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Moyes After The Same Stage Last Season


Mame Biram Diouf

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Don't know about all this talk about player confidence and belief. It's all smokes and mirrors tbh.

The difference is LVG has a track record that suggests he'll get it right, he also gives off the aura of someone who is fit and a lot more comfortable in the job. That alone will grant him more time and more good will.

The points per pound spent ratio is another madness tbh. However injuries have played a part. His confidence and calmness is reassuring.

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The difference in performances alone is enough to warrant his appointment imo.

I HATED watching united last season. Hated it. Was utter dross week in week out.

At least this season you can see some positives here and there, even amid an absolutely ridiculous injury crisis

 

Serious question but which games this season have we actually played good football ?

 

What differences in performances have you seen?

We arent look better in defence, midfield or attack

 

We are still playing slow, static football

 

We looked amazing in pre-season, soon as the real games started we fell back under

 

You can talk about injuries but we have a big enough squad to cover them and still win games, granted it has played a part

 

However his stubbornness to carry on playing 3-5-2 when bar him and one or two people on here I have not seen one person who thinks we should stick with it and he is right to not switch it up

 

His subs have also been very poor aswel imo

 

And if Rooney stays playing CM when everyone is back and match fit then I will really start worrying

 

Only real positives have been De Gea (who was our best player last season anyway), McNair, Fellaini (2nd season so you would expect better anyway)

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Start of the season I said one of LVG's biggest attributes was his ability to "turn chicken shit into chicken salad"

We've been good in glimpses but in reality you can count the good game performances on 1 hand.

The confidence that comes out of LVG creates the perception that things are better than they have been.

Moyes' demeanour only highlighted the bad stuff.

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I dont like us playing 3-5-2 either. I think holland got a lot of undue praise using it in the world cup also.

But at least we have some variety in our play this year. Last season was cross x20, and when that fails, cross some more. Painful stuff.

We are definately playing DIFFERENTLY i dont think there is even a debate about that is there?

Injuries at the back have absolutely killed us tbh.

Di maria going back to centre mid is a must imo.

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I dont like us playing 3-5-2 either. I think holland got a lot of undue praise using it in the world cup also.

But at least we have some variety in our play this year. Last season was cross x20, and when that fails, cross some more. Painful stuff.

We are definately playing DIFFERENTLY i dont think there is even a debate about that is there?

Injuries at the back have absolutely killed us tbh.

Di maria going back to centre mid is a must imo.

Shots Per Game

 

Van Gaal

9. Stoke 13.0

10. Everton 12.7

11. Man Utd 12.5

12. Newcastle 12.3

13. West Brom 12.1

Moyes

6. Everton 14.8

7. Southampton 14.1

8. Man Utd 13.8

9. Arsenal 13.8

10. Swansea 13.0

 

 

Long balls per game
 
Van Gaal
1. Burnley 77.8
2. QPR 76.1
3. Man Utd 75.7
4. West Brom 72.0
5. Leicester 71.3
 
Moyes
10. Swansea 62.6
11. Tottenham 62.6
12. Man Utd 60.9
13. Stoke 60.5
14. Chelsea 60.0

 

 

 

Crosses per game
 
Van Gaal
1. West Ham 27.1
2. Arsenal 25.0
3. Southampton 21.6
4. Newcastle 21.0
5. Man Utd 20.6
 
Moyes
1. Man Utd 26.3
2. Man City 21.3
3. Swansea 20.9
4. West Ham 20.8
5. Tottenham 20.0

 

 

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I'm confident LVG will get this right. Never felt Moyes was going to get anything right, plus he signed Fellaini which was a sackable offence in it's own right. I've enjoyed watching United play more than I did last season, feels more attacking rather than Moyes approach of "How do we stop the other team".

 

Plus I think we will get Champions League football this season. No finishing 7th business.

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Thought?

 

 

“Oh how fine are the emperor’s new clothes. Don’t they fit him to perfection?” “But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said. In truth, The Emperor’s New Clothes is probably a dangerous place to start for a column that aims to make some more subtle observations about Louis van Gaal’s first six months in charge of Manchester United. The risk is that it will be interpreted as trying to deride — or denude — the United manager when the point is more about how a powerful aura, and the awe it inspires, can blind us to the obvious.

English football — players, fans, directors and certainly the media — has long been in thrall to the cult of personality where managers are concerned. In a country where so much of the game’s discourse is personality-driven, where first impressions are surpassed only by preconceptions, a manager who arrives with a reputation as a winner, such as Van Gaal or Fabio Capello, will be delighted to discover that the aura takes him a long way before people begin to question what lies beneath.

Never underestimate the value of an aura in a sport where attention spans in dressing rooms are notoriously short. In any case, Van Gaal’s reputation has not arrived by accident. It is the product of being one of the outstanding coaches in world football for the past two decades and, to judge from the noises from the United boardroom towards the end of last season, the power of his reputation was the biggest single factor behind Van Gaal’s appointment after the dismal nine-month tenure of David Moyes.

What nags, though, is the feeling that, once you look beyond the Van Gaal aura, there has been remarkably little to admire in his first six months at Old Trafford. As a journalist, you find yourself wanting Van Gaal to live up to a certain reputation — a reputation for tactical brilliance, exciting football and even, a strange admission this, antagonistic behaviour in press conferences. So far, we have seen more of the third than the first two and even that, in truth, has been fairly low-grade.

What are we supposed to be seeing from Van Gaal’s United? Better football? Better results? The bar was set exceedingly low after Moyes, but United, after the second highest summer spending spree in football history, have as many — or as few — points after 21 Barclays Premier League games as they did a year ago under a manager who, by then, was correctly perceived to be out of his depth.

To offer that points comparison on Twitter last Sunday, after the 1-0 home defeat by Southampton, was to be informed that Van Gaal must have effected an improvement because they are now fourth in the Premier League (with 37 points) rather than seventh — to which the obvious response is that this has more to do with regression from Arsenal, Everton and Liverpool than any great progression on United’s part. The other Twitter response was that United are now playing “far superior football” under Van Gaal, at which point, after hours of analysing minimal differences (more accurate passing, but more long balls and fewer successful passes in the final third) between this season and last, we are back to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale and a human instinct to see what we want to see.

The narrative is all about a new “philosophy”, but look beyond the Van Gaal aura and there is remarkably little sign of the type of cultural revolution that he has espoused. Indeed, there was precious little evidence of a football philosophy in their summer transfer activity, in which only Marcos Rojo and Daley Blind, for better or worse, stuck out as true Van Gaal acquisitions and the remainder — Luke Shaw, Ander Herrera, Ángel Di María and Radamel Falcao — seemed to reflect the board’s desperation to make some kind of big-name signing that they hoped would delight their new manager as much as it would their beloved commercial partners and less-beloved supporters.

Perhaps that is what happens when you have a manager starting work in mid-July, having spent the previous weeks preoccupied by leading his country to the World Cup semi-finals. Remember in the weeks before and after Moyes’s sacking last April, when the word from on high at Old Trafford was that the mistake had been to sit patiently while the former Everton manager prepared to start work on July 1?

Well, Van Gaal did not start work until July 16. He was left to make snap-judgments based on the team’s pre-season form, which, particularly when it came to his preference for a three-man central defence, was deceptively good.

In the majority of cases, those managers who opt to play three central defenders do so for negative reasons, because of a lack of faith either in the quality of those defenders or a shortage of convincing options in wide areas. That certainly seemed to be the case with Van Gaal both with Holland at the World Cup finals and with United last summer, although he also cited a 3-4-1-2 formation as the best way, indeed perhaps the only way, to accommodate Herrera, Juan Mata, Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie in the same team — and this before the additions of Di María and Falcao. The strange thing is that, for all his stated disinterest in “star” status, Van Gaal’s selections have reflected a desperation to find room for as many of those six big-name players as possible. 

Another Premier League manager suggested privately last summer that it would be very hard to accommodate more than two of Herrera, Rooney, Mata and Van Persie in a starting XI without making unacceptable compromises elsewhere. To add Di María, a winger who prefers a central role, and Falcao only made that equation more mind-boggling. As for the hysterical reaction in some quarters to Falcao’s omission against Southampton last weekend, given his obvious lack of fitness and form, that only strengthens the point about English obsession with profile, status and aura.

The Falcao issue, though, is a sideshow. Imagine, for a second, that Moyes or, say, Roberto Martínez or Mauricio Pochettino had inherited a United squad without a convincing central defender and had decided to invest so much faith in 3-5-2 and variations thereon. Imagine that, with that surfeit of central midfielders and central forwards, he had ended up playing an incompatible-looking strike pairing of Van Persie and Falcao while dropping Rooney ever deeper into central midfield. Imagine that he had stifled Di María’s initial impact by playing him in a variety of less suitable roles. Imagine that he had been so reliant on David De Gea, whose performances in goal this season, behind an unconvincing defence, have so often been the difference between defeat and victory. Imagine that, for all the “philosophy” talk, much of United’s most effective football had come while referring to a more direct Plan B — or C or D or E — that involved seeking out high balls to Marouane Fellaini in an advanced role.

That, amusingly perhaps, is precisely the type of football that Moyes was frightened to play at Old Trafford. He was terrified of thrusting Fellaini forward and looking for knock-downs. Van Gaal has no such qualms. For all the talk of philosophy, he is a pragmatist and, crucially, unlike Moyes, the type of pragmatist who has faith in his convictions rather than fretting about how a tactic or selection would be perceived.

That was Moyes’s biggest failing at United — a tendency to suppress his instincts in an unsuccessful attempt to be the manager that he was expected to be, thus diluting the qualities — single-mindedness not least among them — that had landed him the job. Van Gaal, by contrast, can produce similarly underwhelming performances and results with a stronger squad and retain the faith of media, supporters and, most importantly, players alike. 

That is the difference an aura makes and it is not to be underestimated. Emperor’s new clothes? No, not quite, but there remains an element of wishful thinking about this idea that United this season have been more than merely flattered by the dowdiness of their rivals.
 

 

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moyes took over a team of champions despite people saying fergs left a dead team

LVG took over a team devoid of confidence and had to integrate 6 new players and multiple injuries

All fair enough, but I'll ask this question again, (I asked it months ago and was accused of having a political agenda) Koeman has had similar issues minus the silly rate of injuries and has come in, put his team back together developed and helped his team understand his philosophy and they are doing very well in a season where in the summer some pundits and neutrals tipped them to be in a relegation battle.

Are the Southampton players smarter or are they just hungrier? Something isn't right, beyond the injuries and formation issue, that first half yesterday was as slow and devoid of any creative spark as any Moyes game last season,

If you have a car with an issue with the exhaust, you can spend money and change the seats, tint the windows and even plan in getting a new supercharged engine installed, the engine will still be fucked.

What's happening right now is the same as last season, in part it is down to the manager, but there are bigger issues to be addressed.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Lvg is just here to add an extra room to his retirement home

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  • 11 months later...

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