Midweek Football Thread - Ten Pounds of Wigs In a Five Pound Bag

this is true but I think he needed a strike partner in the same way that Aguero has Sterling

could have had Salah for £35-40m and got a more dependable playmaker in the midfield than Pogba for a lot less money maybe

2 Likes

We’d have had to pay 50m for Salah, but get your point in general

2 Likes

That was what was really noticeable when Abramovich first took over at Chelsea. It wasn’t just that the team could suddenly compete for top top players, it was that they could afford to bin off virtually a whole team of journeymen.

1 Like

Urgh

https://twitter.com/benhcarrington/status/973715793086050304?s=21

He’s done very well but i think he can work harder. I notice it more when i go to OT, but he doesn’t run off the ball enough He’s by no means the only one though and maybe its part of his instruction - it’s part of a wider rot and culture of not taking the attacking initiative that has set in.

I would say most of the team don’t run enough off the ball, and its been like this since Moyes. This is still LVG ball - we’re just doing a bit better because we have better players now and a manager who knows how to grind out results.

We are 20th in the league for distance covered - and that’s not because we’re some wonderful possession-based team.

Fwiw, Guardiola took a much better team that should have been winning the league anyway, and had been planning for his arrival for several years.

Mourinho took over a team that was an absolute mess from an ageing squad, which had been further muddled by bizarre scattershot Woodward signings. On paper, he’s improved it massively with his signings. Results wise (points don’t lie) he’s made them the second best team in the league.

Not taking anything away from Pep’s achievement, Mourinho will never have a team playing like that, but we were several steps behind them in the first place and I imagine Pep would still be having last season City type struggles and frustrations with United at this stage.

1 Like

City and United finished level on points in 2015/16

1 Like

Transfers out in the first two seasons under Abramovich - they let go of some proper great players (in bold) amongst the dross.

Albert Ferrer
Gianfranco Zola
Jody Morris
Graeme Le Saux
Ed de Goey
Winston Bogarde
Juan Sebastián Verón
Marcel Desailly
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink
Mikael Forssell
Mario Melchiot
Emmanuel Petit
Mario Stanić
Jesper Grønkjær
Carlton Cole
Hernán Crespo
Boudewijn Zenden
Neil Sullivan
Marco Ambrosio

1 Like

yeah^this

just to provide some contrast, the one time I saw him play in the flesh (Sweden v Argentina friendly) the amount of running Aguero did off the ball was insane. He never stopped or seemingly slowed the entire time he was on the pitch

you’ve not bolded jimmy floyd there by mistake

1 Like

Duly noted.

2 Likes

love him despite playing for chelsea AND leeds, underappreciated how he was able to maintain likeability while surrounded by such scumbaggery

And both the the Danish and Italian Ryan Giggses.

Was obviously being a bit ironic there. Pretty clear though that the squad Pep took over was both better and better suited to his methods than United’s to Mourinho (which is all about mental toughness, I guess, and our players were completely fucking broken).

At this point, I think whoever fetches up at United next has a job on their hands to avoid becoming something approximating England’s PSG. It’s surely occurred to Woodward and the rest of the board that not playing good football and not really winning much (triple excepted) hasn’t impacted on being the most floatable club in the world. Pogba was surely bought with the number of shirts he’d shift first and foremost, and the number of ageing superheroes you’ve gone in for recently stink of exactly the same sort of thinking.

1 Like

Fully agree. Commercial concerns will trump footballing concerns until the club is sold (probably to become a billionaire’s plaything or a state-backed vanity project)

We shouldn’t forget that Jose’s binned off a full team of players around the fringes of the senior team. Don’t think it’s true that he’s not been able to move a lot of dead wood on. Just had a look…

Valdes, Love, McNair, Blackett, Schneiderlin, Scheinsteiger, Powell, Januzaj, Mkhitaryan, Depay, Rooney, Keane were all in the senior squad.

Fletcher, Rathbone, Rothwell, Reid, Dunne, Weir, Goss, El-Fitouri, Harrop have all been released. Maybe they were shite, but…

Johnstone, Pereira, Borthwick-Jackson, Wilson, Varela, Tuanzebe, Fosu-Mensah, Henderson, Mitchell, Poole, Willock, Byrne, Scott, Redmond, Riley have all gone out on loan.

36 players have left in less than two years, 21 permanently. There’s not a huge amount of dead wood there now - Zlatan, Fellaini, maybe one of the left-backs and one of the centre-halves, but it’s a pretty trim squad.

Need a new job, lads…

I think we’re all forgetting that Pep inherited a team with player of the year elect Otamendi already at the club

2 Likes

Just shows how shit our squad was all that, doesn’t it

and despite that we’ve still got yer Blinds, Darmians, Rojos (to a lesser extent), Smallings, Joneses that he’s having to rely on to varying degrees and has “only” bought in eight players to Guardiola’s fourteen or so.

That list you just posted just speaks volumes of what a shitshow of a squad we’d assembled after three years of dicking about replacing decent, experienced league-winners with players that weren’t upgrades in any way.