Groundhog day, same as most of our games this season under the master tactician - but, I keep watching, hoping that the Jose lovers will be proved right and we'll only employ these shit tactics in certain games and the next one will be different and we'll see the United bashing team we know are hiding behind whatever the fcuk you want to call this stuff.
Interesting that the players you mention are all attackers. Players that thrive with confidence. What chance have any of them of building some confidence when their manager sets them up not to go out and win, but not to lose.
Why the Poch dig? Mourinho is the manager now and he's the one who should get the stick.
Because, regardless of who the manager is, we have seen this type of performance from this team over the last 5 years. The players, as well as the tactics, were bad today. I don’t think the tactics caused Aurier and Toby to make the mistakes which led to the goal.
Irrelevant, digs against Poch are just a weak-arsed justification for this shambles that is Mourinho.
We served up some very bad performances under Poch, but never set out to sit in our own half for 45 minutes. When you play like that, which Mourinho teams have almost always done for the last decade, you basically raise the stakes--you can't make a single mistake, and you have to finish almost all your chances. I will say Mourinho has been more successful in terms of results this season than I thought he'd be, and--assuming Son and Kane stay healthy--I imagine we'll grind our way to a League Cup or something. But we were outplayed and outmanaged today.
Not a Poch dig at all mate, it's more a point of observation, that when we have the ball and we have to break teams down, nothing has really changed since Poch left. More often than not, when we're charged with forcing the play, we don't seem to be able to carve out chances as much as we should on paper. It's a classic example of Mourinho's limitations as a manager, defend and counter attack but struggles to get a team set up to play offensive football, not just that though, it's effectively the same group of attacking players as we had under Poch, the fact that Poch struggled to get this group of players playing a decent brand of football, is suddenly of concern to me.
"I will say Mourinho has been more successful in terms of results this season than I thought he'd be," - Mate, we scraped 3 lucky wins against very low level opposition - Burnley, West Brom and Brighton, if we had drawn those games we would be 11th at the moment. We will probably be down to 8th when the teams below us play their games in hand, the deepjoy of being top was premature ejaculation. Even with these 'wins' a 50% win rate over a season would usually result in a 6th or 7th place.
100%.... he is done.
I just thought we'd be in a worse position in the league at this point. Overall, I've been as unimpressed with our performances as anyone. I've seen some argue that the strangeness of this year's season probably benefits a negative manager like Mourinho who basically tries to win by attrition. That may well prove be true, but if we suffer anything like the injuries we did last season--especially to Kane or Son--we're lucky to qualify for EL.
