Not all doom and gloom?

After keeping things tight and simple in the preceding narrow wins & draws, BR has taken again an ill-advised flight of fancy again.

We expected him to tighten things up and steadily improve on the back of some reasonable performances in the league, but there he goes again with shallow adjustments.

He's a tinkerer. A football romantic. Ultimately, the salesman in him rises as the dominant personality.

 

Not a fan then?

 

I just cannot believe anyone can see this match as a positive,

This was a formation which Rodgers put out as his clever side and it got easily rumbled by van Gaal. Every time the mancs attacked you were worried they were going to score. Whilst when we attacked we knew there would be no one to finish. We could have had another 4 hours and 20 more shots and I couldn't see us scoring.

The whole match developed as expected with this selection and with United still poor in defence, that was the only outcome. Trying to find positives from this match is just pointless.

 

Not clamouring for his neck on the chop at this point either.

I'd give him the Christmas period to prove us wrong. He deserves more patience from us on the back of last season.

 

Whilst the goals were not his fault, the 1st he dives the wrong way (ok, you could say he got 'done' by Rooney, but still), the 2nd he did nothing technically wrong, the 3rd for some reason he went down when Mata squared it (done by a dummy again?) giving Van Persie an open goal.

 

We've got an in form Bournemouth who are top of the championship next.

If we lose that and then Arsenal then I think the owners will probably make a decision, although they may not actually fire him now though.

It may well come down to whether the owners can trust him in January, if they can't, then its tough seeing him staying long term.

They may keep him until the end of the season to give them a chance to find a new manager.

 

Apart from diving wrong way for no reason for the first goal and falling over pathetically for the third goal he was really good.

Costing us 2 goals is quite good for a keeper of Jones' ability.

 

Negatives

- No reason to adopt a 3-4-3 just to match LVG. BR did not have time to practice sufficiently a new tactical formation in 3 days either.
- Mig should have started. Obviously.
- Sterling should not be a 9 or a false 9. He can't shoot. Especially against a very in-form De Gea.
- Balotelli should have started.
- Henderson, Allen and Gerrard - little bang for the buck defensively or offensively from that set-up

 

Look at mata when he squares to RVP, he's looking the other way to Rooney, clever and jones fell for it

 

On the face of it, United are obviously a class above you so a 3-0 defeat to them should not necessarily provoke the usual Scouse handwringing. In context though there's not much to be positive about: United had a very makeshift defence and are clearly a long way from the final product on all areas of the field. Add to that a manager who is basically selecting teams and formations almost at random in the hope that one will eventually work and the only cause for optimism is for those of you not deluded enough to think you're anything but a mid table team without Suarez.

 

Go **** yourself

 

what a miserable post. someone nicked your pint or something?

 

What I see after the game, we need;
*A striker, its the aim of the game that we score goals. We have One striker that has spent large periods out injured, one who is ancient and is really a back up to the back up, one who couldn't score to save his life and one who is on his way out. Out of those four only one of those is worth keeping, the injured one, leaving us with nobody to score the goals.
Lambert was really a waste of time buying. Sentiment hat off, he's 32, not very mobile and an average player. So we get 2 years out of him being decent. Balotelli, wow has that back fired, was always likely to happen. Again a waste.
Replace at least 2 of those we currently have and add 2 quality strikers over the next two transfer windows.

*A goalkeeper. Mignolet is ****, always was and always will be. Don't know why we thought he was a viable replacement for Reina, he's not even in the same league as Reina nor will be.

*A quality CB. We been asking for this for 3 seasons. None of our CB's can be trusted not to do something appalling in each game and none of them are real leaders who can vocalise and organise a defence. The £20m signing of Lovren now looks embarrassing, the guy has made a poor defence even worse.

*A real defensive midfield. Gerrard is not one, nor is Henderson, Lucas is ok, Can needs to be playing but higher up and Allen is ****e. Generally the midfield is ok but they all seem to be playing out of position to cover a lack of a DM.

The only real areas I don't have concerns about are the Fullbacks, we got enough fullbacks at the club to cover three teams and the Attacking midfielder (wingers, AMC etc) who just need proper strikers to feed.

 

If you're being critical, he did dive out the way of the first and on the 3rd he antitipated Mata's show so moved to his right given Van Persie an open goal.

 

we need a new manager and at least 6 new players which at a minimum would cost in excess of 150 million imo just to get to 4th. fsg are not going to spend so we all might as well get used to being a mid table team for the next 3 to 4 seasons.

 

Good optimism Bis, but whatever the positives from your performance today was there enough to show you can stop the rot? In a week you could be 13 points behind United and 8 points behind Arsenal. I look at the table and the only team challenging these two for top 4 is Spurs, which isn't a lot to worry about tbh. If Arsenal and United do win next week, is that it for the top 4??

 

I think top 4 is settled already.

Chelsea
City
United
Arsenal

in that order...

I'm just hoping we finish respectfully and get back to playing decent football again. The team at the moment isn't good enough for CL football and hopefully we'll start targeting players that we did the season before we got CL again if we miss out (Willian, Costa).

A year out and possibly another Europa campaign to get the players and manager used to competing twice in a week will be good for us. It's not so much the amount of games that's an issue it's more that you only have 2 days to pactice tactics for that game unlike the 5 or 6 you get when just playing once a week.

Rodgers has only had to cope with that situation for 1 season before and it's shown as he's not been able to spend all week working towards one game which no doubt helped us last year.

If someone offered me the League Cup or FA Cup / 6th place and players like Can, Markovic, Coutinho, Moreno, Manquillo getting regular game time together I'd take it right now.

 

In that case, today's performance or its positives don't really matter. It's all about the summer spending (and if Rodgers remains there). You will get to the summer then buy a striker, a DM, a goalie and a couple of defender.

Sorry correction - I just re-read your last paragraph. Yeh fair point on that

 

Thought we played well attacking wise, they were just a lot more clinical than us.

Gotta look more at Sterling and Balo for not scoring than Rodgers.

 

For once, we finally saw a performance where we pressed from the off, caused mistakes, created CLEAR CUT chances, used the pace and movement.

The outcome of this game could have been completely different had we taken our chances. I've been banging on about putting Sterling up top, and whilst I wasn't expecting him to score like Suarez, he did what the things what made us dangerous last season - pressing, movement, running at defenders. Even Balotelli was making the right runs (Even though he continues to frustrate the hell out of me).

So until Sturridge comes back, I think we need to persist with Sterling because we will continue to create chances.

The front 3 were really good - but everyone behind them were completely useless.

I really hope Markovic starts against Bournemouth - the lad needs minutes and he's starting to make an impact. The throughball to Mario was perfect.