The problem is that other players need to chip in more, especially in the league.
10
Season Average Rating
- Appearances
- 46
- Goals
- 28
- Assists
- 9
- Yellow cards
- 8
- Status
The problem is that other players need to chip in more, especially in the league.AGAIN with the obvious/correct posts?!
Don't see anywhere near this level of grief for other players?
Seriously? I'd say almost every player gets criticised. The Rooney, Lingard, Rojo and Fellaini comments are far worse. Even players like Martial, Shaw and Pogba come in for a bunch of complaints.
What I have noticed is that often you get posters claiming player X is criticised more than anybody else. Simply not the case. I think it's more that certain posters are hyper sensitive about any sort of negative comment regarding their favourite.
A Very inconsistent approach you have there. Your logic means that Aguero, Costa and Sanchez are crap.
your having a mare mate. Step away from keyboard.
Nope.
Didn't say others DON'T get criticised, I said the LEVEL isn't the same (comparable to others given respective performance)..... in MY opinion.
Zlatan isn't my favourite player btw. In this team, it'd be De Gea.
And what is my logic?
Because he's cost us a massive fee of $0 and calls himself God of Manchester with utter heartfelt seriousness.AGAIN with the obvious/correct posts?!
Don't see anywhere near this level of grief for other players?
I think when the obvious fault in a team is that chances aren't being taken, then the first-choice striker, as supposed main taker of those chances, is always going to be a scapegoat.
And this article from Sky Sports doesn't exactly help his case. It's from the end of October, but talks about how he's missed more big chances than his Premier League striking rivals. I'm not sure how I'd go about finding more current statistics though.
That raises the question, would Martial or Rashford have converted those chances? Maybe, maybe not. Would they have more or less than Zlatan's 13 goals if they were the main striker? I think his lack of pace and poor passing has sometimes been an issue, but then he sometimes does things that I don't think either of the other two would even think to do.
Personally, I'd keep the faith in him. As dwd says, 13 in 22 isn't bad, and I've a feeling that things are going to click for him.
And this article from Sky Sports doesn't exactly help his case. It's from the end of October, but talks about how he's missed more big chances than his Premier League striking rivals. I'm not sure how I'd go about finding more current statistics though.
That raises the question, would Martial or Rashford have converted those chances? Maybe, maybe not. Would they have more or less than Zlatan's 13 goals if they were the main striker? I think his lack of pace and poor passing has sometimes been an issue, but then he sometimes does things that I don't think either of the other two would even think to do.
Personally, I'd keep the faith in him. As dwd says, 13 in 22 isn't bad, and I've a feeling that things are going to click for him.
That's his only problem ..... his lack of confidence in himself?
exactly...
Ibra has 13 at the start of December. Our top scorer last season had 17!
You can't say why my post implies what you took it to imply, can you? Smart ass.
This seems to be so lost on many, and the bar keeps getting raised for him. I honestly think he'll break 30 this season and the same posters will be finding anything to criticise and to show he shouldn't be with us next season.
I already explained to you why your logic was self-defeating. You had no answer to it and came back with nonsense to both me and another poster. And yes my ass is smarter than you.
Except you didn't explain.
In my pre season optimistic haze, I thought Martial would kick on and Mkhitaryan would carry over his Dortmund form so Ibra supplementing their output with 15 odd goals would have seemed like a huge success for me.
He could sustain this run for a while, Mkhitaryan comes in and kills it and Ibra scores 8 in 7. Coincidence?
Why should this run stop?
He's one of the biggest names, with it comes big criticism. All part of the job.
However any criticism pales into comparison to Shaw for example. Guy broke his leg, out for a year, gets criticised. Rashford, this time last year nobody even knew about him, hadn't even played for the U21's, criticised. Martial, our best player last season, still young and learning. Cirticised.
He really doesn't get anymore stick than anybody else.
Ibra is reminding me a lot of Rooney from 3-5 seasons ago. Rooney at that time had a lot of crap games but would suddenly pop up and score a timely goal.
I guess the ability to produce out of nowhere like that is good but I can see how our frontline can also be set back by his play.
I guess the ability to produce out of nowhere like that is good but I can see how our frontline can also be set back by his play.
Its simple really for other teams.. stop him, stop manchester united.. he is the only one getting goals..
He's doing well. We need others to take some of the goalscoring burden off him, though.
His passing has sometimes been a bit too erratic but hes generally very influential in the buildup. That bout of bad passing is a theme with both him anf Ibra, and it just appears to be born out of a tendancy to try too hard, possibly due to a burden of needing to lead us and be the difference makers.
His passing has sometimes been a bit too erratic but hes generally very influential in the buildup. That bout of bad passing is a theme with both him anf Ibra, and it just appears to be born out of a tendancy to try too hard, possibly due to a burden of needing to lead us and be the difference makers.
Don't get me wrong, I like him, I was trying to look at his pros and cons. I think maybe there's been games where it hasn't worked for him where he should have come off, or had somebody up front with him, but that's on Mourinho.
I really wonder how this thread is going to go. If this trajectory keeps up, the man will reach 30 goals or so, and will be slated for costing us points.
That's an excellent tally in itself.
He has contributed 8 goals (8 goals and 0 assists) in 1170 minutes in the league, i.e. a goal every 146 min. That's good. By comparison, Costa has contributed a goal every 77 min. and Sanchez every 78 min. Ibra's doing well in terms of directly contributed league goals but far from brilliantly.
More importantly, his numbers are good but the team doesn't score enough goals in the league. (Less goals than last season?) Why is this so?
There are roughly 3 possible scenarios. (1) The team is being unlucky. (2) His team-mates haven't been good enough. (3) Zlatan being the main man in attack doesn't help the team, i.e. he is a bit like RVN in his last season here.
I don't know which of these scenarios is closer to truth. Only time will show. I still have some doubts about his signing though. IMO, neither Rashford nor Martial would have scored the same amount of goals but maybe the team as a whole would have scored at least as many in the league? (In the cups we score enough, at least at home).
Despite not playing to his very best, he is still joint 3rd top scorer in the premier league with 8 goals. Only, Aguero, Sanchez & Costa have more. Granted that he should be top scorer as he missed some clear ones. But he is our best hope for the proverbial '20/season' striker.
The bollocking he gave to Lingard clearly showed that he is the main man to get us the goals. Others will chip in but we have to depend on him
The bollocking he gave to Lingard clearly showed that he is the main man to get us the goals. Others will chip in but we have to depend on him
Something was off for him last night, but that finish was excellent. Calm and composed. As long as he keeps scoring I'm happy.
Yeah, I agree, I don't want to moan about his performances of late too much as he's scoring but I thought he was one of the worst out there last night and in the last couple of games there's been moments where I've shouted at the tele for him to release it quicker, he's wound me up but then he goes and scores and everything's alright in the world again.
Exactly. They're rare events. Most other chances are created when there are several bodies in the way.
I've never once criticised him for missing chances, because I don't believe the chances he's missed have all been easy. That's the point. Our approach play is to blame, not Zlatan's finishing. You can criticise the latter if you want. I'll criticise the former. And my point is borne out by the number of blocks and saves are made against us by ordinary defences. They didn't suddenly become superhuman, we just make it easy for them to look that way.
That's a problem with finishing, not the build up play, we are creating plenty of chances almost every game, its been the single biggest improvement under Mourinho. Zlatan has missed plenty of chances, as have every other player in our side.
We don't get in behind teams because they give no space to play into, whats going to change that?
His finishing is fine. He's not missing easy chances, he's failing to put away difficult chances that happen to be close to goal but from tricky positions.
A quicker target man and/or wide forwards who are suited to making runs in the channels will improve the quality of our chances.
You what? He's much more influential overall. A lot of his through balls and flicks have been nothing less than spectacular and have created plenty of good chances. This general view some fans have about him having crap games all the time is getting tedious. How many "crap" games has he really had for us?
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/row-zed/man-uniteds-zlatan-ibrahimovic-worst-9064349
How will that improve the quality of our chances? what is it that speed merchants will bring that'll work against teams that sit back? And what pacey target men are you referring to exactly?
We've created a lot of chances against Swansea, Stoke, Burnley and a couple of others but there's been plenty of games when we haven't. Everton game we had one, Arsenal at home a couple, Liverpool away the one chance I think. First three or four games of the season we barely created anything for Zlatan. His finishing was just brilliant. Then there's a bunch of other games we've looked a bit clunky in.
We're improving but it's becoming a bit of a myth that we're a chance creating machine. In a handful of games yes but generally it's not the case.
Something hasn't been right with our forward play.
Everton away, liverpool and Arsenal you aren't ever going to created a huge quantity of chances, against Arsenal we've created more than enough to win the game anyway. In last couple of months our creativity has been spot on.
Check the link above I posted, im a huge fan of Zlatan but there's no denying, up until recently, his finishing has been below par.
There have been plenty of games this season where we've looked slow and disjointed (just last night) I think a creative spell of maybe four games against poor opposition has tricked some into thinking that's been the pattern of the entire season. It's become a false narrative.
We should be creating more than one chance against Everton and Liverpool. Other teams have, other teams have created more against us.
I'm more concerned with that than Zlatan missing a few.
And equally we've created bucket loads more against sides that other teams have struggled against. You can't expect us to be on point creatively every game, it just doesn't happen in this league, even teams like Liverpool in their form have struggled upon occasion.
For Zlatan to only have Costa, Sanchez and Augero ahead of him for goals scored yet still to be in a position where hes wasted more chances than other player says it all, not to mention only two teams in the league have worse conversion rates than we do. Creativity is quite literally the least of our concerns, tightening up defensively and becoming more clinical in front of goal are what we need to be looking at.
We've struggled to create against Fenerbace and Feyerbord away. Same goes for the games against Bournemouth, Hull, Watford, both games against Zorya and Southampton.
Yes Everton, City, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal are better but it doesn't change that we didn't create much against them.
It took until the 8th game of the season against Leicester for us to produce high quality attacking football.
I don't know how that can be characterised as "creating lots of chances in almost every game." It's beyond opinion this, our struggles are clear to see.
A handful of games has skewered the stats and your impression of the season.
I'm not excusing Zaltan here, he's part of that attack and as responsible as the others.
We are talking about United's recent form, no one is arguing our football at the beginning of the season was up to much, that's evident for everyone to see, we were well off the pace and had our 4th manager in 3 years, theres a settling in period.
Pretty much everyone is unanimous in our football being of a much higher quality recently, and that we haven't got the results our performances have warranted. Hell even Mr Negative Scholes has echoed that notion himself, it's pretty odd you seem to disagree.
Still, we are derailing the thread a little here, let's agree to disagree
We are talking about United's recent form, no one is arguing our football at the beginning of the season was up to much, that's evident for everyone to see, we were well off the pace and had our 4th manager in 3 years, theres a settling in period.
Pretty much everyone is unanimous in our football being of a much higher quality recently, and that we haven't got the results our performances have warranted. Hell even Mr Negative Scholes has echoed that notion himself, it's pretty odd you seem to disagree.
Still, we are derailing the thread a little here, let's agree to disagree
Pretty sure we were talking about the season so far rather than the last handful of games but yeah fair enough.
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