Greenlizard0 Weekend Football Thread ** spoilers ** [21st - 23rd October 2016]

Pigeon_Killer said:
. Add the likes of Carrick, Rooney and Schweinsteiger and you have multiple league titles, multiple Champions League titles and a few World Cups :p
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Unfortunately all these players legs and or ability has just evaporated over the last year or more. In such high intensity games as the EPL serves up every weekend, no team hoping for the top four can afford that let alone in central midfield

Yesterday was just a disaster waiting to happen. With no recognised DM on the pitch, and an AM+ Fellaini playing in their place Utd were going to be found out eventually.

Unfortunately there was too much to do in the summer with the prolonged deals for Mhki and more so Pogba (and Ibra as well to an extent) & on top of that unsuccessfully trying to get rid of those JM didnt want at all (Rojo, Schweini and possibly Darmian to name a few) to free up the wage bill.

This of course its helped by the Mkhi situation which is particularly strange + Memphis not performing for the best part of a season.
 
Think we are seeing the result of trying to build a team around pogba. Except pogba isn't good enough to warrant building a team around. As i pointed out pre season he was a total luxury buy good neither offensively or defensively.

Don't think that's what we needed at all.

Again im glad we didn't get into the CL can yiu imagine what barca would have done to us. We don't even get out of bed for the big games these days.
 
What makes me laugh is how much bastian could help pogba but he's been treated so poorly, still an outcast because jose is a petty manager. Clearly no team spirit at united, I think they should have gone with Blanc.
 
llamadal said:
What makes me laugh is how much bastian could help pogba but he's been treated so poorly, still an outcast because jose is a petty manager. Clearly no team spirit at united, I think they should have gone with Blanc.
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so you missed how poor he was majority of last season then?

He isnt capable of the speed / intensity of the EPL at all

Robbo said:
I think we'll need to get at least a couple of players in January to plug the big holes that Mourinho is seeing in the team. Where they are isn't entirely clear, I'd say defensive midfield is definitely one area and then most likely a full back.
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While I completely agree with these two are desperate, its getting the money to do it to start with - if the board is being as vigilent regarding the spend on wages as multiple articles suggested in the summer Utd are going to have to sell several players before they can buy anyway. not to mention we could really do with a 3rd "proper" centre back with Bailly being on ACoN duty

Given the short window, it appears as though players are happy to sit doing nothing on the high wages in their contract than actually play consistantly elsewhere for less money. We might get a few sold , but if the prices are anything like the summer that isnt going to be enough.
 
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Moses said:
Was that because he's not good enough, or because the team isn't? The fact Pogba has looked bang average doesn't mean he is... it could be that the team is rubbish and is shackling him/he needs a good team around him to be good... couldn't the same be said of Schweinsteiger?
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Two completely opposite issues

Pogba is clearly still getting used to the league and needs to be given time (and preferably played in the position further forward, with the right players behind him in midefield, which isnt possible yet at Utd)

Schweinstiger was creaking around the pitch every game he played and couldnt keep up. The intensite in majority of games was clearly beyond his ability - several years ago it wouldnt have been, but clearly physically he is much worse off than he was , which isnt surprising given how little Utd actually paid in transfer fee. His consistant injuries arent helping his cause either.
 
Shame, I used to 'hate' Jose (as he was dam good coach) but seriously respected him as a coach and more importantly as a person. Nowadays he's just annoying and whines all the time PLUS he still gets to spend what he wants. Everyone and everything is against him, yet he's had the luxury of spending what ever he wants and has serious depth to every squad he's ever had.
I used to like him as a character, but now.....'not so much'
 
I love that people like to say Bastian was 'creaking around the pitch'. He was anything but, he was playing box to box, getting back to defend and getting into the box to try and get on the end of crosses. He was anything but creaking around the pitch. People wrote him off as old and couldn't run any more, also kept saying he was useless. He was anything but, he was extremely good but on a completely different wavelength to other players and still involved in a team where Rooney was constantly slowing the play and ruining the game around him.

Bastian would read how the game was playing out and burst into the box to get on the end of a cross, he would see when someone was making a slow pass and raced out to close down a CB and put him under pressure but no one else on the team went with him. Morgan did the same thing, both of them playing together, consistently, with Pogba ahead of him would most likely be very effective. If everyone is on a different wavelength then everything they do looks stupid and comes to nothing. But it was genuinely painfully obvious how good Bastian was.
 
Andybtsn said:
I do find it baffling we're discussing managerial changes already, Mourinho is one of the top managers out there still. It's the drivel that's playing for him.

Think of the quality that could have been bought for that Pogba money. Ridiculous.
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LOL yet what happened with chelsea then?

Mourinho is fast becoming a fraud
 
Andybtsn said:
Has it been that much different since he left?
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Well with a new manager they've won 6, drawn 1 and lost 2. Statto is down which has the easiest format to see results but from other places it looks like when Mourinho was fired they had won a massive 4 games in the league by Dec 17th which Wiki says is when he was fired.

4 wins, 3 draws and 9 losses for Mourinho with Chelsea before he got fired. So in 9 games Chelsea have won 50% more games this season than last season after 16 games. I'd say that is pretty different. 25% win rate to a 66% win rate. Chelsea also lost the community shield, lost one CL game, and lost in the league cup.

So far this season Mourinho has won 4 league games, drawn 2 and lost 3. Considerably better than he started with Chelsea last year, but considerably worse than CHelsea are doing under Conte.
 
We don't know what happened that season when Chelsea were really poor, it happens, i think Klopp recently had something similar with Dortmund. Mourinho does seem to be even more militant nowadays, i read something about the people around him saying he's different since his fathers ill health. He just needs a few more transfer windows at UTD, it's been said a lot but the squad still doesn't have that hunger that it once had under Fergie, takes a while to build a squad which can compete on every front. I'm not sure why people keeping banging the Mourinho is rubbish drum, ok, he doesn't play a high intensity pressing game like Klopp, nothing wrong with that though, different managers different styles, it would pretty boring if every manager favoured a particular style. I heard no one complaining about Chelsea when they won the title, they played some amazing football, i'd be gobsmacked that he doesn't get UTD back up to competing properly within a season or 2.
 
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Klopp had 60-70% of the first team injured on and off for 12 months, end of one season and first 6 of the next. most of them played in the world cup inbetween and got reinjured. It was just bad luck, the second they were all fit again they shot up from relegation to what 7th or something in a matter of 2-3 months. The football wasn't bad, just everyone was injured, just like Newcastle the year after they got 5th, they had constant injuries to first team players and they'd come back but with others out, no one could find form.

Mourinho had no such issue, his tactics were stale, his attack was stale, he focuses on defence and almost never manages to get a player to improve during his time at a club. Every time his teams fall apart after a certain amount of time. He rather 'Redknapp'd" the 14/15 season by buying a working offensive partnership to make the attack click. Rather than train and improve an offence(something he's never done) he brought in a form striker and AMC to fix the offence, which worked but they also went stale under his type of training.

This is what Redknapp did everywhere, don't train players to be better, by a new batch of form players to replace anyone that lost form.


Chelsea were also incredibly boring to watch in the title season for the last 3-4 months and frequently playing bad football. They were meh in his first season back also. It was only with Fabregas and Costa bossing the league and Hazard playing well with them that they looked good offensively and that only lasted till maybe Feb or so.
 
70% of the first team injured? I find that hard to believe. They may have played in the WC, but that's no different to Chelsea, all the Chelsea players are internationals as well. Tactics could hardly have been stale if he went from 2nd to 1st and i'm not sure why would expect a team to play incredible football all season long, if you look back at all the premier league winners bar maybe the invincibles, they'll all have to dig in and grind out results sometimes. A team can't play amazing football all season long, it's impossible. UTD are a great example of that under Fergie, never usually started well but had a hell of a finish on them, Fergie was never scared of switching things up and grinding a result out. I think you should go watch the season where they won, they weren't boring to watch at all.
He's a more conservative coach, i agree with that, he doesn't like to go out the blocks quickly, just because you don't favour that doesn't mean he isn't a good coach. I think it's bizarre how people can call him a terrible coach when he's won stuff everywhere, i don't understand it personally.
 
He's won stuff with teams that were capable of winning stuff before he arrived, full stop. Guardiola has yet to truly build a winning team, he's started with brilliant teams at both clubs he has won things with. City, aren't exactly bad but need more work than Bayern and Barca did by a mile. If he can win the CL with them he'll be proving something, winning it with Messi, Iniesta, Busquets and Xavi is.... meh. He failed to win it with a truly epic Bayern team.

Winning things isn't a barometer of success in and of itself. If you take over a team second only to a unbeaten Arsenal and win.... woooo, there was a 99.999999% chance Ranieri would have won the title that year with Chelsea as well, not least because Ranieri secured the signings of Cech and Robben to add to that team that came second.

Winning a CL, in fact getting to a single CL final for Atletico is a monumentally bigger achievement than getting a win for Real or Barca. Winning the league with Atletico is a bigger achievement than doing it with Barca or Real. Getting to the CL final and winning the league with Dortmund is a larger achievement than doing the same with bayern.
 
drunkenmaster said:
Well with a new manager they've won 6, drawn 1 and lost 2. Statto is down which has the easiest format to see results but from other places it looks like when Mourinho was fired they had won a massive 4 games in the league by Dec 17th which Wiki says is when he was fired.

4 wins, 3 draws and 9 losses for Mourinho with Chelsea before he got fired. So in 9 games Chelsea have won 50% more games this season than last season after 16 games. I'd say that is pretty different. 25% win rate to a 66% win rate. Chelsea also lost the community shield, lost one CL game, and lost in the league cup.

So far this season Mourinho has won 4 league games, drawn 2 and lost 3. Considerably better than he started with Chelsea last year, but considerably worse than CHelsea are doing under Conte.
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What did Mourinho do with the same squad the season prior?
 
drunkenmaster said:
He's won stuff with teams that were capable of winning stuff before he arrived, full stop. Guardiola has yet to truly build a winning team, he's started with brilliant teams at both clubs he has won things with. City, aren't exactly bad but need more work than Bayern and Barca did by a mile. If he can win the CL with them he'll be proving something, winning it with Messi, Iniesta, Busquets and Xavi is.... meh. He failed to win it with a truly epic Bayern team.

Winning things isn't a barometer of success in and of itself. If you take over a team second only to a unbeaten Arsenal and win.... woooo, there was a 99.999999% chance Ranieri would have won the title that year with Chelsea as well, not least because Ranieri secured the signings of Cech and Robben to add to that team that came second.

Winning a CL, in fact getting to a single CL final for Atletico is a monumentally bigger achievement than getting a win for Real or Barca. Winning the league with Atletico is a bigger achievement than doing it with Barca or Real. Getting to the CL final and winning the league with Dortmund is a larger achievement than doing the same with bayern.
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I agree that winning isn't the only barometer of success, but winning champions league titles with both Porto and Inter is a pretty big barometer of success at the highest level. He never won the CL with Real but i think the previous 7 years or something, Real had lost in the 1st round of knock out stage, he then managed to get them to the semi finals for next 3 years, Ancelotti then won the next season, some could say Mourinho just needed that extra year to take them all the way. He's won titles every club he's been at and i don't expect that to change, he'll win stuff with UTD given a few transfer windows to bring in the exact players he wants.
 
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