If he is going to be angry at anyone it should be himself for persevering with him in goal.
UEFA Champions & Europa League Football Thread ** spoilers ** [8th - 10th April 2025]
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If he is going to be angry at anyone it should be himself for persevering with him in goal.
Soldato
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well, there's that too I guess.
Our issue is that this is by a country mile the weakest set of keepers we have ever had. In the past we had two keepers that would get into all but the top sides in the league. Now we have two keepers that very few sides in the league would trade their first choice keeper for.
to be honest, i'd kill for massimo taibi now. anyone would be an improvement on onana at this point.
Yeah, he was quality. I never worried when he was playing.
DDG had to be replaced in no small part due to his ridiculous salary but how we didn't do our due diligence on Onana is beyond me.
I think keepers are very hard to judge on stats. Recently Sanchez (Chelseas keeper) was ranked one of the best in the world. Onana was ranked very highly at one point despite being junk for us in general.
We needed an upgrade on DDG in some areas of the game but the big issue with him was always his wages. His shot stopping was fine. He was making some mistakes but nowhere near as many as Onana. His command of the area, sweeping, handling crosses and distribution was all sub-par but if he was on £120k/week that might not have been a priority.
Will be interesting to see if hes a priority in the summer or something for the year after.
I think at the moment he can't be a priority. You can't have a keeper like him if you want to win anything, but for this rebuilding phase i think it's about getting the team playing well, and doing enough for top 5, then you replace Onana as the final piece when you need that extra 10 points a season his mistakes cost you to push towards a title.
I think how bad Onana's been has clouded some people's memories of De Gea's final 4 seasons at Utd. De Gea's form fell off a cliff pretty much as soon as he signed that massive contract, to the point that he wasn't just not performing well enough to justify the huge wage he was on but to be a keeper at any top half club. In fact just looking back at some YouTube vids of the mistakes he was making, it's hard to say Onana's done any worse.
Everything at United seems to points to a culture of thinking they're better than they are.
"We are Manchester United"
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I'd hazard a guess that DDG's goal/long kicks are still better than Onana's, the latter probably has 1 in 10 that find a United player.
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I think as Matic suggested, the culture at United didn't prioritise football over the commercial side of things and players were incentivised and led to believe that their marketability was their most important attribute. I don't think they think they are better than they are, I just don't think that the club has had its focus in the right place and you can't expect the players to have a laser focus when no one else does.
That, coupled with quite a few "decent" finishes in the league making them think things are going better than they are at times despite relying on the weakness of opposition to get those results. We've never been close to competing for the league since Fergie left despite some second place finishes. We have always been miles off the pace of the top teams and often dropped back the season after a decent league run. Again, likely because the club had zero ambition on the pitch.