Manchester United Banter Archive December 20 2017

20 Dec 2017 22:08:33
I have to say I'm smiling a little at our defeat tonight. Having spent 5 years in my teens in Bristol, and been down to Ashton Gate on numerous occasions, the Robins are my second team. I can't say they were the better side but I can say that there were a few players whose performances were nowhere near what one would expect from a player in a top Premier League team. Both Martial and Rashford seemed to have no first touch at all, their dribbling was slow and ponderous. Promising situations evaporated one after the other at their feet. Good passing opportunities were missed. I'm sure the Beast will have something to say about it!

20 Dec 2017 22:11:17
Shaw,

Great performance from them, seem a good honest side and no reason why they can’t get promoted, good luck to them.

20 Dec 2017 22:17:23
Had a sneaky feeling we’d lose tonight. Zlatan (goal aside), Darmian, Rojo, Lindelof and Martial were awful.

Zlatan in particular looked very much like a 36 year old who’s been out for 8 months tonight.

At least we will get a reaction in the league now.

20 Dec 2017 22:39:01
Forgot to add Blind too. He was so bad I forgot he was playing!

20 Dec 2017 22:52:34
I'd add Rashford to that aswell. Infact the only praise idgive to anyone off our team would be Mctominay.

20 Dec 2017 22:57:12
To be fair how bad would it be to sell Darmian and Blind and bring back Fosu-Mensah and use Tuanzebe more.

21 Dec 2017 01:20:31
Dark Knight didn't mctominay lose his player and that led to their winning goal, he looks a bigger Cleverly to me does the 5 yard passes but nothing beyond that.

21 Dec 2017 02:11:23
All I have to say is that no part of me enjoyed that performance, nor getting beat by a team we should be hammering.

After 10 minutes I felt we were in trouble with Pogba showboating in dangerous areas. Same performance I see every week, this time we got beat, normally we win or draw playing like that. I wonder how we will play on the weekend, spoiler alert "EXACTLY THE SAME".

21 Dec 2017 05:49:34
Have to disagree on Martial. I though Rashford showed his immaturity by being super selfish where he could have squared a simple pass for Lukaku to score. I think the midfield was quite poor and the distance between our kids and defenders and attack lends itself to long balls. all night no one available to take the ball in the middle of the pitch.

Mctominay was also poor if you watched his positioning through out the game and how far he was from where the ball was when our defenders where looking for a midfielder. Second goal was also his fault IMO.

It felt like one of those nights where the many of the players were trying to improve their own stats and not playing as a team. So many poor touches, poor passes and generally very poor decision making. I know people who don't like the manager will jump at him but the players were truly poor and that is on them.

Ibra looks miles off and a hinderance on the pitch. When you are 6 foot 7 and can't win a header that tells you something. Darmian looked like a division 3 player against their left winger and god helps us if he is going to fill in for Valencia.

21 Dec 2017 06:44:22
No one in the side can come away with a lot of credit following a performance like that. Bristol City were great and deservedly won. It looked like we just expected to turn up and win comfortably without much effort.

A few players who played last night such as Darmain (worst fullback in the league), Rojo (we should be paying teams to take him) and Mkhitaryan will be lucky to be here past January. Shaw, Blind, Ibrahimovic and Romero will also probably before the start of next season and obviously signings will be made to replace some. However, bringing back Fosu-Mensah and Periera as well as promoting Tuanzebe would for me be the right way of replacing some of the above.

21 Dec 2017 17:30:01
I think the criticism of Blind and Darmian is a little over the top. If you're not rotating the team regularly, you can hardly expect players to come in once every couple of months and pull out a top performance.

20 Dec 2017 21:56:51
Hats off to Bristol, better side 😭.

20 Dec 2017 22:12:19
Cant argue with that, even for a cup match where you can always get a shock result they just looked more composed.

We had enough ball and chances just didn't look like we were ever going to win.

20 Dec 2017 22:13:07
What can you say about that? Ibra looked like a non league player most of the game, Blind could get us a pack of fags from Barcelona for what he is worth. Darmian needs to get back to a lazy league, where he will get more time to try and defend. As for Pogba, stop trying to do it all, just the basics first.

20 Dec 2017 23:36:14
Maybe if he had some other playeres that could actually play football around him he wouldn’t feel like he has to do it all. How frustrating it must be to pass the ball to martial, rash or Ibra and know they will constantly lose it.

20 Dec 2017 15:48:58
Starting to get a real dislike of pep (maybe jealousy) at the way he's going over the top with celebrations, little digs ect, plus how much luck can one team have, every ricochet every second balls goes their way, can't go on, can it 😭.

20 Dec 2017 17:04:16
If we played that kind of football we'll be celebrating like pep I hate saying it but they're outstanding and we are miles behind.

20 Dec 2017 19:51:55
they are outstanding were not far behind imo if you put Greizmann and Perisic or 2 players of equal elk I'm shore we would be in a 2 horse race Jose is good at building teams we a window coming up I think we will target a attacker.

20 Dec 2017 20:30:12
Agree they’re playing well but can’t see what all the fuss is about personally think we’ve seen better teams in the premiership, when they’ve won champs league andand prem a few times then they ca n gloat.

20 Dec 2017 11:17:51
Question for you all. If Ozil and Sanchez are truely available in January should we go for them. Which one fits our needs more and what would it take to get them.

20 Dec 2017 13:07:26
Good question brad. I think it depends how we intend to set up. I think on paper you would have to say Sanchez is the player we should go for and he is the sort of player we are lacking. If we are looking to play 3 in midfield it would be logical to go for Sanchez to play on the left or right. My personal preference is Ozil who I think is a beautiful player to watch when he is on top of his game. I think we will get him as Sanchez wants city and in quite happy about that because sanchez’s Attitude stinks by the look of it.

20 Dec 2017 13:55:16
Good question brad and the answer is we need both. Both of them will improve our team beyond recognition. Matic pogba and ozil will be a very good midfield. Ozil is very good at passing and ball retention. Sanchez will add a much needed width and the X factor that our team is desperately lacking.

20 Dec 2017 15:34:55
My preference would be Ozil which I expect will go against what most people would want. I think Ozil gets bad press, he covers much more ground than many give him credit for. He does what very few people in our team do at the moment and that is always make himself an option, he doesn’t hide, he makes himself available for a simple pass at all times. Too many times our attacks break down because there is no easy pass on, so we either lose the ball trying something risky or we turn back and pass the ball backwards. Ozil through clever movement makes himself available and he keeps the attack moving at pace.

I really like Sanchez as a player, he works hard and has great talent. However, he has a bad attitude, he is petulant when he doesn’t get things his own way and he laughs when his team concedes. We don’t need a player like that, their bad attitude spreads through the club and affects the young players. I know some will defend him and say that I might be misunderstanding his reactions, and that is true I might be. But the very fact they could be misconstrued means others inside and outside the club can and probably will see them that way. We have two very talented you forwards in Rashford and Martial, we don’t need a big time charlie getting in their way and suffocating, we need someone who can help them progress and help bring the best out of them. I can see Sanchez berating them for not passing him the ball when they try something themselves. They need encouraging not beating down. Look at Iwobi at Arsenal, full of tricks and confidence when he started out, yet every time he tried something that didn’t work out Sanchez would have a go at him, slowly the lad has gone back into his shell and he doesn’t look half as good as he did last season.

{Ed004's Note - I would opt for Ozil over Sanchez as well and for the exact same reasons}

20 Dec 2017 16:34:46
Ozil. I wanted Ozil before he went to Madrid and when he left Madrid. I think he'd fit into the team well. We do need someone in the right who has pace and can cross. But I think Ozil on a free or a reduced fee is too good a deal.

20 Dec 2017 09:12:30
Shappy – Clearly I am on a hiding to nothing replying to your post as there seems to be a lot of positive things to say about it from our fellow posters (I don’t mind playing the pantomime villain because I think it is necessary and on a Man Utd supporter site taking the “positive” angle which actually is pretty “defensive” like our team will always garner praise – too many excuses being made for systemic failure! I would say that I try to keep my posts as snappy as possible, obviously I’d like to elaborate to explain the rationale behind my thoughts but that takes up both a lot of time and a lot of space, your essay below requires a detailed response, so for those of you that are interested, get a brew on and take a trip into the mind of the Beast!

Firstly, I do not disagree with all of your post and quite often I agree with several aspects of many of the posts people make, I’d guess it’s just 25% of the points people make that I take umbrage with and it’s only worth pointing out those differences as we have an “agree/ disagree” button if we agree with all of it. I don’t think it’s a case of all or nothing and this applies to posts as much as it applies to ways the club can move forward or for that matter the way we play – there can be grey areas. Sometimes we play well, more often we don’t. I’d just like to see more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff like everyone I’m sure. It’s also very easy to twist what people say on here and to create a false narrative, I’m sure people don’t do this maliciously but it happens all the time because I assume people take what they want to from posts they see.

In direct response to your questions/ points in the order they appear and hopefully these comments may clarify some misconceptions or at the least provide legitimacy for my frequent criticisms:

1 – Correct I am critical of our playing style, this isn’t solely based on how we played previously under SAF (I have never said this was solely the case so you are guilty of taking poetic license here) . In fact I am fully aware that with age people tend to remember things slightly better than they actually were, we were on the whole far more entertaining throughout the entire SAF tenure than what we are now, despite this, especially since the start of the Premier League. We did play some poor football at times under SAF, his last season was terrible despite romping the league. A key point that people need to remember is that benchmarks move, most people are praising Jose or at least judging him in comparison to LVG or Moyes, SAF was judged on the season before the last one and that was often a very good one performance wise by his Man Utd. So the benchmarks have changed because people have trouble remembering too much detail from 5+ years ago and we have had quick changes of management recently so that is an obvious barometer. It also fits the narrative of ‘progress ‘ if you use a really low benchmark like the LVG era. So I’m saying the dice are loaded, I argued at times that having no manager would be better than having LVG in that seat, so is it any surprise that with hundreds of million spent and one of the best managers ever coming in that the teams has improved a bit since LVG?

2 – We have in fact played amazing football 2 or 3 times this season imo, the West Ham game, the Burton game were both fantastic to watch. So Jose has done it, Moyes had us play amazing football a couple of times as well, the Leverkusen game stands out for me. Even the man that gave me something like 100 disagrees when I called for him to be sacked (which is handily swept under the memory lapse carpet once everyone else jumps on board), had a couple of great performances mixed amongst the rubbish (LVG) . What this tells me is that we are capable of playing amazing football now, the players and manager are just incapable of replicating it often enough because of the way we set up to play – freaks happen and unfortunately the amazing performances are freaks, whereas for the majority of the SAF reign the freaks were the boring/ awful performances. This frustrates me, because we have proven we can play fast, free flowing, productive football, but for some reason the manager doesn’t want to do that or is no longer good enough to do that.

3 – We have had vast investment in the squad in recent years, yet we play like a bunch of strangers most games and much of this money has been wasted – we struggle to pass and move into space, it is often long balls and individual moments of brilliance that constitute an attack – very rarely do we see players on the same wave length. SAF and other managers make mistakes in the transfer market so this isn’t necessarily just a Man Utd problem. However I struggle to recall another team getting things so wrong with the money they have spent and the wastage, we look like an International team more often than not. We have signed some players that should have gotten us on the edge of our seats, but alas the style and tactics deployed by our recent manager has handicapped this – that is very frustrating.

4 – Yes I hammered LVG and would have preferred Jose to come in much sooner, haven’t I been proven right? Granted the Jose we got was the Jose that lost his way at Chelsea (which I hoped wouldn’t be the case), but that has still proven to be better than LVG hasn’t it? I am still unhappy because the Jose I wanted was the Jose that was 100% committed and was better than the Jose we currently have. People change, just like with LVG, most fans were pointing to his great record to justify his appointment and giving him time, well the LVG we signed up wasn’t the same guy that had all that success years before, I think we are seeing a toned down version of this with Jose. His time of being a pioneer is behind him, like most managers as they get older they get even more defensive, less risk takers, more stubborn and less committed.

5 – I’d like to interview candidates for the job, but going off what I have seen I would take the Monaco manager as I have said over a dozen times on this site. Based purely on the fact he has coached overseas, is young, has his team play football the way I like to see it played and he is relatively unknown, so other managers will not have studied him on the way to becoming managers (unlike Jose and LVG) . I don’t know if he was responsible for player recruitment or not, but whoever was at Monaco I would take them as well as clearly they have an eye for talent and the manager knew how to get the most out of that talent – something we do not see often.

6 – I remember it took a while for SAF to get things going, however he took over a club in a mess. The Man Utd of 1986 is a completely different animal to the Man Utd of 2016. Comparing the two things to justify what we are seeing now is nonsensical to me, especially as we have seen with teams like Leicester how quickly you can turn a team from relegation fodder into title winners with the right management and signings (for 1/ 10th of the money we spent) .

7 – Rome wasn’t built in a day. Correct, but it had a lot of bad Emperors and they were often taken out before they could do too much trouble, what happened to Rome as well – SAF built Rome, the past 3 managers are destroying it imo?! Jose isn’t known for building anything, he signs, does well (normally), then leaves under a cloud a few years later. The club wanted LVG to build up Rome again, the problem was he wasn’t capable, Jose was brought in because they needed immediate success to salvage massive sponsorship payments and to correct the damage that had occurred in recent years – the club are not building anything with Jose as manager, he is not a builder, he is a winner at all costs – which is why I am so critical, because City are pulling further ahead and winning the CL will be luck if it happens because every one of us would agree that we do not have the best team in Europe and Jose doesn’t look like he can change that unless he has £500m to spend, because we need a lot more quality to compensate for the way the manager sets us out. His one role will be to win things of importance, I don’t think that looks too likely at the moment.

8 – I don’t buy into fans earning the right to watch good football (or being spoiled), especially City fans. I simply look at the players we have, the manager we have, the support the manager has, the funds and our attacking pedigree as a club and make a call on whether or not we are doing as well as we should be. I am not as emotional about things as I used to be, partly on account of age but mostly because I have never felt so detached from the club. We have owners that don’t seem to have a clue about the football side (or care), Woody seems clueless as well, Jose seems uncommitted and has us playing negative tactics, the players for the most part seem unbothered (remember defeats where they are laughing and joking with opponents at the final whistle) . The entertainment levels are much lower watching us, and neutrals will say this as well – we are a very hard watch compared to recent history anybody without blinkers on will agree to this. I see no reason whatsoever why that has to be the case, it simply doesn’t have to be like this so why are we so quick to simply accept it as a necessary evil, says who?

9 – Pogba – we shouldn’t be so reliant on one player and this praise for him is hyped out of all proportion. How many great games has he played for us? How many times has he been the difference maker on the pitch (not off it)? We are not a one man team because Pogba turns up 1/ 5 games, but more than that recently, but we shouldn’t exagerate. He and DDG are our two world class talents without a doubt, but big players are missed by other teams and frankly I’m not happy putting all of our eggs in the Pogba basket, he hasn’t earned it yet. Besides it’s a bit of a poor indictment on the rest of the team and manager if we are so reliant on one player being both available and then on form – he has had more poor games in his Utd career than he has had good games imo, so saying a fit Pogba means we win stuff is wishful thinking only.

10 – We shouldn’t be wallowing in what City are doing, we should be rising to the challenge laid down. We should be using them as the current benchmark, simply throwing our arms in the air and saying “but City are record breakers” is not what winners do and that is exactly why we are not competing. We have much more going for us over City, we had a massive head-start that was blundered by Moyes and LVG, but Jose should be closing that gap with the investment he has had and the support, but we are falling farther behind – that is not acceptable to me, nor should it be to any of our fans.

11 – Comparing ourselves to where we were 2 years ago is like putting a heavyweight against a fly weight in a boxing match. I’m not surprised you want to do that because it makes us look good, I’d rather compare us to the holder of all the heavyweight belts at the moment and say why aren’t we holding those belts, how do we hold those belts, not “look we just pulverised a little kid in the ring, look how strong I am compared to that runt”.

So in summary, I see the progress from LVG, I was expecting a lot more. I see boring games most times I watch us, I see hoofing it far too often, little interchange between players, limited risks being taken, limited ambition on the pitch, fear whenever there is one goal in it and we approach 20 minutes to go almost every game. DDG making more saves than any of GK in the league so far and we have wasted so much money in recent years it is beyond disgusting.

We had a golden opportunity to bring glory back, but we are wasting it and our main rival domestically is capitalising in a phenomenal way, this adds insult to injury. We are falling further behind in the race, so I don’t see progress, I see regression when judged against the levels we should be competing at. There is far too much papering over cracks going on and kids will be switching off when we are on the TV, that will hurt us in 10 years time massively – we still have time to salvage what took a generation to build, but playing this negative football with a sad/ depressive manager is not the way to do it imo, shame as Jose 10 years ago would do a lot more with these tools, we need the next bright eyed, progressive version, but somebody that believes in attacking is the best way of defence, just like Barcelona, City, PSG and Bayern do.

I support Man Utd as much as any fan – I just don’t support the vision or approach, many ways to skin a cat of course, we are just choosing the most difficult and painful version for some crazy reason, and we are being subjected to every agonising moment of it! Shame.

20 Dec 2017 10:56:06
Some really good points in there beast .
Biggest post I've ever seen.

20 Dec 2017 10:58:56
Beast, great reply and I really appreciate the time and effort you clearly put into that. It is hard to argue with much of what you have said there. I think we are two sides of the same coin, I lean towards the optimistic side whereas you lean towards the pessimistic side. Essentially we both want the same thing, but are looking at it from a different vantage point.

I think as you mentioned you don’t tend to reply to post you agree with which I think does add to the sour demeanor that sometimes comes across. As we only see angry disagreeable Beast.

I think your right in saying the clubs handling has been poor. For me this is the key reason I want a director of football at the club. We allowed Sir Alex to have complete control over the direction of the club, but he had earned that right over many years of service. Since then we have given creative control over to each manager and given them free reign. This has led to the swinging in different directions with each change of manager. We have owner who aren’t football people, a chief executive who isn’t a football person. We need someone from a footballing background who understands the game fully to control the direction of the club. You mention interviewing managers for the position, this is something I agree with. However, who would interview them and what traits would they be looking for? At the moment it would be Woodward, and judging on some of his appointments he has proven himself lacking in knowing what is needed.

I still disagree that we should have made a jump in improvement to such an extent we would be doing better than City are currently. No one could have predicted how good City would be this year, So I think it unfair to have expected Jose to have taken our side from 6th last season the record breaking this season. As it is he has United getting better results than Sir Alex managed in all bar a two seasons in his 26 year career with the club. That is impressive.

I think a lot of people make the mistake in watching the whole of the United game then the highlights of Spurs, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and City rather than the whole game. They then come to the conclusion that the other teams are playing better having only seen the best 5-8 minutes of their games and comparing that to the whole 90 minutes of ours.

Watching just the highlights and not the whole games we look as good as anyone else's highlights bar City’s.

Liverpool play very well in spells but make stupid mistakes and turn away from a scrap, and City are on another level. But Spurs, Chelsea and Arsenal are all playing a similar standard as ours, only we are doing it better as we are higher in the table. So I don’t buy this everyone is playing scintillating football and we are boring the arses off everyone no matter how much the scouse loving media try and say its so.

20 Dec 2017 11:39:30
Great post Beast, couldn't agree more.

20 Dec 2017 14:15:02
Beast. I made my point clear on the previous post. I agree with your post.
I think we can spin it any way we want but the fact is we're 11 points behind the leaders and they are not looking like losing as they have too much fire power.
We're also light years away in the way the club is being run. If we choose to ignore that, then we'll be playing second fiddle for years to come.
City, Chelsea and the others are not going to sit on their laurels while we argue the toss with other clubs and miss out because their valuation is £5m out like we did with perisic. Other teams identify and go and pay the selling team. End of.

20 Dec 2017 15:47:34
Attack, I agree the club needs to be run better. I don't think our decision makers have a real in depth understanding of football.
However, I don't think the just spend more money is the way to go about it. Chelsea tried that model when Abramovich first took over, he out bid us for players such as Robben and Essien. Some may argue he needed to at the time to build Chelsea into the team they are now. However they soon changed their transfer policy once they realised that they were being quoted 10m more than everyone else.
They still spend big on players they feel are worth it, but they don't spend silly money on above average players.

Some players are worth paying over the odds for others are not. Perisic is a very good player, but considering his age, his history and his current ability he just wasn't worth what they wanted for him. He is soon to be 29, will have no sell on value if he didn't succeed and has only really been playing at his current level for 18 months to two years. He didn't have the track record, he doesn't have the growth potential and even if he just maintained his level he wasn't and isn't playing at a 55m standard. Mkhitaryan was playing in Dortmund much better than Perisic has played at Inter, we paid 25m for Mkhitaryan, why would we pay 20m more for an older not quite as good version?

20 Dec 2017 18:47:27
Ugh. 'sell on value'. I hate that phrase, Shappy. We're one of the biggest clubs in the world, not West Ham or Newcastle. Sell on value should never, ever come into it when we're looking at new players.

20 Dec 2017 19:24:32
I kind of agree Stevie, however our club is owned by business men who will consider the value of an "asset".