Dusty

Not a player but Lee Congerton being linked with the sporting directors role at United when Ratcliffe takes over.

Nah we picked up and actually played very well for the final 25.

Yep club just confirmed it was our member off staff, they’re in hospital now.

Antonio Nusa

Geertruida at feyenoord could be the perfect Rciardo alternative, that could also play the Faes role. He’ll only have a year left on his contract at the end of the season too. Someone like Andre at fluminese would be a great winks alternative but it looks like he’s onto bigger and better things. As mentioned above Arthur Theate would be a great signing as well, could play the Doyle or Vestergaard role. Rennes forked out £20m for him tho so would expect him to cost upwards of £30m which might price him out. Aboukhlal from Toulouse is still playing well, he could be a relatively cheap option for one of the wing positions. I wonder if this will be the year that Almada comes over to Europe - his stats are still unbelievable and he is so creative, I think he could do a job as one of the wingers on an 8 in our system, would need to work harder defensively tho.

The flip side of that is that iheanacho can do no wrong in some peoples eyes. It was a chance he should have scored. The keeper did make a very good save tho, but he still has to score that. He’s been average besides that, some good and some bad. Really silly booking tho, I think he would have kept clapping all game if the ref didn’t book him then.

Feels like this commentator is from pne-tv.com. Absolutely loves them. Every time they do something good he gets so excited.

Well we also didn’t play our best players so our flow was disrupted somewhat. I honestly think if we had winks, Hermansen, faes and KDH starting we would have been really effective at playing out.

Akgun had a really poor second half tbf so not a bad decision imo. I like him in that midfield role tho, more to come from him I think.

Middlesbrough is strange as well, hard to put a finger on why it’s fallen apart so much this season. This suggested they are still doing lots of good things, but clearly struggling to score since akpom left for Ajax.

Yeah well it wouldn’t surprise me if Chelsea try and fix their problems by throwing money at Brighton again.

His style is very similar to De Zerbi, who he’s also said he’s good friends with. If De Zerbi moved on somewhere else I wouldn’t be surprised if they came in for him. It wouldn’t disrupt their team a lot and not too expensive for them either.

And winks

Was going to say this too. 100% pass accuracy tonight, 80 passes, mental.

Extremely disjointed so far. Been said by lots be Kel has been so poor, this system falls apart if one person keeps losing possession. Casedei not much better. Winks playing well but everyone else is pretty meh.

Checked the Southampton forum to see what they were saying about Martin as I read there was a Martin out thread. I’ve not seen a single positive thing said about him yet, they all say he’s as bad as Nathan Jones 😂

Leon Crncic

I don’t think fewer passes is the way to create better chances at all. There will obviously be transitions where being more direct and vertical with fewer passes will be the best option but I think in our game those opportunities aren’t going to crop up that often anyway. I think we just need to be more comfortable and confident in the system, once everyone understands what they need to do they can strath thriving at it.

Yeah for once I was actually quite impressed with a Tanner article. I think it highlights our strengths and weaknesses really well and I think it provides a bit of balance that everyone on this thread needed. Imo it settles the argument of “pointless possession” and just “passing sideways and backwards” as the number of shots and passing sequences leading to shots numbers are relatively high. But it does explain that we have been very poor at creating high quality chances, as I think we all expected as well and although we take lots of shots, many of them are from suboptimal positions. I’m hopeful this will just come with time and there aren’t many glaring changes we need to make to ideology, just execution and confidence.

If that high press Liverpool tactic focusing on energy and transition is so successful then why are Liverpool themselves not still doing it? And why have they decided to focus on a more possession based style? And why are there so few teams in England that are purely transition teams these days?

I love the cross field pass thing from that half space. It’s the sort of thing Klopp has done at Liverpool with Trent and Robertson spamming so many crosses into the far post, it’s so so effective and I hope it’s something we regularly try.