Gubbins

Should probably get rid but Cooper is a symptom not the cause and i dont think itl make a great deal of difference. Keeping Rodgers at least 6 months too long was the killer. History is repeating slightly out of order. Rodgers is Taylor, Maresca is Adam's, Cooper is Bassett and we are heading straight for a long inglorious spell in the lower leagues.

Winks and ndidi were battle hardened a few years back but the fact they both spent last year in the Championship says something about their current quality and career direction. Ayew is not a midfielder. I'm not disagreeing at all over cooper, wel never achieve more than scraping survival under him and even that may well be beyond him. What I disagree with is the notion that removing him will automatically turn us back into a half decent midtable side. Those days are long gone. As far as I am concerned the failure to sack rodgers early two seasons ago has absolutely crippled the club to a Peter Taylor like degree ( despite marescas adams esque sticking plaster promotion) and we are on the verge of reliving the mid 00s again. With the current team and board level leadership itl take a genius level manager to stop this happening.

Maybe we could survive but I don't see it being 'comfortably' and regardless of manager the defenders we have really aren't very good. The only improvement over when we went down last time is the goalkeeper which is negated by being significantly weaker in midfield and upfront.

Well I think this is mostly rubbish and you seem to be living in the past regarding the strength of our squad and the strength of other teams, so wel have to agree to disagree. Regardless of manager this team/squad finishes bottom 5 and it wouldn't be comfortable. The team has been flat as a pancake for most of the last 4 years and there's been no real leaders on the pitch for even longer than that. The midfield has no real steel and battle hardened prem midfields will largely overpower it. The defenders are not prem standard and no amount of coaching is gonna stop justin or faes making stupid errors.

Whether we are playing out from the back in a relentless low block or playing a hard pressing high line any premier league defence containing a combination of faes, justin, kristiansen and vestergaard is gonna concede more goals than it scores.

Where? None of the defenders are up to it, the cms are bottom half standard at best, wingers are poor more than they are good and our only half competent strikers best days were at least 3 years ago. It's not a squad that will 100% go down but there's no where near enough quality to think we could stay up even remotely comfortably.

Prob the most persuasive post regarding getting rid I've seen and I don't necessarily disagree. What I will say though is that I genuinely don't see any attainable manager who could meld our hapless defenders and soft midfield into a solid unit that could comfortably survive.

This is the thing that gets lost amongst all the 'Cooper is the worst thing ever' hyperbole. This squad is mostly rubbish. Whoever takes over is still gonna have to play justin and kristiansen at full back, faes and or vestergarrd in the centre, one of ndidi or soumare is bound to be in the team past it vardy or daka are gonna be up front. Regardless of who replaced cooper we'd still look crap and lose most of our remaining games. Whoever is in charge this is a bottom 5 prem squad.

Think you could pick almost any combination of our players and the result is still gonna look like championship fodder sadly.

But there was no situation under maresca where the team significantly upped their game. It was the same one paced side to side football regardless of where we were in the league, who we were playing or whether we were winning, losing or level. Maybe the players did believe in what he was doing but the situation getting the results was that we were in the Championship playing rubbish teams.

I don't know when he said this but I have to imagine it was post arsenal when he was working for UEFA as it really is business meeting level waffle. Seriously replace the word club with company, add a punchline at the end and you've got a legitimate David Brent quote. And even here the word identity is meaningless. You take it out of the quote and he's saying exactly the same thing. You lose nothing. Again it's a buzzword.

Maybe it's partly a semantics thing. I can totally buy managers or owners creating a certain 'culture' in a club (or organisation) or needing to change a bad one. Man utds 90s/00s youth set up and iron fisted rule by ferguson was for me a culture thing. in my original post if Amorim had talked about changing the current terrible culture at man utd then fair enough but he doesn't he talks about identity this grandiose term meant to encapusulate the whole club without explaining what it is or how he's going to create it. It's a bit like that scene in wolf of wall street where mconaughey explains the stock market to Dicaprio 'it's not f**king real!' This modern idea of identity in football is a fugazi!

So it's essentially a pretentious way of describing style of play? Slow dull possesion football which was the defining characteristic of maresca and later years Rodgers needs to be described as an identity? How come Clough Ferguson or Wenger never prattled on about identity? What's Real Madrids identity? What's Fulhams? As far as I'm concerned it's a meaningless buzzword. If David Brent was a football manager he'd be all over it!

I've moaned a few times about people on here using the word identity as regards football and how it's just an overused and pointless buzzword. Well here's the new man utd coach to help me out! "We know that we need time, but we have to win time,” Amorim told United’s club media. “To win time is to win games. But the most important thing for me is identity. So since day one we will start with our identity. How to play, how to press, these small things, small details. You cannot go 100% on every detail because it will be confusing for the players. So if I have to say one thing, my main goal, my first goal, is identity.” What an absolute load of unexplained, meaningless shite. 😄

Predictably a fair few posts blaming this malaise solely on Cooper but this has been going on for 3 or 4 years now. Slow decline to the norm under rodgers before the catastrophic collapse in his final season helped by incredible ineptitude from every level of the club. Followed by the most dull and joyless promotion possibly in football history leading into this seasons inevitable struggles. Last season was the real clincher for me. The fact that my team won a league and I found it so hideously boring and unenjoyable to watch showed me that modern football just isn't for me. All the bs talk about systems and philosophies and f**king identitys can just get in the bin along with sky, big 6, var, the champions league, tourist fans and all the other b***ocks that make me genuinely hate the sport I used to love.

Just recently finished a full rewatch of Breaking Bad for the first time since my original watch around 10 years ago. I'd grown to consider it a relatively distant third in my list of best ever shows behind Sopranos and The Wire but I'm gonna have to upgrade it somewhat as it's pretty much as good as both of them. It's certainly more intense in places and in Ozymandias has the single greatest episode in tv history by an absolute mile. The gist of the opening scene in the desert aside id forgotten a lot of what happened but it really is absolutely and horribly brilliant in every single scene. It surely will never be bettered. Very tempted to finally give Better Call Saul a watch now.

I don't see how it won't be. Certainly the Democrats will never do it again. This election had abortion and women's rights as big issues and an opponent who is both crass and misogynistic, surely favourable for a female candidate and she's been completely blown out the water.

Think that's probably it for the chances of a woman ever becoming potus. Whilst it's easy to think that Trumps win is the end of all things you've got to bear in mind he only stood for re election for 2 reasons, to stay out of jail and to massage his own ego after losing last time. I think/hope hel actually be quite half hearted in what he tries to achieve. Hel continue to say outrageous stuff to feed his base and piss off the liberals but since he won't be running again hel actually give less of a **** as time goes on. He doesn't care about what happens to the republican party in 4 years and hes an old man. Hel probably spend the majority of time playing golf.

From what I'm reading and have listened to over the past 24hrs there seems to have been a bit of momentum shift back towards Harris.The msg Puerto Rico comments have definely hurt Trump and the Democrats have done some smart campaigning on abortion and women with suggestions that abortion could be the driving factor in the recent iowa poll putting Harris ahead there by 4 points. Can also only surmise that trump already setting the groundwork for claiming another stolen election shows that he is not super confident of winning. As opposed to a week ago I'm now guardedly optimistic that Tuesday should be the end for the orange grifter.

I agree there's plenty of similarities between now and when we were in the prem under pearson. That side had no real defined way of playing and relied a lot on grinding out points and staying in games. Pearson though was given all the leeway in the world on here by many regardless of how poor we were for most of that season whilst Cooper has been up against it from game one. No he's not the long term solution but frankly long term in management terms nowadays probably amounts to 3 seasons so hel probably be gone one way or another by 2026.

Watching the team last season was certainly as enjoyable as staring at a swiss watch for 90 minutes! Maresca is at Chelsea because they've gone through most top level managers now and because of his connection to Guardiola just like kompany at bayern. Not because he got a low end prem team out of the Championship. Surely 'good football' is a matter of perspective as well. If not it means that we've only played good football under puel, rodgers and maresca which is clearly nonsense. Ranieri, pearson and O Neil teams all played far better stuff than most of the tedious crap served up under those possesion merchants.

It's not just the club though it's top level football in this country full stop. A horrible, cynical, profit at all cost machine, run and played by greedy, self interested millionaires. And its rarely even fun or exciting to watch any more. I genuinely look forward to the day my dad decides to stop going so i can pack the rotten thing in.

Yeah we won 6 of 7 against extremely poor opposition playing the most horrifically dull football I've seen us produce in 35 years. You could say we had a clear identity but then I would say that identity is just a utterly meaningless football buzzword. Seriously it means absolutely nothing. What is this story I'm making up. People on here were using the 'not at our best but its a totally new style, takes time to learn' line throughout most of the season it wasn't a good excuse then and it's not now either. I don't particularly rate Cooper. Wel never finish higher than lower midtable with him and his inability to counter Bournemouths 2nd half changes were very concerning. I do find the almost demented hatred and vitriol thrown at him bizarre though. Under him we're at present scrapping out enough points to stay up and occaisionally playing more exciting football than the majority of the horseshoe of doom possession rubbish we've had to watch the previous 3 seasons under rodgers and maresca. Regardless I fully expect Cooper will be gone within 18 months. Hopefully then this forum will stop being so f*king negative.

Are we not reaching our full potential because it's a new group of players under a new manager learning a new way of playing? Was a popular theory on here last season 😄

I personally thought the first half was a good watch and there have been spells in games this season which have been way more entertaining than a lot of the turgid shite offered up last season. 2nd half was not much fun though and whilst I think the vitriolic hatred piled on Cooper here in what has become a depressingly negative forum is way ott his in game management needs to be a lot better.