have been put through on goal, and he gets punished for it.

I'm still genuinely furious about that. You have no business being a manager of anything if you're either too cowardly to make the right decision or deliberately make the wrong ones to push some kind of stupid point/agenda. The only logical excuse is Greenwood was injured but if that were the case he should have made two subs at that point otherwise he just chose to deliberately ignore the problem that caused him to get Fernandes ready in the first place.

Basically he's gone right down to a zero in my estimation after that shite show of management tonight. Its gone from trusting him until he proves otherwise to him needing to prove he's not a fecking idiot before I have any trust in him at all.

The only game we've looked remotely decent in under him was against Palace, so why is he deliberately picking a team that can't possibly physically produce the same performance?

And this is the massive issue I have with Ralf. I can forgive the team for not looking perfectly well-drilled given the disturbances from COVID etc. but some of the issues are self-inflicted. Matic's legs have been finished for about 2 years at best, and yet he's starting successive games just a few days apart. Our frontline last night had a combined age of 70 years old! And they played the full fecking 90!! One of the exciting aspects of Rangnick's appointment was that he was famed as being the inventor of the modern gegenpress. I mean, you aren't even going to get a semblance of a sustainable pressing system with a 33-year-old Matic, a 34-year-old Cavani, and a 37-year-old (almost) Ronaldo starting and finishing games.

At the moment, Rangnick is defying even the most basic expectations of playing a team capable of putting a shift in. It's bizarre.
 
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ronaldo
Sancho fernandes
Fred VDB Mctominay
Back four

he’s gotta try it. See if vdb can hold possession and honestly i would prefer not having McTominay in there but we have none else. Freds positioning is poor but he can make his passes.
Why on Earth would we STILL start Ronaldo when we've got Greenwood available? FFS Greenwood was the only one that looked vaguely threatening yesterday, and Ronaldo patently cannot lead the line on his own anymore.
 
Why on Earth would we STILL start Ronaldo when we've got Greenwood available? FFS Greenwood was the only one that looked vaguely threatening yesterday, and Ronaldo patently cannot lead the line on his own anymore.
I think with the reaction to Greenwood being subbed yesterday the fans are now starting to see the Ronaldo and Cavani forward line differently. Fans will accept having a couple of older players here for a year or two if it means we're challenging for something but as we're not you start to wonder why we're persisting with a couple of temporary solutions and not looking at a more permanent forward line and developing something.
 
Well. If you have 6 months to move one pile of dirt from one place to another. You dont choose a strategy that will take two years and new equipment. No need to let the man work. It is better now to find a man who can finish the job in five months with the equipment we have.

Or, we can just give him the two years right away. What we are doing now is not ok and is not geting us what we need from this sesson or the next two years becouse new dirt mover will comme in june and have a whole new strategy.
Agreed I think he should've gone straight upstairs and we continued with Carrick until the end of the season.
 
And the Greenwood substitution was absolutely pathetic. He was the only forward player making runs for the team, creating things for team mates. Cavani and Ronaldo were both guilty of ignoring him, including once when he should have been put through on goal, and he gets punished for it.

I'm still genuinely furious about that. You have no business being a manager of anything if you're either too cowardly to make the right decision or deliberately make the wrong ones to push some kind of stupid point/agenda. The only logical excuse is Greenwood was injured but if that were the case he should have made two subs at that point otherwise he just chose to deliberately ignore the problem that caused him to get Fernandes ready in the first place.
We all thought it would be Cavani coming off for Bruno. Cavani looked low on energy all first half, then came out in the second half harrying about as if he had been told to give everything for the next 15 minutes before a pre-planned substitution.
 
I didn't think the crap we've seen this season is only the managers responsibility so I don't hold Rangnick responsible either. The rot is deep and it's most likely a combination of factors.
 
ronaldo
Sancho fernandes
Fred VDB Mctominay
Back four

he’s gotta try it. See if vdb can hold possession and honestly i would prefer not having McTominay in there but we have none else. Freds positioning is poor but he can make his passes.
No freaking way Scott McTominay plays. That's just rewarding a bad performance. McTominay needs to be dropped and sent to the Championship.
 
You are right to say that overhauls are rarely pretty. But when you want to enhance and improve the train service, for example, you don’t simply shut everything down for 6 months and give up on your SLAs/KPIs. Customers/Fans have every right to feel aggrieved when that happens and I still expect top 4 from this side.

If what you say is true, alienating a large group of staff so early on without any replacements in or lined up isn’t good management. In football, you have the luxury of doing so during the off-season to minimise disruption. In the meantime, it’s important to keep morale up.

It’s a tough juggling act and that’s where strong leadership and management is vital to mitigate and navigate around the pitfalls of an overhaul.

Rangnick has been appointed as Interim Manager so it’s fair to judge his short term record and play style, otherwise we should have just appointed him as a DOF or consultant instead.

No one is suggesting we shut things down and I'm not saying he should go scorched earth and send those dissenting to the reserves. There's a balancing act but the priority has to be the long term development of this squad and overhauling the failed structure that has lead us to this point. If some players are upset over that then so be it. Not a single one of them has earned any sort of indispensable status.

We decided to go this direction after Ole failed and given our preferred choices obviously weren't available it made sense to bring in Ralf in this capacity. People really need to give their head a shake if they think Ralf was brought in because of his management pedigree. If the goal was to get top four and put the long term planning off to the summer then the appointment made no sense at all. Ralf's job first and foremost is putting in place a direction for this club on and off the pitch - I'd far prefer he does that effectively even if it means we finish 6th or 7th. There's far more important work to be done than securing CL football next year.
 
I've not turned. I had low expectations in the first place for the rest of this season. I've long learnt not to not buy into the hype of managers and players based on opinions on here.
 
As I have always been -

I've been more excited at him potentially making a manager out of Fletcher than doing anything great with us.

His influence on Tuchel and Klopp is better than what he did with shalke.
 
I would much rather point the blame at the players yesterday than at Rangnick. There were so many promising attacking situations that ultimately lead to nothing, because the players were unable to make simple passes with the right weight and direction. Greenwood and AWB were serial offenders, but Cavani's decision not to pass to Greenwood was criminal as well. The execution in the final third let us down as much as anything.
 
My expectations with this squad are already in the basement, I struggle to shift blame at Ralf when a number of the team have failed not only the previous manager but the last 2.

This 4-2-2-2 is worrying but what worries me more so is how many games we start where I look at the opposition’s midfield and see better players, be that technically &/or physically. We’ll never control games with that rabble.
 
I understand people jumping on the bandwagon (maybe I am as I'm writing this), of course I hope Rangnick will be successful but I as wrote when we hired him, the guy barely managed any club in the last 15 years let alone big club... Ok, I know, you'll say he did a miracle with Leipzig but that is all
I never understood why we went for him anyway.
But I do agree this squad have some major problems, not just our managers. Totally agree with Judas
We needed a temporary option and time to find a new permanent manager. Who else available?