This Man Utd is like 1980s Man Utd with ‘sublime players and carthorses’
Being a Man Utd fan can still be fun as long as you ignore the Sir Alex Ferguson years and enjoy the chaos and the cups.
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Man Utd are back in the 80s again
I was 9 when I first went to the Stretford End and saw teeny tiny Lou Macari score a thunder-tw*t 30 yard winner in 1979. I was hooked. If you forget about the money, the current United are back in the 80s, careening around between big-name managers and no-hopers, occasionally sublime players and carthorses, winning the odd cup and sometimes being brilliant to watch sometimes dire.
I love being a United fan and we don’t have to be all conquering for that to continue. I may be naive, but for the first time in a decade it looks like success at football is at least partly what the management wants. As opposed to just a big piggybank.
In the 80s, Liverpool = Man City. Everton = Arsenal.
Rearguards,
Liam
Shooting JR
I have to respond to JR’s attempt at positivity in the mailbox on Thursday morning.
United are still talked about a lot, it’s true, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. Maybe Oscar Wilde was right about all this, but the reason that most non-United fans indulge in a United oriented conversation is all about enjoying the schadenfreude. Feel free to take that as a positive if you want, but I am struggling to see it.
Yes, everyone does still want to beat you, but they also want to beat Liverpool, City and Arsenal too, and celebrate on the odd occasion this happens, but they take more joy from beating United simply because it happens all the time.
The pain caused by Ferguson has absolutely dissipated in the last ten years because the club has been a shadow of the Ferguson years.
As a Liverpool fan, it was just awful watching United dominate, but also as a Liverpool fan, it’s been marvellous watching the shit show at OT, and here we are, three games into the season with the team, yet again, in a mess, with United fans in complete turmoil, desperately trying to find positives: Teams celebrate when they beat us! We were good once and you all hated it! Liverpool are really good these days but they could have won more trophies! Opposition fans cling to the pain of the past?!? Where does that even come from?
And sorry to break it to you, but as much as pennies are finally beginning to drop with some old school United fans (and it has taken ten years for this to start happening), a significant proportion of United fans still have a twisted sense of entitlement and remain in denial that the club is a fallen giant.
United are super lucky that that their most successful period coincided with the ridiculous monetisation of the game, and this means that they remain, just about, in the upper echelons of the English game, but at the time of writing, United are in a pack of also-rans that includes Spurs, Villa, Chelsea, Newcastle and perhaps even Brighton and West Ham, and I don’t think anyone would be surprised to see the manager ousted by Christmas and another 8th place finish.
As a football fan, I can appreciate your defiance and attempts at positivity, but you aren’t fooling anyone except some of your fellow broken United fans.
Mat (thoughts and prayers with the mothers of Pacho and Keith who both must have had a terrible time over the comment-free period)
MORE ON MAN UTD MESS FROM F365:
👉 16 Conclusions on Man Utd 0-3 Liverpool: Ten Hag sack, great Gravenberch, Casemiro done, ‘unprofessional’ Szob
👉 Five reasons for Manchester United fans to be cheerful features the Ten Hag sack
👉 Zirkzee 8th), Ugarte 5th): Ratcliffe-era Man Utd transfer decisions ranked from worst to best
Man Utd defeat WAS about tactics
Thought I’d throw my two cents in to keep fanning the flames of this incredible meltdown. Can we make it a mandatory fixture to have Liverpool visit Old Trafford before the first international break every season?
Re: Garey’s email about tactics not being the main reason for Liverpool’s success, I must disagree.
Slot highlighted in his post-match interview that “Their full-backs are sometimes really high and then Casemiro comes in between. So if you pick the ball and you keep Luis Diaz and Mo Salah high you’re constantly in a one-v-one situation”. That’s a tactical choice to keep your wingers high and wide rather than have them fall back when put of possession. It’s very similar to what Klopp used to do, but it’s a tactical decision made on his own observation that Utd don’t really anticipate losing the ball in their build-up.
Slot had Van Dijk and Gravenberch poised to pounce on every poor touch and pass. They aggressively looked to intercept passes rather than to fall back and close the space behind the high line. Again, while it’s not very different from his predecessor, it is a tactical choice, one that Utd didn’t follow for example.
That the goals did indeed come from individual errors, I would argue that most goals occur in this fashion by some mistake made by the defending team. You have cherry picked the times we successfully scored from these tactics. We had further chances for Szoboszlai, Salah and Trent even had a disallowed goal for good measure, not to mention the foul on Gakpo in the box that eventually fell to Nunez. In total 11 shots at goal were had.
Defensively, aside from the opening exchanges and Zirkzee’s chances from which he probably should have scored at least once, Utd were held away at arm’s length rather comfortably through retained possession, which is probably the biggest observable difference between Slot and Klopp. Last year’s games were characterised by Liverpool letting leads slip through sloppy errors and complacency, this year, Liverpool were getting cheered by their fans for doing a rondo outside Utd’s area, culminating in a chance for Salah to make it 4-0.
And for all the people that use stats to justify the closeness of the game, according to Opta, by the time Utd created an xG of 0.5, Liverpool were already 3-0 up with an xG of about 1.2 before they took the foot off the pedal and made substitutions.
Slot may not be as good as Paisley (we can dream) or Klopp. He has a long way to go to even match Postecoglou’s start to last season, but I know which bald headed Dutchman I want steering my ship for the next 35 league games.
Tom, LFC (thought it was nice of our fans to sing both managers’ names, since the other crowd were so quiet)
Getting down with the stats
I’m an old fogey. I preferred football when Mike Bassett was the England manager. Back in the days when managers wrote teamsheets on the back of fag packets and everyone played four-four-fucking-two.
So call me a skeptic about this new obsession with stats, data, heatmaps, xG, ball recoveries, corners won, correlation of the price of pies to away goals…I guess people read match reports on Excel spreadsheets these days. Apparently, the executive summary of Utd_Liverpool.xlsx pointed towards a close game at the weekend.
So I decided to get with the times and join the bandwagon. No more forming opinions by watching games for me. I put on my glasses, opened my laptop, and had a look in the Utd_Progress_2023-24.xlsx folder, and here are the highlights:
8th in the league, their worst-ever Premier League finish (yep, that includes Moyes),
Negative goal difference,
Bottom of an easy group with 15 goals conceded in the group stage (the highest for any English club ever),
Lost 5 of their first 10 home games, their worst start since 1930-31,
Lost 8 of their first 15 games, a record not seen since 1962-63,
Conceded 18 goals in their first 10 league games, a record since 1967,
Conceded 2 or more goals in 4 straight games, the first time since 1979,
Lost consecutive home defeats by three goals or more, a first since 1962.
Etc…
On the plus side, they did win the FA Cup, so everything’s fine.
Sean
It’s been three sodding games
Lads, it’s been 3 games.
3 games.
If you’re deciding your manager is a genius and you’re destined for greatness or your manager is a fraud and the season is for sh*t based on a sample size that small, you’re a fool.
Wait and see how things are in the autumn, 10 or 12 games in, then start piping up. Drawing big conclusions now is the fast lane to looking stupid later.
Lewis, Busby Way
Wolves will be fine
-6 goal difference…Wolves are in trouble?
It’s 3 matches in and we had a tough run in of Arsenal and Chelsea. Next 3 matches will also be tough – Newcastle, Villa and Liverpool.
We could be bottom of the league on -15 but doesn’t mean we are in trouble after six games folks.
Tinkering with new formation at the moment, as well as this they did well first half v Chelsea ( then fell apart) we trust in GON, all going to be good 👍
Colin WWFC Dublin
READ: Five other struggling Premier League managers grateful Ten Hag is taking all the heat
The Price is Wrong
Two points on Villa’s extortionate Champions League ticket prices;
1. Those prices essentially say ‘we don’t expect to be back here soon’. Not cool.
2. If you’re making Gabby Agbonlahor and Stan Collymore look like the sensible adults in the room, you’ve really f**ked it up.
Gary AVFC, Oxford
Rice will not get boiled in Dublin
I find it quite amusing with the reporting that Declan Rice is going to get abuse from the crowd at the Aviva.
For anyone who has never been to an Irish game, the majority of Irish football fans are a fairly supportive bunch (they really wanted Stephen Kenny to succeed despite the games being rubbish), the rest are probably on a corporate junket.
Nearly all support English clubs or Celtic with a reasonable core who support League of Ireland clubs too. There is no real tradition of match going to club games here so the chanting is basic, (Ole, Ole, etc.).
Pretty much everyone there understands Rice and Grealish’s choice, we have been rubbish for the guts of a decade and they have been to major tournaments and finals. So there will be some pantomime booing but I’m pretty sure Declan ain’t going to be phased by it, can’t see any pigs heads being thrown.
Mel – Dublin, Berlin, Athlone Town
Liverpool contract chat
I previously wrote in at-length about the LFC contract situation with Salah, Virgil and Trent. I don’t want to re-hash that subject but wanted to reply to Calvino’s assertion that “the contract situation is very much real and very much a club failing in my mind (especially the disrespect to Mo, VVD)”.
First, I don’t think there is any doubt about the contract situation being “real”; nobody has seriously suggested that any of them have secretly signed contract extensions without announcing them. Secondly, I have no clear idea of what “disrespect to Mo, VVD” is even supposed to mean, or what Calvino is implying the club should have done.
I already went through the reasons why it is entirely logical that no contract extensions have been signed for any players since Jurgen Klopp told the squad he was going to be leaving in November 2023. There is no reason these players would commit to new contracts before finding out how it went with Slot. That is presumably why the last contract extension any player signed was Kostas Tsimikas in September 2023.
So the last opportunity LFC had to extend these contracts was in Summer 2023. At that point, Salah was a 31 year old with 2 years left on his 350k-per-week contract and Virgil was a 32 year old with 2 years left on his 220k-per-week contract. I don’t think LFC would have done anything differently even if they had 20/20 foresight and knew Klopp would resign midway through the next season; it would not have been the smart move to do so.
I would agree that LFC extending Trent’s contract was always a no-brainer, even in Summer 2023 as a 24 year old with 2 years left on his 180k-per-week contract. The thing is, we don’t know if Trent was interested in signing a contract extension at that point. LFC had just finished outside the CL spots the previous season. As one of the best players in the world he may have been wanting to see signs that the club was back on the right track before extending. By the time that happened, Klopp had told the squad he was leaving.
Oliver (Calvino thinking rival fans want ETH sacked is very funny, but has already been addressed by others) Dziggel, Geneva Switzerland