Alert: Premier League: Wigan vs Manchester United - 11th April,2012[R]

Swansea are not more athletic than we are. Neither are Barcelona. Our problem is a coaching/tactical one.

I agree with the lack of technique and discipline though...






when we play the wrong players.

If our team can't avoid stepping on a simple banana skin then I can't help them.

Saw this game on replay and missed the lineup at the start. So I really don't know what makes us look so pedestrian -- it can't just be lack of Paul Scholes, can it?

Welbeck is starting to get on my nerves a bit. He always looks like he's making the right motions, but he just doesn't score.

Jones? Anyone know how many games he limps his way through? It could be skin type/complexion, but he always looks red-faced and out of breath right after the game starts, and then he'll have some niggly injury and limp around.....

Rooney? I didn't see enough of the game to see what happened with him. The team just looked slow.

Rio has looked good lately. Ditto Jonny Evans.

DDG is looking fantastic. Consistently.

It was nice to see Nani back.

We played dodgy team selections in every one of those games.

Nothing to do with pressing. How much more evidence do you (and evidently Fergie and the coaching staff) need?

It's Fergie, he does what he wants. (And when I say Fergie that means him and everyone on the coaching staff under him)

In the past it was:

4-4-2

Two proper wingers
Two proper central midfielders
Two dangerous strikers
Two good central defenders

That was what we played all the time, every time.

Then we hired Quieroz, Chelsea came along and upped the ante and it became this:

4-4-2(against fodder and in home games against top clubs)

Ronaldo on any flank he wants
Lesser mortal (Old Man Giggs, Nani, Park, Hargreaves) on whatever flank Ronaldo is not on
Technical but not physical CM duo
Two good strikers
The two best defenders on the planet


Now it's this:

4-4-2(against fodder or top clubs that we don't respect/think we have to plan for (Liverpool, Chelsea, Spurs)

Deep defense, High midfield and attack
Valencia on the right
Jones (I love him, but he's a liability in any system other than a gung-ho system or a bunkered system)
Random CM pairing
Two good strikers
Evra



Hopefully we stumble upon another Ronaldo.

So in short we are shit, I wont go that far but think major shakeup is needed, i.e. in formation, style and personnel.

I didn't say we were less athletic than team x, I said we were not athletic enough. Across the board, we're not a terribly athletic team. More importantly, combined with a severe lack of athleticism in key areas for pressing (Scholes, Carrick and Giggs are big worries here) is a lack of discipline. For pressing to work, everyone has to do it or everyone has to be in on it. We aren't and we also aren't going to teach old dogs new tricks.

See above. Pressing is not about having superior athletes, but a base level of athleticism is required and then it needs to be executed.

I think most people agree with this.

Not only do we need a shakeup, we need a shakeup in such a way that we can't revert back to the old way (like we have recently) even if we wanted to.

For this to happen Giggs and Scholes need to retire, at least 4 new guys have to come in and we have to have less than 4 out and out strikers on the team.

As long as the old guard remain and we have plenty strikers to play we will always keep running back to the same dodgy comfort blanky we've been reverting to every season.

Is it that we have enough forwards to play 2 up top or that we lack creativity to score and penetrate without 2 front men or maybe we lack a front man of sufficient quality to play by himself? I don't think it is simply down to us having a bunch of strikers.

That post is pretty tricky to navigate but the fact is it is down to us having a bunch of strikers seeing as we went out and bought them all. If we didn't think we were creative enough why'd we buy strikers that needed creative players to support them instead of buying creative players?

We could have just as easily loaded our team with penetrative dribbling widemen and highly creative CMs/AMs and kept a 3 striker rotation.

Instead we decided to ignore midfield and focus on signing strikers and defenders.

And the sad thing is that it's pretty much worked. Well until we get to the CL and run into Barcelona or (this year) pretty much any team.

The problem is that you have to design the team around the midfielders and SAF doesn't want to do that. He tried to make the midfielder conform to the team (South American & expensive -- can't think of his name) and that was a total failure. So he looks and looks for the Scholes clone that will make the team go on as it has -- no luck so far.

One theory anyway.

When I said this it was considered mutiny but it is time to move on, people accept it or not.

About your other point is why I dont want Ba even if he is cheap or any striker to come in replace Berba, a 10 will do that thank you.

Which leads me to what SAF said, there are no Robsons or Keanes to buy, that is an unfair measure for a target midfielder, specially when we dont apply that to other positions. Ashley Young isnt a Giggs or Ronaldo or even Nani or even close, Hernandez is not a RVN.

By 4 out you mean Giggs, Scholes, Berba and ?

If the old guard goes out we do need 4 in, as we already need two in, a 10/11 and a midfielder.

Updated for utter insanity.

SAF has his favourites and wont leave them out.

The Park selection....still a bit mind blowing to me.

70% loss rate. That's a good enough reason to start him in a big game

The insanity at imagining he'd somehow pop up with a big game when that's never happened this season...

7/10 defeats, that's staggeringly bad. 7/14 for Jones is not much better either, mind you, but a player who has had a less than 5/10 performance in 70% of games expected to be suddenly a world beater.

When you get to the stage where you can predict whether we are going to win or lose a game based on the starting xi, then serious questions need to be asked

But...but he's a big game player! Faith! Belief! Loyalty! Effort!

These things are important to us.

And keeping Giggs and Scholes on for another year because you know they came out of the system in 92.