Ten Hag sack looks inevitable after Man Utd substitutions prompt some swears

Erik ten Hag looks like a dead man walking for Manchester United, whose fans are angry about those substitutions in the derby.

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Ten Hag sack talk after ‘f**king crap’ substitutions
I had watched the United vs City game on a flight yesterday, and given the way the first half went, you could actually back United to possibly won the game. But if that was the very best United could produce in 90 mins, then Ten Hag is in trouble in the summer I think. He cannot plan a game out over 90 mins and his subs yesterday were f**king crap.

Firstly why did Evans go off? He didn’t appear to be injured, and when Ten Hag took him off decided to reshuffle the WHOLE defence. What happened after this? Foden scored where the space was from the two CB’s not being close enough to each other on the right-hand side where the youngster came on.

Yes fair enough City dominated and Foden scored a great first goal as did Rashford, but I think the last shot United took in the entire game was in the 23rd min. That is utter crap. I don’t care if it’s City away from home, they weren’t at their best yesterday and if the players had taken a few more risks they could have scored a second goal 15 mins into the second half.

A wasted opportunity really, but in the league the season is over really, I think as a United fan I have to accept this is the reality now that they just aren’t very good and City are the probably the best team in the world right now, and deserve it given they are actually a well run club with objectives similar on all levels (115 charges though, so will see what happens lol, lets face it the those Abu Dhabi lawyers will find a way out of it)

Also why can’t Rashford score more goals like that if he has the ability to do so. Foden has 18 goals this season, where as Rashford has 6. If Rashford wasn’t so lazy, he would actually be on a similar amount of goals, but also playing for United just looks mentally draining as well. Oh and Amrabat should be sent back to Fiorentina early after he gave away the third goal yesterday. United could have made one more chance, but nope decided to give the ball to Haaland who is pretty much the last person you would want to give the ball to.

United need to sack Ten Hag in the summer providing he doesn’t win the FA Cup this season. I don’t think United will beat Liverpool, just too average at the minute and you can tell there is a lack of self-belief in almost all the players currently, but stranger things have happened!
Rami, Dubai

READ: 16 Conclusions on Manchester City 3-1 Man Utd: Ten Hag sack, phenomenal Foden, rubbish Rashford

Nothing to see here…
We learned very little new from the Manchester derby really. City are amazing, United are average but are behind their manager and tried hard. We should not overreact.
Tom

…That was about as expected right? For all the column inches that have been and will be published on the Manchester Derby the resulting plot, City wining by a few whilst dominating possession and United playing on the break with a defensive error gifting Haaland a goal, was probably as close to pre-game consensus as football gets.

Even the slightly controversial nature of City’s first goal giving the United manager something to rail against post game would have only got evens with the bookies at best. Perhaps the poor performance by KDB was unexpected but even this barely registered.

The compact sort of 4-4-2 formation from United was a surprise only because Ten Hag very rarely changes formation and tends instead to play around with player roles within his preferred 4-2-3+Bruno set up. Whilst this kept City fairly quiet in terms of goal threat it was almost Mourinho like in the nature of ‘this will only produce 3 opportunities to score and you have to score all three to get a result’. I could even imagine Jose’s post game interview shrugging indifference whilst blaming his strikers for not being perfect.

I don’t mind that to be fair, there is little that counteracts this City team and United don’t have the players available or confidence to have a real go so bus parking it is, on another day it might have worked.

The main problem United faced was Lindelof having to defend Foden. The Swede isn’t a great centre back, is woeful as a fullback, and stood little chance against the game’s best player. However, had Ten Hag reacted a little sooner to the threat maybe City’s first goal doesn’t happen. The foul on Rashford (yes clipping the legs of a runner in possession is a foul no matter what Gary Neville says about standing up) wasn’t the issue, but we saw how quickly Dalot shut Foden down when shifted to left back.

Had the manager made this decision 5 minutes earlier then maybe things would have been different. Though as Pep subsequently proved by moving both Foden and KDB over to the right, away from the mostly excellent Dalot, United’s need to have square pegs in fullback shaped holes was a problem no matter what Ten Hag did. The absence of Shaw stings for the 427th time.

As much as the criticism of Ten Hag’s subs is justified, see Mainoo and Garnacho, he was also very limited in options to affect a result that was then only heading one way. Bringing Antony on is never a good thing such is the player’s impotence but with the very young and inexperienced Forson/Amad as the only other attackers I’d have to agree with him replacing the weary and injured Rashford.

While Ten Hag was definitely behind his signing and is complicit in the problems its created it was not the manager who decided to spend £80m on him. The price tag more than anything is used to bludgeon the manager after every poor result which is unwarranted, especially when there are plenty of other justifiable criticisms to lay at his feet. There is a bit of ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ in these situations as I don’t see any realistic alternatives that would have made things any better.

Overall things ran as we thought they would and I can’t imagine anyone learned anything new or changed their opinions in any way. I don’t think Ten Hag’s job is in any more danger than it was on Saturday and for City its probably just another win in a slow procession to another title. It seems increasingly unlikely that INEOS will persist with the Dutchman past this season but when you look at the list of potential replacements…
Dave, Manchester

Man Utd progress? Ish?
Wow!! During the half-time interval I was actually thinking about our long running unbeaten record of 143 games while being ahead at the halfway point. Every time we lead going in to half time the commentary team doesn’t fail to point it out. And I had this feeling that it was going to end. And it ended and how. I was not to know that we will not have another shot on target. Or an actual shot.

But to still come out and say that on another day we could have come out of it with a point or more is ridiculous to say the least. Yes we had our moments and we fluffed them like we always do. Yes we started well and scored early and had a few more chances or should I say opportunities to create chances. Haaland actually kept us in the game with his unbelievable miss and Onana showed CL final level form to bail us out on other occasions. And our defence and midfield was there to block anything that came our way. But for how long. We know that there are always mistakes in this team and the consistent dip in form during the game.

Marcus Rashford was scared to run at Walker. He scored a great goal and then resorted to usual levels until he was taken off. Garnacho didn’t do any well either. Neither the Walker push nor the Ederson tackle were clear cut penalties and if it were given against Utd, the outcry would have been heard for months.

And the substitutions either tactical or because of injuries didn’t have any impact. Why bring in Antony after calling out his form barely ten days ago? What did he do in the interim to warrant an appearance? And what did he bring to the team up on introduction? Why never give that chance to Amad? That’s how Pellistri was treated and eventually loaned out. And Amrabat? Don’t want to go there.

My pre-match prediction had us losing 4-0. Eventually we lost 3-1. But by ETH’s logic I have got the result (it is a foregone conclusion) right and also the correct number of goals scored in the match. Hence this is progress and everything went according to plan.
Vasanthan Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

READ: Man Utd being predictably rotten at Man City suits Sky Sports

Biscuit hands
City’s 2nd goal led to my friend (Alex, LFC) describing Onana as “Biscuit Hands”.

This resulted in a Partridge-esque discussion about what kind of biscuits.

We ended up with soggy digestives for palms, and those tasteless pink wafers for fingers.
Aidan, Lfc (shortbread would’ve saved that)

Phil yer boots
Glad to have Phil Foden in my FPL team. Sadly, he’s in most of my immediate rivals’ teams, also. He’s also in City’s team. Annoying.

Even as a Gooner, Foden has been one of my favourite players to watch over the last four years. I think he’s a phenomenon. And, as much as I hate the Sunday League level punditry of the likes of Rio Ferdinand, I do think Foden’s a bit better than Saka. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t swap Saka for Foden. As the Mancs might say of Saka, he’s “our kid”. Also, they’re different players who tend to occupy different spaces, and can easily fit into the same line-up.

In fact, I believe the England front six is a no-brainer: Rice, with Foden and Bellingham either side, slightly advanced. And Kane up top, with Saka on the right and Grealish on the left. What country has a better front six than that right now? “Anyway, I digest”.

I’ll be flabbergasted if City don’t win the treble again this season. Happy, maybe. But, flabbergasted. I have a good feeling Arsenal will dispose of Porto at the Emirates. But, we might well face City in the semis or the final of the Champions League, adding to the inevitable woe of losing to them at the Etihad following the horribly scheduled international break. Again, if I’m wrong, I’ll be happy. Flabbergasted. But, happy.
Simon, Norf London Gooner

Man City and Girona will be fine
Before we all get too excited about the potential lols of City not being in the Champions league, it’s not going to happen. First of all, City would need to finish 3rd and that isn’t going to happen. But even if it did, they would still play in the Champions League.

Rob write that “UEFA rules prohibit teams with the same owners from competing in the same tournament”. That’s not strictly true. It’s about influence not ownership and they would look at whether an Individual or company have significant influence in both clubs. There would undoubtedly be some sort of compromise, where they say its all fine, don’t worry about it.

I mean if RB Salzburg and RB Leipzig can both allowed to play in the same tournament, I highly doubt that City or Girona would be kept out.
Mike, LFC, London

The march of the robots
Has there ever been a football club more lacking in humanity, soul and relatability than contemporary Manchester City? People might look at the whole top six of the Premier League, all owned by one foreign billionaire or another, and argue that City aren’t all that different. But they truly take bland, sanitised footballing perfection to another level.

Start with the manager. If you asked an AI image generator to create a picture of a football manager, it would look exactly as Pep Guardiola looked on the touchline against United. The black cashmere rollneck was perfectly rolled, every hair on his face and scalp clipped to an identical length, within a tolerance of perhaps a few microns. The creases on his chinos precisely bisected the front portion of his thighs.

Even his name could have been computer generated – the punchy, plosive first name and the more florid surname together create exactly the sort of “realistic” football manager name a large language model might imagine.

Then there’s the players. To understand City’s modus operandi here, it helps to look at what they did to the two most human and relatable players they’ve signed. Jack Grealish and Kalvin Phillips were both classic local boys made good, dashing around the pitch for their hometown clubs, carrying with them the hopes of fellow locals watching from the stands. This colour, this humanity seems to have been out of keeping with the values of the Abu Dhabi United Group. Reprogramming presumably began shortly after their arrival.

Phillips was publicly chastised for carrying a few more grams of body weight than dictated by the group’s statistical models. Over time, he was worn down and discarded, now playing as a husk of his former self at West Ham. Grealish apparently passed more successfully through the process, but at what cost? The footballing free spirit who used to try whatever came into his head to grab goals for his boyhood club now contributes adequately to the relentless march of RoboBall.

City have even created their own local boy wonder in Phil Foden, but look into his eyes after his two perfectly crafted, game changing goals yesterday and you see no sparkle, merely satisfaction at having followed the model and been rewarded.

Off the pitch, the soulless perfection continues. Unlike the apparent chaos at Everton when the FFP police came calling, at City legions of perfectly briefed, impeccably qualified lawyers were presumably deployed and have succeeded in preventing any negative consequence to the club for a full year and counting. Perhaps it is too much to imagine that all of those lawyers wore identical grey suits and carried identical black briefcases, but one wouldn’t be surprised.

In the transfer department, other than their one failure (Phillips) and one near miss (Grealish) where they failed to account for the uncertainty created by the humanity still stubbornly present in some of their playing staff, they do not make mistakes. Every new signing slots seamlessly but anonymously into the machine. And all of this under the leadership of Txiki Begiristain, another name one would not be surprised to learn had been digitally created.

It is impossible not to be impressed by the level of footballing skill and precision which Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and his hirelings have brought to the stadium which now bears the name of his airline. But the game of football would surely be in a better place if he had deployed his billions in some other venture.
Tom, LFC

This means more
That mailbox was fantastic. Jam-packed full of Liverpool supporters once again demanding a full replay as the only fair way to resolve such a consequential refereeing mistake.
Tim. THFC. Adelaide

You told us to suck it up so…
I remember at the start of the season when one of the most egregious and obvious referee mistakes happened, I said (repeatedly) that refereeing need to be more consistent and even and even pointed out a statistical bias for one specific referee and said that NO BIAS should exist (wonder if he reads this page because since then he’s been a lot more even).

Anyway rival fans gave some sage like advice to Liverpool fans, which as annoying as it is I decided to put in the back pocket since I was certain a decision in our favour at some point would make everyone angry and I could slip that paper out my back pocket to reiterate that same sage like advice to everyone else – life isn’t fair, stop playing the victim . Suck it up, accept it and move on.

Time to heed your own advice peeps.

I have another piece of advice for rival fans though, stop singing anti Nunez songs. Four times it’s happened and each time Nunez scores the winner, it clearly motivates him more.
Lee