Can it ever be enough?
European midweek games.
- Thread starter Spaghetti Legs
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Can it ever be enough?
We have to be measured. Enough to make us laugh and make them fail, but not too much that they sack him!
Oh sure, I don't think he's much of a gamble, but if they decided against him last season, I can see them being a little more cautious this season.
One of the few options I guess, although most, like him, would only be short term prospects.
Actually I think he *would* be something of a gamble TBH. As Moyes himself is busy proving, there's a difference between getting a mid-level club to punch above its weight and getting a top-level club to fulfil its potential.
Yes, that's why I think they're in a real spot now. The next manager would have to be a clear 'Not Moyes' figure - not up and coming, not from a middling club, but a tried and tested winner at the top, and I don't see many who'd go to the mancs with that squad, possibly even out of Europe. Last season there was rarity of someone like Maureen who was desperate to leave a big club and practically begged the mancs to take him and they snubbed him. Those chances don't come up very often, and that's what they'll probably need.
I think there's a bit of a difference between Moyes punching above his weight at Everton and what Klopp's achieved at Dortmund!!
I think some of us overestimate the size of the task facing them. If they get a top class coach in like Klopp, and spend the sort of money on players they're talking about (£100m+), then they'll soon be back up challenging for the title. Sure, these fuck-ups will have cost them a lot - a LOT - of money, but they seem to have it to waste, so what does that matter to us?
I think some of us overestimate the size of the task facing them. If they get a top class coach in like Klopp, and spend the sort of money on players they're talking about (£100m+), then they'll soon be back up challenging for the title. Sure, these fuck-ups will have cost them a lot - a LOT - of money, but they seem to have it to waste, so what does that matter to us?
Problem is Utd are a top level club with mid level players and management.
I don't for a minute think that Klopp is a gamble and Utd choosing Moyes had everything to do with Fergie.
I know what you both mean about Klopp, but he had less of a gap to bridge at Dortmund IMO than Moyes did at Everton. In any case, the fundamental point remains - the job in which he's admittedly excelled there is of a different stripe altogether to that which would face him at United. I'm not saying by any means that he definitely wouldn't succeed, but not all managers can move easily between different types of job, as Gollum is currently demonstrating in glorious Technicolor.
Peter: disagree with your second para. IMO the size of the task which faces them is considerable, with or without a big cash injection. At least half that side needs replacing before they're realistic candidates for top spot again and doing that all at one go will be fraught with risk, whoever's their manager.
Peter: disagree with your second para. IMO the size of the task which faces them is considerable, with or without a big cash injection. At least half that side needs replacing before they're realistic candidates for top spot again and doing that all at one go will be fraught with risk, whoever's their manager.
I cant stand Morgan but sometimes he can be funny
Piers Morgan @piersmorgan 12m
Must be spotless after last night, 'fella'.. you never touched the ball > RT@rioferdy5 @piersmorgan you ok fella?! come clean my boots!
Piers Morgan
Must be spotless after last night, 'fella'.. you never touched the ball > RT
David Moyes' position as Manchester United manager remains secure
http://gu.com/p/3n4dm
Kiss of death or hurray!
http://gu.com/p/3n4dm
Kiss of death or hurray!
Am I the only one who would love to see him sacked; then Utd hire Keane, Robson, Phelan or Hughes as interim manager, then they hire a "foreign" coach in the summer & he fails just as spectacular and lo they are have regained their laughing stock status from the 70s and 80s
i want moyes there for as long as possible, theyre going to throw lots of money to get back on top, i want moysey to be the cretin wasting it away, even when they do get good players he'll just get them racing to the byline to float in crosses for shitty midgets up front
This.
can't wait for them to buy Mirallas and Osman for £30m
Moyes: "You know I stuck superglue to the tips of your fingers, don't you lads?"
Moyes: "You're all laughing at me aren't you?"
Neville: "Who, me? No no... Look there's Woodward taking our picture"
Giggs: *struggles to hold mouth shut* "Mmm mmm mmm"
I am haunted with memories of the Kop singing "Fergie must stay" in December 1989 during a 0-0 draw
I wouldnt like to see Moyes sacked and ferguson being the interim manager
The public grilling continues.
http://espnfc.com/blog/_/name/championsleague/id/814?cc=4716
Moyes missing his tactical nous
Posted by Gabriele Marcotti
First of all, credit to Olympiakos because, frankly, they deserve it.
On Tuesday, their coach, Michel outwitted his opposite number, Alejandro “El Chori” Dominguez rolled back the years and Joel Campbell showed just why, not that long ago, Arsene Wenger believed he could contribute in the Premier League.
Furthermore, you can point to the fact that only one team -- Paris St. Germain -- has beaten the Greek champions in the past 12 months
Done?
Right, how about a reality check now? Olympiakos may be a juggernaut in Greece, a nation that has gone through economic hell in the past five years. But who are these guys who beat Manchester United 2-0?
They are kids, journeymen and local heroes who bled red and white on the night.
Jose Holebas was signed from Munich. 1860, that is. Centreback Ivan Marcano arrived from Rubin Kazan. Leandro Salino? He made his name in Portugal, albeit at Braga. Delvin Ndinga, who monstered the opposition midfield, played in Ligue 2 last season.
Hernan Perez may be a Paraguayan international, but he’s also a guy who couldn’t get on the pitch much for Villarreal. Campbell is in his third year as an Arsenal player but has yet to play a minute for the first-team and Michael Olaitan is a 21-year-old Nigerian forward who scored all of seven goals last season.
Oh, and then there’s Nelson Valdez, who may be a familiar name to some. He used to play in the Bundesliga and once scored twice in a famous win for Hercules at Barcelona. He’s the guy Olympiakos signed to replace departed centerforward Kostas Mitroglou, who moved to Fulham. Valdez arrived from Al Jazira, that powerhouse from the United Arab Emirates.
The point of this exercise is to illustrate how a rag-tag bunch of players who, in terms of reputation, wages and ability are second or third tier at best, could coalesce on the night and beat the Premier League Champions. Why? Because they had the right game plan and they executed perfectly.
It’s worth noting this, because the team they beat were the polar opposites. A team with household names, blessed with huge contracts and plenty of ability, put on one of the worst performances in recent memory. Why? Because they had an awful game plan and they executed it badly, creating a vicious cycle where futility breeds futility.
This one’s mostly on David Moyes, the architect of that wretched and non-sensical approach.
“That’s the worst we have played in Europe, that’s for sure,” he said afterwards. “It was a really poor performance. We never really got going from the start and we didn’t deserve anything because of the way we played.
“I take responsibility. It is my time and I will always front it up. The players are hurting as well. They know how they performed.”
To his credit, he’s taking responsibility, which is good, because those who keep going on about how Moyes supposedly inherited a pile of chumps from Sir Alex Ferguson are as tiresome as they are misguided.
Sure, many of these guys are not as good as their counterparts on Manchester City or Chelsea, let alone Bayern or Barcelona. But this is Olympiakos we’re talking about and, frankly, even if Brazil 1970 somehow time-traveled to face United, there would still be no excuse for lining up the way they did.
Going into the game, Moyes evidently thought it best not to take chances and take full advantage of the fact that the tie is played over 180 minutes. That’s fine. Why take risks if you can just settle for a draw and win at Old Trafford? Okay, so he decided to be conservative -- no Adnan Januzaj -- and play on the counter-attack.
There’s nothing wrong with that strategy.
But if you’re going to counter, you need guys with pace in positions to provide a threat. Instead, Ashley Young and Antonio Valencia sat so far back that they were basically adjunct full-backs. This meant that, when United did win the ball, they were starting from so deep that there was no threat at all: Olympiakos saw them coming from miles away.
Furthermore, United didn’t get to counter-attack much because they had so much of the ball. Olympiakos seemed happy to let them enjoy the most sterile of possession. Here, most of the public’s fury has been vented at Michael Carrick and Tom Cleverley, the central midfielders.
Granted, they were both poor but when you’re sitting in the middle of the park, seemingly with orders not to stray too far beyond the halfway line and your wingers aren’t making runs, presumably so you can “keep your shape” and Wayne Rooney is swallowed up by the twin gorgons of Ndinga and Giannis Maniatis and Robin van Persie can’t find space (more on this coming up), what else are you going to do but incessantly spray the ball sideways and backwards?
Even then, it might have been fine. Keep the ball, move it, be patient, try to tease Olympiakos forward and strike when the time is right. Heck, it’s tiki-taka stuff, right? It's worked well enough for Barcelona.
The problem is that United played at a pace only slightly faster than flows of molten lava, particularly in the first 45 minutes. Every pass that wasn’t mis-hit -- and there were plenty of those -- seemed telegraphed and in slow-motion.
It was the sort of pace you would expect in an over-40s recreational league playing under the midday sun in some place like Recife or Arizona (or Qatar, for that matter). And it made no sense at all.
Olympiakos were entirely in their element with their slower tempo. Meanwhile, United who -- I don’t think it’s a secret -- play in the Premier League, where the game tends to be quicker anyway, were not.
If you had a couple of Juan Matas and the odd Ryan Giggs in there it might have made sense. When you have runners like Young and Valencia, it did not.
The other absurdity -- and here, you have to blame whichever rocket scientist Moyes sent to scout the opposition -- was completely mis-reading Olympiakos and what they might try to do.
In the Greek League, where they’re undefeated with 24 wins and two draws and enjoy a 20 point lead over the second-placed team, they face opponents who defend in numbers and hang on for dear life (usually unsuccessfully).
Inevitably, Olympiakos has to attack in numbers and keep the ball for ages but, in Europe, they have a different approach, using two defensive midfielders and two speedy wingers to cue counter-attacks.
United sat deep, maybe thinking that Olympiakos would mistake them for Levadiakos or Ergotelis or whatever other cannon fodder they beat up on each week in Greece.
Some will call for Moyes’ head. That won’t happen. The Glazers gave him a six-year deal (another idiocy: did they really think that giving him two years plus an option for a third would have made him turn down the job?) which means firing him will be ridiculously expensive. And the Glazers don’t like expenses.
Nor should it happen, frankly. After all, at this point, there’s no season to save. Even if they go out of the Champions League in this round and fail to qualify for next season's competition, it’s a blow the club can absorb.
United have committed to a Moyes-led rebuilding process and he still has (barely) enough sporting capital left following his years at Everton that a turn-around can be believed in. Sort of.
But this nonsense has to end -- now -- and Moyes also has to be clever in how he deals with the latest brouhaha, generated, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps mischievously, by van Persie.
Speaking to Dutch broadcaster NOS, he said: “My teammates are sometimes occupying the spaces I want to play in. And when I see that, it makes it difficult for me to come to those spaces as well. So that forces me to adjust my runs, based on the position of my fellow players. I think that’s a shame.”
If that is what’s happening, then it’s on Moyes as well because that’s the kind of thing you work on in training. It’s not as if Young, Valencia and Rooney are unfamiliar to the Dutch striker. He’s played with them all for two years.
The most frustrating part right now is how unlike his Everton team Moyes’ United look. The Goodison Park club weren’t always easy on the eye but they had a manager who knew how to read games.
Everton had a guy whose defense was organized, whose midfield was aggressive, and whose front four were synchronized. He was a man who excelled at forcing the opposition to play the way he wanted them to, even when they were more talented and, this didn’t happen, he adjusted his team accordingly.
That guy was David William Moyes. He wasn’t perfect, but he came up with reasonable tactics and his teams implemented them well.
How United could use that Moyes right now, instead of the guy who showed up in Athens on Tuesday night.
http://espnfc.com/blog/_/name/championsleague/id/814?cc=4716
Moyes missing his tactical nous
Posted by Gabriele Marcotti
First of all, credit to Olympiakos because, frankly, they deserve it.
On Tuesday, their coach, Michel outwitted his opposite number, Alejandro “El Chori” Dominguez rolled back the years and Joel Campbell showed just why, not that long ago, Arsene Wenger believed he could contribute in the Premier League.
Furthermore, you can point to the fact that only one team -- Paris St. Germain -- has beaten the Greek champions in the past 12 months
Done?
Right, how about a reality check now? Olympiakos may be a juggernaut in Greece, a nation that has gone through economic hell in the past five years. But who are these guys who beat Manchester United 2-0?
They are kids, journeymen and local heroes who bled red and white on the night.
Jose Holebas was signed from Munich. 1860, that is. Centreback Ivan Marcano arrived from Rubin Kazan. Leandro Salino? He made his name in Portugal, albeit at Braga. Delvin Ndinga, who monstered the opposition midfield, played in Ligue 2 last season.
Hernan Perez may be a Paraguayan international, but he’s also a guy who couldn’t get on the pitch much for Villarreal. Campbell is in his third year as an Arsenal player but has yet to play a minute for the first-team and Michael Olaitan is a 21-year-old Nigerian forward who scored all of seven goals last season.
Oh, and then there’s Nelson Valdez, who may be a familiar name to some. He used to play in the Bundesliga and once scored twice in a famous win for Hercules at Barcelona. He’s the guy Olympiakos signed to replace departed centerforward Kostas Mitroglou, who moved to Fulham. Valdez arrived from Al Jazira, that powerhouse from the United Arab Emirates.
The point of this exercise is to illustrate how a rag-tag bunch of players who, in terms of reputation, wages and ability are second or third tier at best, could coalesce on the night and beat the Premier League Champions. Why? Because they had the right game plan and they executed perfectly.
It’s worth noting this, because the team they beat were the polar opposites. A team with household names, blessed with huge contracts and plenty of ability, put on one of the worst performances in recent memory. Why? Because they had an awful game plan and they executed it badly, creating a vicious cycle where futility breeds futility.
This one’s mostly on David Moyes, the architect of that wretched and non-sensical approach.
“That’s the worst we have played in Europe, that’s for sure,” he said afterwards. “It was a really poor performance. We never really got going from the start and we didn’t deserve anything because of the way we played.
“I take responsibility. It is my time and I will always front it up. The players are hurting as well. They know how they performed.”
To his credit, he’s taking responsibility, which is good, because those who keep going on about how Moyes supposedly inherited a pile of chumps from Sir Alex Ferguson are as tiresome as they are misguided.
Sure, many of these guys are not as good as their counterparts on Manchester City or Chelsea, let alone Bayern or Barcelona. But this is Olympiakos we’re talking about and, frankly, even if Brazil 1970 somehow time-traveled to face United, there would still be no excuse for lining up the way they did.
Going into the game, Moyes evidently thought it best not to take chances and take full advantage of the fact that the tie is played over 180 minutes. That’s fine. Why take risks if you can just settle for a draw and win at Old Trafford? Okay, so he decided to be conservative -- no Adnan Januzaj -- and play on the counter-attack.
There’s nothing wrong with that strategy.
But if you’re going to counter, you need guys with pace in positions to provide a threat. Instead, Ashley Young and Antonio Valencia sat so far back that they were basically adjunct full-backs. This meant that, when United did win the ball, they were starting from so deep that there was no threat at all: Olympiakos saw them coming from miles away.
Furthermore, United didn’t get to counter-attack much because they had so much of the ball. Olympiakos seemed happy to let them enjoy the most sterile of possession. Here, most of the public’s fury has been vented at Michael Carrick and Tom Cleverley, the central midfielders.
Granted, they were both poor but when you’re sitting in the middle of the park, seemingly with orders not to stray too far beyond the halfway line and your wingers aren’t making runs, presumably so you can “keep your shape” and Wayne Rooney is swallowed up by the twin gorgons of Ndinga and Giannis Maniatis and Robin van Persie can’t find space (more on this coming up), what else are you going to do but incessantly spray the ball sideways and backwards?
Even then, it might have been fine. Keep the ball, move it, be patient, try to tease Olympiakos forward and strike when the time is right. Heck, it’s tiki-taka stuff, right? It's worked well enough for Barcelona.
The problem is that United played at a pace only slightly faster than flows of molten lava, particularly in the first 45 minutes. Every pass that wasn’t mis-hit -- and there were plenty of those -- seemed telegraphed and in slow-motion.
It was the sort of pace you would expect in an over-40s recreational league playing under the midday sun in some place like Recife or Arizona (or Qatar, for that matter). And it made no sense at all.
Olympiakos were entirely in their element with their slower tempo. Meanwhile, United who -- I don’t think it’s a secret -- play in the Premier League, where the game tends to be quicker anyway, were not.
If you had a couple of Juan Matas and the odd Ryan Giggs in there it might have made sense. When you have runners like Young and Valencia, it did not.
The other absurdity -- and here, you have to blame whichever rocket scientist Moyes sent to scout the opposition -- was completely mis-reading Olympiakos and what they might try to do.
In the Greek League, where they’re undefeated with 24 wins and two draws and enjoy a 20 point lead over the second-placed team, they face opponents who defend in numbers and hang on for dear life (usually unsuccessfully).
Inevitably, Olympiakos has to attack in numbers and keep the ball for ages but, in Europe, they have a different approach, using two defensive midfielders and two speedy wingers to cue counter-attacks.
United sat deep, maybe thinking that Olympiakos would mistake them for Levadiakos or Ergotelis or whatever other cannon fodder they beat up on each week in Greece.
Some will call for Moyes’ head. That won’t happen. The Glazers gave him a six-year deal (another idiocy: did they really think that giving him two years plus an option for a third would have made him turn down the job?) which means firing him will be ridiculously expensive. And the Glazers don’t like expenses.
Nor should it happen, frankly. After all, at this point, there’s no season to save. Even if they go out of the Champions League in this round and fail to qualify for next season's competition, it’s a blow the club can absorb.
United have committed to a Moyes-led rebuilding process and he still has (barely) enough sporting capital left following his years at Everton that a turn-around can be believed in. Sort of.
But this nonsense has to end -- now -- and Moyes also has to be clever in how he deals with the latest brouhaha, generated, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps mischievously, by van Persie.
Speaking to Dutch broadcaster NOS, he said: “My teammates are sometimes occupying the spaces I want to play in. And when I see that, it makes it difficult for me to come to those spaces as well. So that forces me to adjust my runs, based on the position of my fellow players. I think that’s a shame.”
If that is what’s happening, then it’s on Moyes as well because that’s the kind of thing you work on in training. It’s not as if Young, Valencia and Rooney are unfamiliar to the Dutch striker. He’s played with them all for two years.
The most frustrating part right now is how unlike his Everton team Moyes’ United look. The Goodison Park club weren’t always easy on the eye but they had a manager who knew how to read games.
Everton had a guy whose defense was organized, whose midfield was aggressive, and whose front four were synchronized. He was a man who excelled at forcing the opposition to play the way he wanted them to, even when they were more talented and, this didn’t happen, he adjusted his team accordingly.
That guy was David William Moyes. He wasn’t perfect, but he came up with reasonable tactics and his teams implemented them well.
How United could use that Moyes right now, instead of the guy who showed up in Athens on Tuesday night.
A Utd fan on talkshite now, season ticket holder, has just said he wants Moyes sacked & giggs made interim manager!
Hahahaha. Love it.
Hahahaha. Love it.
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