Unable to watch the match tonight but aren't surprised to hear we were dull and uninspiring - that's the norm for United these days. However, a few points to consider for those that want Ole sacked due to the tedium of the football:
If we keep chopping and changing managers, then you need to accept that whoever we get in, the football won't improve much if at all in terms of attractiveness with this current squad.
The reason is simple - Moyes, LVG and Jose were all mostly dreadful in the transfer market. The players from the Fergie era that retired or left due to age around the time/shortly after his departure e.g. Carrick, Giggs, Scholes, were replaced with a wealth of expensive flops.
We’re now lumped with far too many of two types of players (a) mediocre post-Fergie signings on inflated wages, that are difficult to shift for this reason, and (b) certain relics from the late Fergie era that should’ve been put out to pasture years ago (Young, Jones, until recently Smalling etc). No manager can play easy on the eye football with this squad as it’s just not very good, owing to mistakes made by previous bosses.
So all we can judge Ole on so far, IMO, is his business in the transfer market. And it was clearly our best post-Fergie window, not in terms of quantity but certainly in terms of quality (or potential quality) and age demographic. We signed McGuire, AWB and James this summer, and only 3 months in it’s evident that all 3 are likely to be good or even excellent players here. That's a huge positive. Selling Lukaku without a replacement was a huge cock-up though, admittedly (more on that in a bit).
The quality of football is what we should’ve expected given that around half our players were part of the squad under at least 2 of our 3 last Managers, with virtually all of this group being equally bad or at a similar standard under all.
We're currently in a phase where our league position can be attributed to a single factor rather than loads of things going wrong; Lukaku departing and not being replaced. We have one of the best defences in the league (at least statistically). Our problem is that we don’t score goals. The biggest issue you can have in football, yet the most fixable with the addition of just one reliable goal-scorer.
Find a good one (doesn’t even need to be a great all-round CF, a short-term fix will do at this moment in time) and I think we’d be a 4th-6th place standard team – nowhere near what a club like Manchester United should be aspiring to, but perfectly in line with what we should expect results wise until the squad can be further improved in future transfer windows.
If this post seems a bit contradictory at times, to sum things up:
1. Terrible signings by Moyes, LVG and Jose has led to a poor squad.
This has been a much bigger problem than other factors often cited as main causes of our decline e.g. tactical weakness/poor coaching, mismanagement of personalities, wrong footballing philosophy etc. This is evident by a lot of our players failing under multiple coaches, and our football being just as ponderous and predictable under all (though Moyes may be the exception as I believe he was just an all-round average manager/coach, and because he performed so poorly with almost the same squad that Fergie won the league with the year prior.
2. Results and quality of football since Fergie (or at least since LVG took over) have been around par for the course considering our squad. We’re a 4th-6th placed quality team during this entire period. No Manager could make this squad play excellent football (except for when Pogba is at his absolute best and in sync with our attackers. Sadly this rarely happens as Pogba is immensely talented but extremely erratic, not to mention lacking in football intelligence. Martial and Rashford are simply OK, but not good enough to lead the line for Manchester United – Rashford may become an excellent footballer in 2/3 years, but if this happens it's probably more likely to be as an 11, whereas Martial is unlikely to become a great CF, or great anywhere else on the pitch.
3. We’re not operating at our 4th-6th standard under Ole due to not replacing Lukaku with a reliable goal-scorer. One bad mistake that has cost us dearly, but not a sackable offense if our league position goes back to its norm once someone is brought in (which may not happen until next season if we can’t get Manduzic on loan).
4. But Jose finished 2nd, I hear you cry – doesn’t that mean we aren’t a 4th-6th placed standard team after all?
We’re a 4th-6th placed level team under any Manager that tries to play decent football with the players at their disposal.
The only way we can finish higher without further reinforcements is under a highly successful pragmatist e.g. Mourinho, Simeone, possibly Conte), yet I don’t believe there are many out there that want to bring in someone who won’t be interested in playing good football at any point in his tenure, even on the slim chance they manage to accumulate their ideal squad.
