Why Man United Are Their Own Worst Enemy
Reviewing on Manchester United's recent Champions League group defeat against Copenhagen. While fingers will be pointed at a series of questionable refereeing decisions, Eric Ten Hag's problems were, predictably, entirely of his team's own making.
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00:00 *intro*
00:02 Hello everyone, Adam Cleary from 442 and just Man United, they've done it again.
00:10 Just when you think they've turned a corner, this team, this collection of genuinely quite good footballers
00:17 has managed to record yet another headline grabbing catastrophic defeat.
00:23 But wait just a second because if you are a Manchester United fan, you have clicked on this video
00:27 and you're now thinking, "Do you know what, I actually can't be bothered to hear about why we're so terrible
00:32 and we keep losing these games again from you, Adam Cleary."
00:35 Then do you know what, just have a seat because it's not all bad.
00:40 *ding*
00:42 Alright so look, before we start just forget about all the refereeing side of this game, okay.
00:47 Both those penalties were absolutely ridiculous and you can definitely argue that the Rashford sending off
00:52 was incredibly harsh but just the bottom line is this Manchester United team, any Manchester United team
00:58 should be able to hold on to a two goal lead against Copenhagen even if they've only got 10 men.
01:05 We can all agree on that surely. And we'll get on to why they didn't in a second but first let's talk about
01:09 how they got that two goal lead because for 40 minutes right up until the red card, this was as good
01:15 as I have personally seen them all season. I did this tweet.
01:19 "Where have they been?" I asked. "There is intensity to their running, there is intensity to their pressing,
01:23 they are passing it with confidence, they are moving the ball around, they look like such a threat."
01:27 We haven't seen enough of this from this team this season and this was always supposed to be
01:32 the team Ten Hag told us he was building.
01:34 "We want to be," he said, and I won't try and do the accent, "the best team in transition in world football."
01:41 Now what does that mean? Now transition is a very trendy buzzword we all use at the minute
01:44 and it basically just means when one team loses the ball and the other gets it back.
01:48 That is a state of the game that teams really work on to make themselves really effective both defensively
01:54 and in an attacking sense. Your dad might call it counterattacking but it's not as simple as just sitting back
01:59 and waiting till you get the ball and rushing up the other end. You're basically trying to counterattack
02:03 from everywhere on the pitch. So what that means is basically one of two things.
02:07 Either when you are defending and you win it back, you are really well drilled and then springing
02:11 and attack up the other end and scoring goals as a result. Or when you've just lost the ball,
02:16 usually in your opponent's half, the team is then perfectly drilled to try and win it back straight away.
02:22 And the reason Ten Hag wants Man United to play like that is because they have loads of players
02:26 who are theoretically really, really good at doing it. They're quick, they're creative, they're incisive,
02:31 they make good choices on the ball. It's the kind of players you want to be a transitional team.
02:37 And for 40 minutes against Copenhagen, they looked like a brilliant transitional team.
02:41 They got two goals directly off doing that. For the first goal, they recover the ball
02:45 and they play a long direct pass into Marcus Rashford, who has found the space.
02:49 He then in turn plays in Aaron Wan-Bissaka, who is exploiting the space the defender has left
02:54 from being up the other end of the pitch. Scott McTominay, who's in this team to make deep runs from midfield,
02:59 makes a deep run from midfield again into the space that Copenhagen have left.
03:03 And they get a really good, brilliant counterattacking goal from it.
03:06 Second goal, even better, Bruno Fernandes intercepts a stray pass in his own half.
03:11 And you can just see here, look at the body language. As soon as he gets that ball,
03:15 so many Manchester United players know it's their job to flood up the other end of the pitch
03:20 because there is a chance. As the ball crosses the halfway line, they effectively have a 2v1
03:24 and you will score from that situation nine times out of ten.
03:28 Donaccio should just square it across to Hoyland, but that doesn't matter because the keeper spills it right
03:31 and it was par for 2-0 and they looked brilliant.
03:34 And it wasn't just the two goals, by the way. They were really good at this right from the kick-off.
03:38 This is Opta's map of all of Manchester United's turnovers prior to that red card.
03:43 This is way, way more than they normally do in the Premier League.
03:47 And you can see here a number of them, I think like six, are high turnovers.
03:52 They've won the ball back almost, if not quite, in Copenhagen's final third.
03:57 Anyway, the best one here, 0-2, is actually 20 because that's Diogo Dalot.
04:01 That is one of Manchester United's full-backs winning the ball, not even an interception.
04:04 That is a tackle won in the final third. That is gold dust to a team that want to hurt you on a transition.
04:11 And for a time, it was good. And then it wasn't.
04:15 And this is what I mean about the best and worst of Manchester United
04:18 because this is how Eric Ten Hag wants this team to play.
04:22 And when they play really well, when they get their s*** together, they can be really, really dangerous.
04:27 And were it not for that red card, they'd have gone and won this 4-5-0, in my opinion.
04:32 Copenhagen had everything all wrong. They were not going to stop this.
04:35 Man United were, pardon the pun, rampant.
04:38 But then we get the red card and before half-time, that two-goal lead has just completely vanished.
04:45 And it's the same old problems we've seen from them all season.
04:49 This is how Man United are set up as the cross which leads to the goal comes in.
04:53 For Arjen and Maguire, they are perfectly positioned to stop the main goal threat.
04:56 And the run at the back post has been correctly identified and marked by Aaron Wan-Bissaka.
05:02 But the problem is this man here.
05:05 You saw this for the first goal in the Tottenham game, by the way.
05:07 Man United set correctly. They're in good shape.
05:10 Everybody is technically where they are supposed to be.
05:12 But nobody is reading the situation to decide,
05:15 "Actually, I know I'm supposed to mark this area, but nothing's happening in this area.
05:19 I need to go where the threat is." And that's that player.
05:22 And the thing is, if we just rewind a couple of seconds, Scott McTominay has a look.
05:27 Like, he knows there is a player coming across over his left shoulder.
05:30 Bruno Fernandes is looking right at him. Between those two players, they could sort that out.
05:36 Either McTominay moves across to block that run or Fernandes just gets a proper run on and goes to catch him.
05:41 But neither of them, neither of them do that.
05:43 And lo and behold, when the cross goes long, he finds himself in all kinds of space.
05:46 He cuts the ball back. None of the Man United defenders really react to it quick enough.
05:50 It's 2-1 and the heads go.
05:52 But it's the equalizer that I think is more damning.
05:55 Because you are down to 10 men. Your lead has just been cut in half.
05:59 You've got about four minutes left to get in at halftime and sort this out.
06:04 Use your brain. Show some game management.
06:08 This is where that goal comes from.
06:11 Does that look to you like the shape of a team determined to just see this half out?
06:17 Where do you even begin with this still image?
06:20 The back four have gone really narrow. Great. Good idea.
06:22 But you need to have your wide players then come back in to defend this space.
06:26 And neither of them have.
06:28 There's a huge gap between the back four and the two midfielders who should be sitting in front of it.
06:32 So your man here is in loads of space.
06:35 And yes, what we said at the start, the penalty decision is absolutely ridiculous.
06:38 Obviously it is. But if you watch what happens when the ball comes in between Maguire and Varane,
06:42 two immensely experienced footballers.
06:45 Is that the reaction? Is that the decision making of either player being really committed to getting rid of that?
06:51 It's not at all.
06:52 And I'm not going to make you sit through the third and fourth goal again,
06:55 because you've not seen it a hundred times already, then you almost certainly don't want to.
06:58 But Dalot, he has this man absolutely well-marshaled and then just doesn't track his run.
07:03 That's the equaliser.
07:04 And then for the final one, three Manchester United players,
07:07 three experienced top-level footballers all go for the same header,
07:12 leaving somebody in the box whose name may or may not be Rooney this much space to win the game.
07:19 At the point of him striking the ball from within the penalty area,
07:23 there is nobody within about five yards of him.
07:27 That simply cannot under any circumstances be allowed to happen.
07:31 But it does happen, doesn't it?
07:33 It happens time and time again to Manchester United this season,
07:36 because for all the positive qualities they have, all the things they are really good at doing,
07:41 they lack the ability to manage a game of football.
07:45 And this is where I think if we are going to start to criticise Eric ten Haag for some of this,
07:50 then it's fair to do so, because the man has an obsession almost
07:55 with playing a type of footballer in certain positions rather than playing a type of person.
08:01 There was an absolutely fantastic thread on Twitter,
08:03 which I'm just going to pretty much repeat verbatim here, it was that good,
08:06 about how he selected last night's starting 11,
08:08 which did have a few people scratching their head, based almost mathematically and robotically
08:14 on what he expects a footballer to be able to do on the pitch.
08:17 For this system that he wants Manchester United play, he wants a left-sided centre-back
08:21 who is going to carry the ball up the pitch and progress it that way.
08:25 It's why he bought Lissandro Martinez, it's why he doesn't like Harry Maguire there,
08:29 because he's far more of a passer than he is of a dribbler.
08:31 So of his options available to him, with no Shaw and no Martinez,
08:35 he wants Johnny Evans to do that.
08:37 And if you're going to play Johnny Evans there to do that,
08:39 then you need to offset his physical decline by selecting another defender
08:42 who's far more robust, a little bit quicker across the ground,
08:45 a little bit better in the air, and of the options available to him, that's Harry Maguire.
08:49 Lindelof and Varane are on your bench, they are almost unarguably better footballers
08:54 than those two, but they're not going to do the very specific on-the-ball things that he wants,
08:59 so that's the pair he goes with.
09:01 Now I do personally quite like Scott McTominay, but one obvious criticism of him
09:05 is his decision-making in defensive situations, like you quite often see.
09:09 As we just did for the equaliser, he will be running back towards his own goal
09:13 and he will not do the thing he should do, he will just do the very basic thing he's been told to do.
09:18 But that seemingly does not matter to Eric Ten Hag, because he has decided
09:21 that he wants somebody in central midfield who will make runs from deep
09:25 and help provide a goal threat, as we saw with the first goal, he's really good at doing that.
09:29 So he is the player he picks to put in central midfield,
09:32 regardless of what else that means for the team.
09:34 And it's this weird obsession with profile over personality which ultimately lost them the game,
09:40 because they've just, it's 3-3, they've just conceded yet another equaliser,
09:43 but there's not long left, you can lock this game down, you can get out of here with a point.
09:49 And he makes the substitution of Rasmus Hoyland for Mason Mount.
09:53 Now he's done this because for whatever reason he felt Hoyland couldn't continue
09:56 and he needed to replace him with someone who was going to do a specific job,
10:00 and that specific job was to drop deep near the midfield, receive the ball to feet and hold it up.
10:07 And of the options available to him on the bench in that moment,
10:10 so Mount, Palistri, Anthony Martial, he thinks,
10:13 who is the best at receiving the ball to feet, who is the best at doing that?
10:17 And the answer is obviously Mason Mount. So he sticks him on up front.
10:21 Now again, I like Mason Mount, there are many positive qualities to his game,
10:25 but one thing you do not associate with him is an ability to battle against defenders,
10:31 to hold people off, to get a foot on the ball, to know when to buy a foul,
10:35 to know when to run into the channel, to do that kind of classic centre-forward work
10:40 that would theoretically have seen them over the line.
10:42 You can say what you like about Anthony Martial,
10:45 but he will have done that several dozen times in his career.
10:49 He has battled centre-forwards, he does know when to buy a foul in that position,
10:54 but that's his personality, that's not his profile.
10:57 And would you like to see Mason Mount's entire contribution to that game
11:01 after he came on the pitch?
11:03 Well, and apologies is backwards again, but here it is,
11:05 he won the ball back in the corner once, and he did both of the kick-offs.
11:11 They did not find him with one single pass,
11:14 he did not allow them to ever relieve pressure when they were defending.
11:18 It was a completely, about as ineffectual a substitution as you could hope to make.
11:23 Just to wrap this all up nice and neatly for you,
11:25 when Manchester United are good, they are really good,
11:27 because there are loads of players in that team who are good
11:30 at doing the things that make them good.
11:32 But when they are bad, they are really bad,
11:35 because not one single player in this team is good at the stuff
11:38 which stops them being bad.
11:40 Nobody gets a handle on the situation, nobody keeps their head,
11:43 nobody organises things, nobody reads the game as it is happening
11:47 and makes adjustments on the pitch.
11:49 They can do what they are told to do, but when teams find a way to get around that,
11:54 they don't know what to do.
11:56 And I do start to worry for Eric Ten Hag,
11:58 that the blame is finally going to start shifting over to him,
12:02 because they've been incredibly unlucky with decisions and with injuries
12:05 and things like that.
12:06 The Rashford red card again, another example.
12:08 And so many of these are just individual bad decisions being made by players
12:13 that are costing them goals.
12:14 But how many bits of bad luck and how many individual mistakes can you have
12:21 before they are a symptom and not the cause?
12:25 It's like Mr Burns, isn't it, in that softball episode of The Simpsons.
12:28 Like three misfortunes, that could happen.
12:30 Seven misfortunes, there's an outside chance.
12:33 But nine defeats in the first 17 games.
12:36 Anyway though, if you are a Man United fan, you managed to sit through all that,
12:39 please, I genuinely would love to know what you think the problems are,
12:43 why this keeps happening in the comments.
12:45 But is it just bad luck?
12:46 Is it actually really good?
12:47 Is it just the most unfortunate team with 10 to 100 witches' curses cast upon them?
12:52 That's an opinion, certainly.
12:53 Why not share it in the comments below?
12:55 Of course, don't forget, here at 442,
12:56 look at our nice shiny metal thing that I found in a cupboard
12:58 to subscribe while you're here.
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13:01 Until next time, though, get me on Twitter @alumpireclery442.
13:05 The whole social thing, it's in the corner of the video.
13:07 And until next time, which I hope isn't another Man United video anytime soon,
13:11 I will see you soon.
13:13 Goodbye!