We are an awfully coached team

Di Maria's angel said:
What about Maguire, AWB, Diallo and VDB - over 200 million there?
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Maguire - better than we had.
AWB - better than we had.
VDB - a decent backup option.
Amad - not bought for this season.

I'm sure Ole would have loved to go out and buy 2 top players for each position. He's barely been allowed to replace those that have left.
 
Ole bought players for sure, but he also inherited some pretty expensive players. I'd agree that City have an unfair advantage over everyone, but our downfall since Fergie has been spending big money on players who become bang average when they come here. Still we need massive investment and I doubt the Glazers will provide.
 
What's the implication here with the constant comparison to City and Pep? Is it that with a few more players Ole can be just as good as him and it really is as simple as that? Because I'm not sure I agree with what's being implied when this sort of thing always comes up. Not to downplay the importance of player recruitment, of course, but I don't think it's really that simple despite people like the person in that Tweet (and presumably the person who posted it in this thread) thinking it's some sort of slam dunk on anyone who questions the coaching.

It's really not.
 
It's coaching AND quality, in my opinion.

When we move the ball fast, more often than not the attack breaks down trying to be too clever. When we move the ball slower and more meticulously, we become too predictable in possession. The difference between us and City, with the utmost respect to Ole, is that we have him and City have Pep and he has marginally more quality in all but two or three positions.
 
Adam-Utd said:
You'd think so, but it's clear keeping possession isn't important to our management.
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So true now that you say it.

Beaucoup said:
I'm not sure using one of the best coached teams in world football is a great example.
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RussellWilson said:
Imagine being this dim.
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He has a point but not to the argument I and a lot of people are making. I'm not looking for a Man City or even a Liverpool type of approach. There's a middle ground approach and we've yet to explore it.
 
BusbyMalone said:
What's the implication here with the constant comparison to City and Pep? Is it that with a few more players Ole can be just as good as him and it really is as simple as that? Because I'm not sure I agree with what's being implied when this sort of thing always comes up. Not to downplay the importance of player recruitment, of course, but I don't think it's really that simple despite people like the person in that Tweet (and presumably the person who posted it in this thread) thinking it's some sort of slam dunk on anyone who questions the coaching.

It's really not.
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Exactly.

I think last night has tipped me over the edge towards the Ole out side. Well, not quite Ole out - but I wouldn’t care if he left. Hopefully he can stay long enough to bag Haaland. But we need a fecking clue more than we need any individual player.

A good team should be more than the sum of its parts. It’s why City could lose Aguero, De Bruyne and Jesus and still perform the same. Meanwhile we are insisting it takes a world XI for us to win a trophy.
 
BusbyMalone said:
What's the implication here with the constant comparison to City and Pep? Is it that with a few more players Ole can be just as good as him and it really is as simple as that? Because I'm not sure I agree with what's being implied when this sort of thing always comes up. Not to downplay the importance of player recruitment, of course, but I don't think it's really that simple despite people like the person in that Tweet (and presumably the person who posted it in this thread) thinking it's some sort of slam dunk on anyone who questions the coaching.

It's really not.
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Pep's comfortably the best manager/coach for me but let's not pretend their defence looked so 'Well coached' last season when they had Laporte missing and no Dias. See also Liverpool this season. Player quality is far more important.
 
roonster09 said:
Actually the point is true, we are properly coached team but in a wrong way. I have posted Ole's interview so many times where he said how he wants his team to play and we play more or less in the same way. It has nothing to do with controlling the game, building up play. It's all about win the ball and play forward pass quickly, take risks. We play in the exact same way (minus high pressing all the time), problem is this model is not sustainable.
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Oh, interesting. But how does he want to win the ball? Cause my impression (mostly from reading, mind) is that you guys often try to win the ball a little further down the pitch - or at least not in a kind high-press way. That won't work with teams that are sitting back, they are set up to be safe against that. I guess that's your sustainability comment, that you need something more for the possession phase, to break down defences that are built entirely for safety?

Lentwood said:
We’ve consistently outperformed the individual abilities of our players though over a period of 18mnths. That has to count for something.

Nobody seriously believes we are better than City but for the last year and a half we have been “best of the rest”
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I'm not sure how exactly United compare to the direct competition, but I do think your players are underrated here. When people complain about players not being able to pass a ball over short distances or control it - that makes no sense, these players made it through the youth system into United's first team squad for a reason. But beyond that, in almost every position, you have a player in the first team that was or is considered a top prospect in that area - with the exception maybe of your CBs and holding mids (although these aren't poor players either). Squad depth is another thing though, especially in defence I suppose.

Scarlett Dracarys said:
We're still in 2nd place for crying out loud. We've hit a rough patch but we're not in a terrible position. We could have been in 5th and lost our last three games but we didn't. Winning is obviously better than drawing but at least we didn't lose. Some of you really need to take a chill pill and stop with the tantrums and whining.
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I would say though, that drawing is pretty similar to losing when winning gets you three points. I mean, three draws might sound better than two losses and a win, and it's likely better for your goal difference - but it's the same amount of points. All the same, I agree that the team being in 2nd is certainly not bad thing. :)
 
Kaizane said:
It's coaching AND quality, in my opinion.

When we move the ball fast, more often than not the attack breaks down trying to be too clever. When we move the ball slower and more meticulously, we become too predictable in possession. The difference between us and City, with the utmost respect to Ole, is that we have him and City have Pep and he has marginally more quality in all but two or three positions.
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Pep has a very clear ideology in the way he wants his team to play, the players he picks have very similar attributes, hence when he shuffles the pack, which he does a lot, the team continues to play the same style of football.
 
Leftback99 said:
Pep's comfortably the best manager/coach for me but let's not pretend their defence looked so 'Well coached' last season when they had Laporte missing and no Dias. See also Liverpool this season. Player quality is far more important.
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Player quality is important. No one in their right mind would suggest otherwise. But under the wrong stewardship, the team starts to represent a group of individuals as opposed to a cohesive unit. This is where my issue comes in when there's a constant comparison to Pep at City. I personally don't believe that our problems will be solved simply by adding a few players to the team. You need a combination of both. That's why the criticisms of the coaching can't just be swatted aside by simply suggesting that we go out and spend a few hundred million. At least that's what I thought was implied in that Tweet you posted, anyway.
 
I'm seeing this more and more, the team being undervalued on here and comparison with City being made. Yes, Liverpool's first XI is a lot better than ours, City's too (and their bench). However, the sign of a good manager is that he gets more out of his team collectively than the sum of the parts.

So far, I see no indication that we have learned anything new. The soak up pressure and play on the counter works sometimes, but there is nothing else that has been properly developed. Take away Bruno's incredible individual productivity and what is the plan?

It really is hard to say that there is some coherent plan.

Has someone identified it?
 
BusbyMalone said:
Player quality is important. No one in their right mind would suggest otherwise. But under the wrong stewardship, the team starts to represent a group of individuals as opposed to a cohesive unit. This is where my issue comes in when there's a constant comparison to Pep at City. I personally don't believe that our problems will be solved simply by adding a few players to the team. You need a combination of both. That's why the criticisms of the coaching can't just be swatted aside by simply suggesting that we go out and spend a few hundred million. At least that's what I thought was implied in that Tweet you posted, anyway.
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Agreed again. For cohesion to not be an important factor - we’d need players far better than everyone else - which isn’t going to happen in a league where everyone is rich.

A team like Brighton is a team you can look at and immediately see that they need a superior player. They created a number of chances agains the same Palace we could barely lay a glove on, with lesser players than us. They also played us off the park - and have done so to a number of teams and not gotten a result as their players aren’t good enough.

And they don’t play ‘possession football’ for the sake of it. They pass and move, but do it forward. There is no way, regardless of what Ole said in any interview, that he wants his team to pass poorly. By all means, be progressive with your possession, but you need to find a teammate!

Also, if the grand plan is to win the ball high and then attack - what is the solution when you come up against a compact defensive unit with no space to break into?
 
BusbyMalone said:
What's the implication here with the constant comparison to City and Pep? Is it that with a few more players Ole can be just as good as him and it really is as simple as that? Because I'm not sure I agree with what's being implied when this sort of thing always comes up. Not to downplay the importance of player recruitment, of course, but I don't think it's really that simple despite people like the person in that Tweet (and presumably the person who posted it in this thread) thinking it's some sort of slam dunk on anyone who questions the coaching.

It's really not.
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If you give Ole the City squad, does he get as much out of them as Pep?
 
One thing that's been more apparent this year is the number of touches we take, particularly the defenders and deep-lying midfielders. It looks coached to me - get the ball under control, look, find, pass. The most noticeable is Fred, but also Lindelof and Maguire.

Clear problem is against a deep lying defense, those extra 2/3 seconds are what makes the space. Now, we make less mistakes this way and don't lose the ball in dangerous situations, but we also end up recycling without threatening. They key difference then between us and City, is they have patience, whereas within 1 or 2 cycles one of our players will try something daring/stupid and we lose the ball, then reset.
 
Rozay said:
Agreed again. For cohesion to not be an important factor - we’d need players far better than everyone else - which isn’t going to happen in a league where everyone is rich.

A team like Brighton is a team you can look at and immediately see that they need a superior player. They created a number of chances agains the same Palace we could barely lay a glove on, with lesser players than us. They also played us off the park - and have done so to a number of teams and not gotten a result as their players aren’t good enough.

And they don’t play ‘possession football’ for the sake of it. They pass and move, but do it forward. There is no way, regardless of what Ole said in any interview, that he wants his team to pass poorly. By all means, be progressive with your possession, but you need to find a teammate!

Also, if the grand plan is to win the ball high and then attack - what is the solution when you come up against a compact defensive unit with no space to break into?
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I think that's a question that Ole has been asking himself since he came here, seemingly with no answer.
 
The problem of breaking teams down who sit back was about in the last years of Fergie, it's approaching a decade of seeing this club struggle in the same department. Slow zombie football.
 
Rozay said:
Agreed again. For cohesion to not be an important factor - we’d need players far better than everyone else - which isn’t going to happen in a league where everyone is rich.

A team like Brighton is a team you can look at and immediately see that they need a superior player. They created a number of chances agains the same Palace we could barely lay a glove on, with lesser players than us. They also played us off the park - and have done so to a number of teams and not gotten a result as their players aren’t good enough.

And they don’t play ‘possession football’ for the sake of it. They pass and move, but do it forward. There is no way, regardless of what Ole said in any interview, that he wants his team to pass poorly. By all means, be progressive with your possession, but you need to find a teammate!

Also, if the grand plan is to win the ball high and then attack - what is the solution when you come up against a compact defensive unit with no space to break into?
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Pray for a penalty bail out
 
Beachryan said:
One thing that's been more apparent this year is the number of touches we take, particularly the defenders and deep-lying midfielders. It looks coached to me - get the ball under control, look, find, pass. The most noticeable is Fred, but also Lindelof and Maguire.

Clear problem is against a deep lying defense, those extra 2/3 seconds are what makes the space. Now, we make less mistakes this way and don't lose the ball in dangerous situations, but we also end up recycling without threatening. They key difference then between us and City, is they have patience, whereas within 1 or 2 cycles one of our players will try something daring/stupid and we lose the ball, then reset.
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I think that patience stems from the fact that they know they will eventually break those teams down. Generally speaking, of course. There's no doubt examples of them not doing this, but I think we can all agree that under Pep they generally do break them down. Whereas for United, we're a lot easier to frustrate because we seem to struggle a lot more, hence why we get desperate and try and force things which results in us losing the ball. Obviously it's a combination of better players needed, but also coaching, IMO.
 
Judas said:
The problem of breaking teams down who sit back was about in the last years of Fergie, it's approaching a decade of seeing this club struggle in the same department. Slow zombie football.
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Agreed, that’s why I’ve been careful not to come out with the ‘since Fergie’ narrative myself.

Football is evolving and progressing all the time, yet we seem to be stuck in the same mantra of ‘courage, character and desire’ as the solution from the good old days. The fact that our manager is from the old Fergie school, and he’s gone and surrounded himself with inexperienced coaches from the same school shows to me that they are just trying to replicate this ‘create the right mentality’ stuff that they were raised on.

Fergie was the best manager, but he probably wouldn’t have been the best manager forever had he continued. We need to modernise our play and put more into the detail of a football match, rather than this off the cuff style that is our tradition.
 
Fergie evolved by hiring coaches to help keep him modern, Ole needs to take another page out of his playbook and do the same. We desperately need something new, it's obvious in the way we play.
 
Possibly worth noting how crap we are from non-penalty set pieces. Last season Liverpool in particular scored loads of goals from free kicks, and as soon as you get that 1 goal lead, it kind of fixes the problem of a low-lying defence.
 
I think our slow starts to games makes these deep defending games so much more difficult than they need to be. If we came out of the traps flying, get a goal ahead, the whole game changes, the approach can be totally different. But we sleep walk through the first 45 minutes so often.
 
Judas said:
With our home form, the way we're playing in general, certainty statements like this are silly really. West Ham are in better form than us in 2021.
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Yeah that could really come back to haunt them
 
Borys said:
This is the approach I can not understand. What is the point of watching games if you're ignoring completely the performance and focus only on League position? What is the point in discussing football on the forum in that case?
You're talking like we're overachieving. "At least we didn't lose". Against feckin Crystal Palace.


Well the problem is we most certainly WON'T TRY to win against City and I can bet there will be smiles after another 0-0 game.
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Yeah expect us to just hope that City miss a host of chances and we can nick something
 
Beachryan said:
One thing that's been more apparent this year is the number of touches we take, particularly the defenders and deep-lying midfielders. It looks coached to me - get the ball under control, look, find, pass. The most noticeable is Fred, but also Lindelof and Maguire.

Clear problem is against a deep lying defense, those extra 2/3 seconds are what makes the space. Now, we make less mistakes this way and don't lose the ball in dangerous situations, but we also end up recycling without threatening. They key difference then between us and City, is they have patience, whereas within 1 or 2 cycles one of our players will try something daring/stupid and we lose the ball, then reset.
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The dwelling on the ball is also related to a players' limited passing range (Fred) and the team's general lack of movement.
 
Let’s say Liverpool fails to qualify for CL next season, and decides to replace Klopp for Stevie G, would you guys take Klopp?
 
Judas said:
Fergie evolved by hiring coaches to help keep him modern, Ole needs to take another page out of his playbook and do the same. We desperately need something new, it's obvious in the way we play.
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Darren Fletcher is what we need. Gets the club n stuff
 
Beachryan said:
One thing that's been more apparent this year is the number of touches we take, particularly the defenders and deep-lying midfielders. It looks coached to me - get the ball under control, look, find, pass. The most noticeable is Fred, but also Lindelof and Maguire.

Clear problem is against a deep lying defense, those extra 2/3 seconds are what makes the space. Now, we make less mistakes this way and don't lose the ball in dangerous situations, but we also end up recycling without threatening. They key difference then between us and City, is they have patience, whereas within 1 or 2 cycles one of our players will try something daring/stupid and we lose the ball, then reset.
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I agree with this. I think one reason this is true, though, is Fred, McT and Matic just don't have the required skills to move the ball quickly. Maybe a coach can get them playing quicker, but maybe they have a ceiling and the coaching staff is playing to that.

All the best teams in the world have a very good passing DM that keeps things ticking and can bail them out in tight spots. We have DMs that make everyone nervous when they are under pressure.
 
I would so wish that Ole would acknowledge how his role as a manager in modern football, can allow for a senior, top quality first team coach AND a top quality tactician, without it really diluting his value as an inspirational figure, head of recruiting and "instiller of United values"..
If he was a CEO of a fortune 500 company he would also bring in a top quality COO and a Head of Strategy..
 
gerdm07 said:
I agree with this. I think one reason this is true, though, is Fred, McT and Matic just don't have the required skills to move the ball quickly. Maybe a coach can get them playing quicker, but maybe they have a ceiling and the coaching staff is playing to that.

All the best teams in the world have a very good passing DM that keeps things ticking and can bail them out in tight spots. We have DMs that make everyone nervous when they are under pressure.
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I don't know, I really think its strategic. These guys are professional footballers, they can ping a first time pass under minimal pressure. Well, except Fred - really don't understand how he is so incredibly poor at manipulating a football.

Even watching Chelsea this evening - who were excellent - you could see the structure creating triangles to allow 4 quick one touch passes to get out of trouble. That's the future, that's how you beat the modern press.

I've seen nothing to suggest we're even working on it, sadly.
 
Beachryan said:
I don't know, I really think its strategic. These guys are professional footballers, they can ping a first time pass under minimal pressure. Well, except Fred - really don't understand how he is so incredibly poor at manipulating a football.

Even watching Chelsea this evening - who were excellent - you could see the structure creating triangles to allow 4 quick one touch passes to get out of trouble. That's the future, that's how you beat the modern press.

I've seen nothing to suggest we're even working on it, sadly.
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Our triangle is always there:
GK and our 2 CBs
 
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