Originally Posted by
Taksin
How low can they go?
Now that we are flying so high I can't get as much pleasure from their suffering as I once did. I used to look forward to MOTD quite a bit more when they had lost a game. Couldn't give a shit these days. However, this is now a kind of deeper pain that they are encountering, one that might eventually be even a bit deeper than the misery we went through in the nineties, zeros and tens. The delusions that we once had - that we were good enough - are starting to desert them. Gary Neville said he thought Manu U would win the league before LFC last summer, an opinion some posters on here might have shared with him, but that's a different subject.
They have all these ex players as pundits talking about how they are the biggest and best team in the world as if it's their birth right to be at the top, but there is a sneaking suspicion that this might be the end of an era. And the era where they are also rans could last a very long time. I say that as someone who has been thinking we could win the league for thirty years without it happening.
They have been ploughing through the top managers to try and restore the glory days but it hasn't worked at all. It has been a mess. Is Solskjaer a decent manager or inept - can anyone tell? I think they will have to stick with him because they can now see it isn't the managers that are wrong, it's obviously starting to become clear that they have player recruitment issues, despite the usual massive spending. The more they panic, the worse it will get.
Last night the Old Trafford crowd turned nasty and it wasn't Ole they aimed their bitterness at, it was Woodward. This got me thinking again about the argument between Steveo and myself on these boards over the last year or so. Where does the success originate?
LFC had its own demise and it was the end of an era. Our owners fell behind in the race - they didn't know how to keep with the times. Man U were planning differently and started to put something successful together - at that time, talking about people buying shirts in Asia was totally foreign to most clubs, including ours. Breaking the transfer record on someone like Collymore became a symbol of how we had lost pace with our rivals. In that era after our last league title, Leeds, Blackburn, Newcastle and Manu U were all starting to run their clubs differently to historical models. Yes, Ferguson was a genius and they had luck in terms of the talent coming through the youth set up, but they kept signing the best players in the world, over and over again. Even ones you'd never heard of. That's what we have started to do. We've got six players or something in the world's top twenty. How did that happen?
Our recruitment has become cast iron solid. When we buy a player, I no longer worry about how good they are going to be. I know that the manager is convinced, the team has done its research properly, including using statistical models developed by people that don't even know about football, and we are ahead of the competition as a result. The manager, scouts and the owners agree about what is needed. It's a new era of competence.
A mate was telling me that even the Klopp appointment used these methods. He had had a bad last season at Dortmund and they looked at stats to see that his team was actually performing really well but had not had the rub of the green. They brought up specific examples in the interview and he was thrilled that they could see his team were actually playing well despite the loss.
So, my prediction is, the chaos will continue at United so long as the Owners, CEO and board pursue the current model. Doesn't matter if they appoint the best manager, build the biggest stadium or buy the biggest stars, its not enough. The whole, complex organism has to be brought into functional harmony. Even then, as with Klopp at Dortmund, success is not guaranteed. But it's guaranteed not to happen if the club hierarchy is failing.
First Team
Take care.
Rowdy Yates
Posting Permissions
Bookmarks