PBP: EPL - Manchester United FC vs Leicester City FC - Sep 14, 2019 [R]

Welcome to the life of a mid table team supporter. Close loss to Crystal Palace one week....close win against Leicester the next. No dominance over any PL team, rolling the dice..and hoping your team scrapes a result.

I'm actually embarrassed for any supporters (not talking about people here), that get excited about any half decent results we get, regardless of performance.

 

Bahahahaha

There's so much bitter stupid happening in here.

I haven't seen the match yet. But it was our 2nd lowest xGA this season. The only match that was lower was against Wolves - where Pogba actually had a very good game as a CM.

It's not a surprise that the team was mentally strong enough to grind out a win without having to carry Pogba's water.

I would love to see more Pogba-less XIs, but I know Ole doesn't have the spine to do what's best for the club.

It'll be nice to have Martial back next week - another reason I wish we could see more Pogba-less formations. Martial and Rashford have very complimentary skill sets as a strike pairing, but so long as Pogba is in the team we will have to stack the midfield.

Lmao at someone calling Greenwood out on goals. There's not a striker in Europe with more than 10 goals all comps atm. It's September 14th and you're gonna act like a twat because Greenwood hasn't broke the duct yet?

Not to mention, the number I said was 5-7.

 

By far the most encouraging point of the season so far is that the defense has been mostly excellent but we've made some big mistakes and been punished heavily for them in other games. In this one there was the one big mistake right at the beginning but De Gea made an excellent save and outside of that we really weren't threatened.

Not sure I'd mark Pogba's absence down as a success though because we really, really struggled to do anything at all with the ball. 42% possession at home to Leicester is frankly pathetic even playing with a lead for the entire match and we really didn't create even a whiff of a chance outside of the cheap pen (cheap not in the sense of it being a bad call but in the sense that it didn't come from any particularly clever attacking play by us) and Rashford's brilliant FK.

Even when LC was forced to come onto us in the second half we weren't threatening at all on the break really (we probably miss Pogba more in this phase of the game then anywhere else; Martial also). Unless one of the young guys starts breaking out in a big way very soon I think we're going to need to go for an attacker in January because right now it does not look like we have enough firepower.

 

In regards to guys we are keeping an eye on, I thought Maddison did pretty well today. Especially once he moved to a more central role once Perez came on. He's the type of player we could use though: highly creative, likes to drive and pass the ball forward and is dangerous on dead ball situations.
Still looks like a Fernandes light though to me, with the Portuguese having more to his locker in terms of being a genuine attacking threat (goals especially but assists as well).
With our obvious jones for English players, Maddison is surely who we will be going after. And while he inherently would not be a bad buy at all, in a straight choice between the 2, would still rather go with Fernandes. Leicester are going to ask a fortune for him though (with Fernandes probably available for at least 10-20mil less), particularly since he's pretty much an England international who could be part of their Euro squad next summer.

 

Our xG besides the penalty was 0.3. Leicester's was 0.7.

 

My biggest concern with re-extending Mata is that OGS might play him.

That aside, a tidy, if close win against our direct competition, good result.

Battle for 6th is on!

 

This somebody has a name, bro! I @ you so have the decency to @ me.

Your the ********er that said Greenwood would be good for 10-15 this season. We are still waiting for 1! Dan James he aint.

We tried sitting Pogba with a better midfield, remind how the team played. We got a PK then held on for dear life. Martial combines well with Rashford until Rashford has bad game then it is Martial our someone else's fault. I thought with no Pogba, Rash was gonna carry the team. I didn't see any of that.

Carry Pogba's water? We got a world class racehorse tryna convert him into a plowhorse and idiots like you want to pile in.

 

Drunk at 630, classy.

 

And yet still making more sense then you ever do. Amazing.

 

Just to put this another way, if xGA is being bandied about this season then we're obviously ok with small sample sets.
We've had two games against teams that don't play the low block and intend to control the game by being on the ball. We've had one with Pogba, one without. Two clean sheets. In the one with Pogba we scored 4 (Pogba 2 assists), with a non-penalty xG 6 times higher than yesterday's. We conceded none and had a non-penalty xG almost double our opponents'.

 

Do you mean this in a conspiracy manner?

 

There are a lot of people on here, and United fans in general, that have to ask themselves:

Why am I continually disqualifying our success without Pogba while qualifying our failures with him?

Pogba has had no meaningful contributions to a win this season - and don't bring me those garbage time assists against Chelsea. He was woeful in the first half and wasn't spotted in a positive fashion until we were 2-0 to the good.

McT was brilliant and James' end product from the LW is very good. He was unlucky not to bag an assist. Pereira should have been on his horse earlier on a ball that James put in. He flashed another one across the near post a bit later, too. Rashford unfortunately was fouled in the build up so we had no one in that space.

 

@incighte Just ignore Pogba for a season, he will be gone next summer. Give peace a chance.

 

@tscboys Because we have always had a far better win ratio with Pogba than without, against the top 6 or as a whole. I'll let you dig those out, this is what you've chosen to focus your embitterment on.

If you were even remotely measured and not hopelessly deranged in your fervour and hyperbole over the Pogba topic then it would be a remotely interesting conversation, one that might be worth devoting 99% of your posts to. To ask people why they disqualify success without him and qualify our failures with him is a hilarious lack of self awareness given your stances not only on Pogba's successes and failures but also on Rashford's.

 

I think he meant how we play invites a lot of penalties. We have a lot of fast players who are able to nip in front of defenders or take a touch away at the right moment, and we don't have enough players who are capable or creating clear cut chances or who make striker's runs to get on the end of them.

 

Naboo, given that you claimed earlier that Leicester had 0.7xG, you need to post stats with credibility before just making claims.

Because that wasn't their xG. Not even close.

 

xG map for Manchester United - Leicester City

the quality United defensive performances just keep coming (tho they did not do a ton of good attacking tbf) pic.twitter.com/SGIwYm5cc7

— Caley Graphics (@Caley_graphics) September 14, 2019

That's where I got the xG from. Happy to be proved wrong, it says it's powered by Opta but if it's off then I'd be happy to know.

On Pogba:-
https://www.planetfootball.com/quic...d-vs-top-six-compares-with-and-without-pogba/

As of this summer, Utd's win ratio with and without Pogba Vs the top 6.

For figures since his signing, at a very quick Google, I found this which was for 2018/19 under Mourinho.

The stats don't lie - Manchester United perform better with Paul Pogba on their team. pic.twitter.com/3lh2d2Aq9u

— ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) December 21, 2018

That's the only season where I can recall him being dropped rather than injured, so is probably most representative of him at his 'worst' when Mou thought he needed dropping - though again, happy to see any sustained figures over the entirety of his time with Utd.

 

I was really impressed by Pereira on the build up of that play, he chased the defender down and won a ball he had no business winning. We wouldn’t have seen a player attack with that intent last year for fear of being out of position. It was refreshing to see that press from him.

 

I thought we looked pretty lame in attack before Martial's injury. But now with Martial out, it does kind of feel like we don't have a real finisher out there. With him out there, it feels like the few amount of chances we do make have a chance of being finished off. Not so much with Rashford alone.