Man Utd to finish sixth with no-trick wingers like Antony, Sancho, Garnacho?

There are many mails on that non-penalty but Manchester United fans would also like to complain about that team, thanks. They were terrible.

Send your views on this and other subjects to theeditor@football365.com

Man Utd wingers are absolutely rotten
A few years ago, you kindly gave me top billing in the mailbox with a letter titled something like:

‘Rashford and Martial are just right-footed Robbens without the skill’

I’d like to update you on that to include Sancho, Antony and Garnacho as well.

We seem to think defenders should just fall on their arse whenever we start running towards them. They can’t just cut inside and have it somehow work like Robben did, they need to DO SOMETHING to fool the defender into going a certain way.

Last night I watched Wolves drop shoulders, move the ball quickly between feet, and do stepovers that tore United to shreds. And then when we ran at them, we just run into the defender without trying anything at all.

Seriously, get Nani or Giggsy back as dribbling coaches because we’re appalling at taking players on.

Even the little stepover to the right, drag left and shoot with the left that Wang did at the end is all you need to get that half a yard. We just don’t do it.
Silvio (If Onana had hit the defender with his head it would have been a ‘clash of heads’ so why the penalty debate?) Dante

Rotten from Man Utd and the referee
Well that was truly awful, second to every ball and when they did have it far to easily pushed off it, Wolves were faster stronger and just better all over the pitch accept where it counts. Ten Hag needs to get a grip on this lot as playing like this again they will get spanked by almost every team in the league.

Casimero looked slow and overweight, the forward players’ decision-making was off and the passing was schoolboy stuff, the amount of times a Wolves player picked the ball up in their own half and ran with it all the way to United’s penalty area without a challenge being made was frightening.

On to the referee, yes it was a penalty but Wolves fans and players have a short memory as last season their keeper came charging out, missed and smacked a player in the face and nothing was given, I’m not saying it shouldn’t of been a spot kick but Wolves were given the same rule of law last season as United were this. Anthony Taylor is not a very good referee and I think this is the first favourable decision United have gotten out of him, still it gives all the conspiracy theory nutjobs ammo to spout the United own the refs bollocks for a few weeks, all the Fergie in the VAR room memes etc.

The reality is United have had some appalling decisions go against them and very few favourable ones but let’s not let that get in the way of a good conspiracy theory shall we, if we owned the refs as some people suggest then we need our money back as we’ve won bugger all in that time.

Lastly 3 points is 3 points and hopefully Ten Hag will kick them into some sort of order in time for Spurs, if not then we are in for a long season and the refs will really need to earn their corn.
Paul Murphy, Manchester

We saw the first new manager bounce of the season
People were way too confident about Utd going into the game last night. The signings haven’t been great, the signing of Mount is a baffling one to me and Onana, IMO is a risk and may very well bring more pain than joy, and the new striker is nothing but injured potential for the future.

Who exactly is saying that this team should be title challengers? Rashford has been off it since Feb/March and Anthony and Sancho just are not good enough. Are people seeing something that I ain’t!??? The defense is the only thing worth writing home about but they are always one injury away from collapse!

Last night Wolves showed up on their first day of the season with the first new manager bounce of the season and had absolutely everything but the goal. Unfortunately I don’t see that form continuing, Man Utd often acts as steroids for opposition teams who want to etch their names into folklore and Wolves were just the latest to turn up wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

That performance may well take it out of them and will leave the gas tank empty for the upcoming games and you have to wonder is it worth it to sacrifice all that for one game? Utd on the other hand will put their tails between their legs and act like nothing happened. I can see them finishing 6th this season very easily.
Richie – Bulgaria

READ: Dyche leaves Everton, Chelsea above Liverpool, Man Utd outside top four and more kneejerk calls

VAR from okay
Absolutely clear penalty. It’s not even like the ball went out of play and Onana tackling the man didn’t matter. Can’t even fathom what the reasoning was. This should rightly be brought up when we are on the losing side of a decision later this season and start whining.

Maybe we can try Varane at centre-forward. Couldn’t be worse than Weghorst.
Greg, Tampa

…I have seen people suggest that the game might be corrupt in the past and I have dismissed this as paranoid rambling, and I am still not really suggesting that it is. But when you see a decision like that, a goalkeeper basically assaulting an attacking player (and he knew the ball had gone when he brought his arms down), knowing that an “expert” is reviewing the incident from several different angles in slow motion, seeing what everyone else can see, and this “expert” concludes that there is no foul against the big club, in added on time, well, you’d be some sort of idiot not to question how this can happen.

There were some deeply debatable decisions over the weekend but this one is not debatable – it was an obvious foul, and it’s absolutely shocking that the decision wasn’t reversed.

I see apologies have already been made, but that’s Wolves down a point, and United up to two, and there is something profoundly wrong with the game.

If it’s not corruption, it is complete incompetence, and it has to be one or the other. There is no excuse for either.
Matthew

…What really rankles about that non-pen decision last night (which let’s face it the vast majority of other clubs would never get in their favour) is that, based on the 90 mins, it could be the difference between United staying up and someone else going down.
Rob

Actually, not a penalty
On the incident with Onana, I’m inclined to agree with Ten Hag’s logic – that is to say Onana does make contact with the player, but after the ball is played… you generally don’t see those being given.

There was a big fuss about a similar incident when a penalty was give against Ederson against in February in similar circumstances, and probably the same people who are screaming bias in favour of United now were saying “what’s the keeper supposed to do?” – so it is not as cut and dry as people are pretending.

My opinion is unchanged – it probably is technically a foul but that sort of contact in the box after the ball has been played is almost never given as a pen – case in point, Sa clattered into Antony after Antony played the ball with a “foul anywhere else on the pitch” earlier in the very same half of football. Why is one a stonewall pen and not the other?

It’s not unjust on Wolves that they didn’t get a pen, but it would have been agregious if Wolves got awarded one and United didn’t for two near identical incidents.

All the people with their ABU tinfoil hats out would be furious if that was give against their team.
Andy (MUFC)

What’s really wrong with VAR
I imagine the mailbox is gonna be full of VAR mails regarding that non-penalty last night. So here’s another missive on how to fix VAR.

It’s really quite simple. Don’t employ referees to run VAR. I remember seeing an interview with Howard Webb the Chief Refereeing Officer at the PGMOL, he stated that all VAR referee’s have to be current Premier League referees.

That is absolutely crazy and probably the reason why VAR is a mess.

Knowing the laws of football is about 10% of the job of a referee, the rest is a mix of (among others) decision making, football street smarts, dealing with 50,000 people screaming at you, man management, health and safety, crowd control and common sense (if only).

You know the players, you have history with crowds, you have personal bias, all of which you try to minimise. Managing emotions, yours and the players is very important. The only IT you need to worry about is a stopwatch or 2 and a headset.

For a VAR referee, the laws are still a small proportion, but the rest is a completely different skill set, you need analytical and IT skills, in short it’s a completely different job.

If we take last night, we could have had a person who is a professional VAR, knows the rules, knows the job and is genuinely good at the IT, Analysis and applying the rules. Instead we got a matchday referee, who would rather be running around in the heat of the match, might well be refereeing at Old Trafford in the next month and has refereed certain players before.

We wonder why VAR gives us bad decisions, but the worst decision was asking matchday referees to do a job that they haven’t trained for, probably don’t want to do and are probably the last people you want doing it.
Matt

An apology after one weekend?
So, after just one weekend of the supposed best league in the world, we’ve had an apology from Jon Moss and Howard Webb for their merry band of nitwits and incompetent ‘professionals’.

Happy to run around dishing out yellow cards for holding on too long at a throw in (when they now add all the time on anyway!) or for having the audacity to challenge absolutely disgraceful decisions like the Onana foul is why the referees get the abuse they get.

Instead of spending the summer going from club to club and telling players that they were going to see more bookings for kicking the ball away, shirt pulling and dissent (only for the rules to then be applied selectively as we’ve seen multiple times already), Webb and Moss should have improved the referees, much like football coaches try to do with their teams in the off season. They clearly didn’t and yet again, peoples’ jobs are decided by the rank incompetence of people like Simon Hooper and Michael Salisbury (who has previous for this).

Sorry, but how do we let a game worth so much to so many be run by people with such deficiencies when it comes to doing the job they are employed to do? They’ve been given all the technology and tools to do the job the game deserves yet still make basic errors.

Either the Premier League needs to start demanding more from the PGMOL or factoring the ‘apologies’ into the league table because at present, its a shambles.
Stew, London

…Another Premier League season where disgraceful refereeing and VARing once again mars the integrity and fairness of the game in week 1. The resources flying around football and these are the standards of officiating produced. It’s embarrassing.

It would appear to me that PGMOL might be better focused on eliminating obvious errors and increasing their own performance rather than indiscriminately waving yellow cards at managers who understandably lose it. My heart went out to Gary O’Neill last night.

It feels very much like they sat down in the summer and said “we need to stop the criticism of our performance”, but couldn’t be bothered to up their performance so let’s just harshly penalise any and all criticism. The approach reminds me of an episode of South Park where the leaders of a Catholic Church decided to tackle the reporting of child abuse rather than stop the abuse.
PL from DL (I do like the yellow card for imaginary card wavers)