We are told to go and stick our Man Utd coverage by angry fans, while we have more on Gareth Southgate and excellent Euro 2024 ideas.
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Stop writing about Man Utd; the fans love Ten Hag
It’s probably about time that the media (including F365) started listening to United fans: we like Erik.
Yes it was getting a bit dicey when we got hammered by Palace and it looked like certain players may have been refusing to play. But he galvanised the fans and the team to produce probably our most memorable cup win for nigh-on 30 years.
It’s not all about Erik. We’re tired of the constant managerial churn. We don’t want to read what loads of people who don’t support the team think INEOS should do. Let’s face it, if you don’t support United you’re anti-United so you can just fook off to be fair. We’re fed up with your Steinbergs and your Romanos telling us which manager’s agent has told them to tell us that we’ve been turned down. It’s all bull plop.
We were shit last year it’s true. But still only eight points off the top four with one fit striker, 30 centre back partnerships, no left back and a regression from Rashford (and loads more crap as well). There was clearly uncertainty from the takeover which fed in to the team.
Erik is not absolved of blame but show me a manager who has thrived in these conditions? And you outside the club have absolutely no idea how crucial Licha Martinez is to the team and the fans. He’s absolutely talismanic and has been a massive loss.
And Erik himself seems such a gentleman and nice guy. I was so pleased for him getting his own back in all the pundits (with how many trophies as managers?) after the cup final.
The fans love him. We won’t forgive the poor performances forever but you can see by the way he looks after the young players that he gets United. So you can take your manager ranking, turn it sideways and shove it straight up your ass. Mourinho number one? By the end we HATED him. We may get fed up with Erik if United don’t improve but we’ll wish him the best and cheer him on at Bayern or wherever he goes. Mourinho’s continued downward trajectory has been relished by contrast.
There will be different opinions across the fan base but the math goers are generally #ERIKIN.
So can you please start writing about something else? Otherwise I’m going to have to stop clicking.
Ash (Ole number 2? After you spent three years having a go at him for not winning any trophies?) Metcalfe
MORE ON TEN HAG AT MAN UTD FROM F365:
👉 Ten Hag backed like Brendan but is Man Utd’s Jurgen Klopp coming in October?
👉 Man Utd’s post-Ferguson managers ranked: Ten Hag stays to chase down top two
👉 Man Utd: ‘Secret’ manager ‘spoken’ to but ‘crucial’ factor led to Ratcliffe sticking with Ten Hag
…Nice work ‘journalists’ and football media in general… really nailed that Ten Hag inside scoop.
Honestly, why would anyone trust news in an industry whose industry wherein the media business model relies on there being 24 hours worth of news every single day? They obviously have to make shit up to fill 23 of those hours, every single day.
And what the fuck is a ‘report’? In football media, it means several repetitive sentences preceding a single unsourced, unconfirmed, speculative sentence.
If F365 just deleted 98% of the websites content, no one would be any less informed about what’s going on in the world of football.
Moses
The reviews are in…and they’re a mess
After weeks of checking my phone every hour for an announcement from Man United I wake up to the news that Ten Hag is staying. That’s what I get for having an early night. The decision to keep the manager in place is fine I suppose. As I’ve said many times, I like Ten Hag and think he has enough quality to be successful at United but this ‘review’ process has been absolute bullsh*t.
The official line is ‘we think it’s reasonable to take two weeks to review this properly’ however they’ve not had two weeks. INEOS and their hires have been in place for months and to suggest the notion of assessing the manager’s suitability for the club only occurred to them after the FA Cup final is daft.
The delay since the cup win can only have been so long because they were assessing other candidates, not Ten Hag.
I’m sure there will be lots of ‘the media just make stuff up’ but that’s almost Trumpian in its ignorance. There is vast amount of nonsense written in football gossip columns but in this case there were enough reputable and sensible journalists reporting on this to know INEOS were interviewing multiple other coaches to replace Ten Hag.
It does show however that INEOS run United will be a different animal to the Glazer version. Under Woodward especially they were desperate to brief every passing thought and idea to every rag and social media peddler going. That at least can be a positive. Whether it’s a concerted effort to misdirect or just the barest of information getting through which is then spun to narrative we can’t give nearly as much credence to United leaks going forward.
For the players, everyone else associated with the club, and those the club deal with INEOS have sent a clear message. They will go at their own pace, they won’t be rushed or pushed into a decision because it looks good or because the fans demand whatever. They will do everything the way they want to. Despite the recent impression of uncertainty this whole period does give off an air of absolute control and ownership, making a cup winning manager wait on your word for two weeks will do that.
For Ten Hag this leaves him in a strange position. His confidence must surely be damaged by an employer obviously looking for his replacement but then also emboldened in the knowledge they couldn’t find anyone good enough. He does seem almost religiously obstinate so the need to now adapt to a structure and playing style imposed from above may be difficult for him. He’ll need some Dutch pragmatism along with courage to make this work.
Dave, Manchester (Thank God it wasn’t Southgate)
…For all those fans worried that the new minority shareholders would create an upturn in Manchester United’s fortunes, I think we can now accept and rejoice that they will not. 3 weeks of their manager review. 3 weeks, to stick with the man who got them their worst Premier league finish.
It would have been much, much funnier to get Southgate in, but fear not, I foresee a pre Christmas managerial change…
Will (need all the diversion I can get from the far worse Chelsea owners)
Euro 2024 ideas
Football 365 Towers must be thanking the high heavens that the ETH news came along but hopefully you’ll still release ‘Euro 2024 teams ranked by what biscuit they’d be’ any day soon.
Chris, Stourbridge
…Looking forward to tomorrow’s which Euro24 country has the shortest players, or best mascot, or sexiest bus drivers.
Finlay x
What England should do
I thought I would get my thoughts in regarding England and what to do considering the defence we currently have.
Now Southgate is was and always will be a safety first pragmatic manager, he’s reactive rather than proactive, that being said if he ever grew a pair and decided to use the great Matt Busby’s way of thinking “You score 2 we’ll score 3 or 4” the attacking threat we have at our disposal we can certainly do that.
A back line of Pickford, Stones in the middle with Walker and TTA either side, wing backs of Saka and Gordon, Rice and Mainoo holding with Kane, Bellingham and Foden up front, sod it go for the jugular and scare every bloody team to death, pace and flair all over the shop, we may not win but it would be a hell of a lot more fun than watching us get knocked out in the quarters 1 nil because Gareth refused to go for it.
Paul Murphy, Manchester (Bald is Best)
Deschamps is not all that
A lot of your correspondents seem very down on England’s prospects in the Euros because of Gareth Southgate’s limitations, while at the same time lauding the prospects of the favourites, France. But here’s the thing: Didier Deschamps is just as limited, and arguably in many of the same ways, as Gareth Southgate, and France are still a dominant team in the world notwithstanding all that.
There’s a famous story about Didier Deschamps, shortly after taking over as France manager, sending two of his coaching staff to a Napoli-Empoli game to see if Khalidou Khoulibaly was good enough to be called up for France. Khoulibaly had made his debut for Senegal the previous year, and at this point had seven caps, including in two World Cup qualifiers. For all his manifold drawbacks, I don’t imagine Southgate doing something similar.
Dara O’Reilly, London
Why is it all on Southgate?
“”So, when/if Southgate screws it up – or rather, when the players are blamed for not being good enough – when we stumble at the first high hurdle, remember that’s a load of bullshit.”
Why shouldn’t the players be blamed for not being good enough, Bad Wolf? They get paid (handsomely) to perform on the pitch and if they do not perform good enough why shouldn’t they be blamed? Why is it always and souly on the manager? He picks the best players and if they don’t perform that’s their responsibility.
Dan, London
An update on Colchester
Here is the Colchester United update which literally nobody asked for.
We’re still rubbish. How rubbish? you don’t ask, because you’ve skipped already – 90th in the football league rubbish. Going into the last day of the season we were not safe from a second relegation into non-league in my lifetime rubbish. On our 8th manager in 4 years rubbish. Minus 23 goal difference and 11 wins all season rubbish. Y’know – pretty rubbish.
But! Despite it all, I’m more optimistic now than I have been in many years. Reasons follow.
Mostly, we end up selling our best player every year – usually an academy product who has done a season or two in the first team and get’s snapped up by one of the bigger fish. This does not help much with building a squad, but is part of the club’s strategy and the academy does a good job of producing players which we still just about make a profit on despite EPPPs best effort.
We’re currently so bad there are zero rumours knocking about regarding any of our players. Many will leave, but it feels like this transfer window it will be more about the manager shaping the squad than an exodus of the talented lads looking for more money and/or a higher standard of football.
The second (and main) reason for optimism is the manager. I’ve long argued that appointing a manager at league 1 & 2 level is much harder than at the very top level. There’s maybe 10 serious candidates for the next Manchester United manager – it’s more like 100 for a league 2 club. Which is probably why the Colchester board don’t tend to bother and just give the job to someone internal. Who can blame them – you either get lucky and find someone really good and they get poached within 6 months (Matt Bloomfield) or they’re a disaster and you sack them before the year is out (the other 7).
This time around though, we’ve appointed the Cowleys. Much of the fan base wanted them back when they were doing good things at Braintree Town – they went on to do even better things with Lincoln and the fans have complained about the missed opportunity ever since. However, since then they have done rather less well at Champo and league 1 level with Huddersfield and Portsmouth respectively.
What I hope this means is, that if they do well at Colchester clubs at a higher level will think twice about poaching them, and there’s half a chance to have a few seasons of stability where we could actually build something. Early signs are promising – they made us hard to beat (w4, d10 of their 20 games in charge) which kept us up. After years of flirting with relegation, I’d settle for mid-table and maybe some matches being actually fun next season.
We’ll continue to develop players and sell them on – I’ve learned to just enjoy the really good ones whilst we have them, but hopefully with some stable management who know what they’re doing we can build a squad and system which caters for that reality and move the club forward. After so many years of manager roulette and stagnation that’s as much as I dare to dream of.
Jeremy (please don’t relegate City to league 2, we don’t want the f**kers) Aves
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