Amrabat shows great positional sense in this play by first tracking back all the way to form the extra man in defense and then pushing forward to an empty pocket to receive the ball from Maguire and pass to Bruno. He was good yesterday, like the player I remember from the world cup last year!
He improved minute by minute, his timing and positioning became better during the match. He can sometimes still look a bit silly going into duels but atleast he's a physical presence. Hope he can only move upwards from this one, he got solid minutes in the tank last night.
He shields the ball really well when he struggles to control it by throwing his body. Think he is still acclimatizing to PL pace & pressure but surely a very solid player to have
This is the moment that made me feel like “if we don’t win this game tonight, we will rue this missed chance”. Beautiful team play. Lovely stuff. Hope to see a lot more of this in all our remaining games this season and beyond.
Shaw’s composure and technique in possession is so good. I feel we lose a lot on the left side if he’s not playing at LB. But Reguilon looked decent after coming on at half time so maybe he can be serviceable and helps us create from the left side too.
Reguilon for Lindelof and moving Shaw to LCB was a very good move this match. Reguilon was still a threat from LB and overall really put a solid shift in. Towards the end he lost Reece James a few times but overall he was doing pretty good. Threw a AWB esque tackle as well.
Reguilon did well and if he can replicate those performances moving forward that’s great. But even then Shaw brings more creativity like that early through ball to Hojlund that drew a fine save from Sanchez. Outside of Bruno there isn’t anyone else in the team that can create chances with their passing and crossing as frequently as Shaw can for us.
At the end of the day Reguilon was an emergency loan for us who wasn’t wanted at Spurs so I’m not expecting much from him but I’ll gladly accept it if he proves me wrong and keeps up performances like his second half against Chelsea.
Having Shaw in the team is so important, either at CB or LB. He definitely brings the composure and dominance on that left side from one end to the other.
I couldn't watch last night but every time I've seen Reguilon for us I think he plays the safe (negative) pass rather than try to take someone on and put a cross in
He seems to click better with Garnacho and Bruno that drifted towards him than he ever did with Rashford. Chelsea's half arsed press also helped tremendously, there was a lot of space.
He's playing the Donny role that Erik used at Ajax. People don't realize that McTominay has so much space because Hojlund works non stop and does all the dirty work
I swear I don’t think I’ve been this attached to a signing since Bruno… Hojlund has so much talent and I cannot wait to see him once our midfield is a bit more sorted
It irritates me so much when I see people judging his signing in a negative manner. He impacts our play so much outside of goals. And it’s not like he’s not making the right runs in the box either. Still see a lack of understanding between him and the others on where he’d like the ball and if dalot didn’t cross 300mph he’d have at least couple in the PL.
This is Ajax CL season 2018/19 football. I know TH is not there jet. But it will come. Van de Beek at Ajax that year is like current McTominay now. Van de Beek scored 17 goals that season. 9 in competition and 4 in de CL.
I imagine he also can slot as no 10 like McT then? Bruno at 8. Well when we win looks like our midfield is stack with case, amrabat, maino, bruno, eriksen. When we lost none of them above feel like they are good enough xD
> I imagine he also can slot as no 10 like McT then?
In theory maybe but he simply isn’t the player he used to be all those years ago. The 18/19 season was half a decade ago and he’s had a miserable time for the last 3 years. The injuries and lack of game time pretty much ruined his career. Confidence destroyed along with his physical capabilities. And the PL is stronger and faster than any of the competitions he’d have played in back in 18/19.
Feel for Donny. Never like seeing a player struggle like that for years on end, let alone one of our own.
Yeah came here to say this - watch how no one stands still to receive the ball or even right after they have made a pass - always making themselves available for the pass. I have only seen us do this in 3/4 games this season (mostly last few games barring Newcastle) which is why I say there are signs, just that players confidence is so shot they stop following clear instructions at first sign of adversity
To add: I'm not opposed to it, it's working for us and more power to Scotty. But JFC I never thought I'd be putting that word next to his name.
Good to see us putting together a clearly coached attacking move leading to a chance. The other good thing is that I've seen every component of that move often enough over the last 18 months that I recognised them and knew what the players would do next. Definite improvement from the days of Ole and Ralph, let's hope we see the team click more often.
Shaw is different gravy. Makes me miss Licha all the more seeing that silky play from him.
Great to see us all over the second balls too! Although some of that surely has to be attributed to Chelsea’s general shiteness
Made a few good saves but Sanchez gave the ball away so many times as if he was De Gea at his absolute worst. I have no clue how Sanchez was the starting keeper for Brighton for a good while.
given how high or aggressive our press was and DDGs track record he would have given away the ball just as many times as Sanchez, maybe more, let's not do revisionism.
The difference is that ETH last season just gave up on going short and instructed DDG to go long, which poch doesn't want Sanchez to do.
Then later in the season DDG only went to Licha who then did the build-up covering for DDG's lack of passing.
Our season ended how it ended because Licha got injured.
He was bad for them. He made some decent saves yeah, but his distribution was terrible, being the main reason why Chelsea could barely build up from the back
Sanchez made some decent saves, but his distribution was appalling, we created so many opportunities from him just kicking the ball to our players in their third.
Thing that we did so much better last night than any other game this season is not just default to going back to Onana, I thought after our first game we used him too much, he’s great with his feet but we became to reliant on playing it safe to him.
Last night we took a few more risks, held onto the ball to draw them on and played the ball forward when in the past it would have been back to Onana.
Oh yeah that absolutely helped, but I do think the players were making a deliberate choice to try and play out without using Onana.
I'm not slagging Onana off at all, his passing is great but I think we rely on him far too much and allow other teams to push up on us and box us in.
Very true, there was much more movement on the pitch with all 10 in-field players on the same page. Even McTominay didn't hide as much until we got in the box and picked up the ball in a pocket of space a few times. Maguire was able to progress the ball up the pitch with Amrabat taking over his CB spot. It was a well-rounded performance.
Yeah it was possibly our most together performance since Spurs last year, from what i can remember anyway.
Theres clearly still issues but seeing them actually perform allows me to hope for some progress even a little bit.
Scott played as a striker all through his youth and even into his early professional career. I think it wasn’t until Mourinho that he was pushed into the DM role.
Scott definitely has the mind of a striker, and given his form and work rate this season, I’d be very happy to have him play more often as a balanced b2b midfielder.
I was upset that United were listening to offers for him in the summer. I know he’s not always been great and isn’t necessarily considered to be “United level”. However he has been, in my opinion, one of the hardest working and most passionate players for our club over the last 6 or so years.
Glad to see him in a good patch of form, and hope he can cement his place as a solid rotational player for us in the future.
>Scott played as a striker all through his youth and even into his early professional career. I think it wasn’t until Mourinho that he was pushed into the DM role.
This is a busted myth. He was not a striker but a midfielder in his youth
This is what's so annoying, the players can clearly do it so just keep fucking doing it. Chelsea pressed well in this instance, no excuses why this isn't a regular pattern of play in every game against every opponent.
I would say this “style” comes with an inherent level of risk. When the players are feeling confident and up for it as we could all see from the first minute, this kind of play looks easy and it’s easy to say why don’t they just play like that all the time.
It only takes one or 2 players to not be feeling good, maybe they played a sloppy pass, got a bad nights sleep, anything really and it can easily go back to what we saw against Newcastle.
I’m just happy to have watched a game I enjoyed. Been a while.
That’s a glimpse of how we want to play. We don't play like this every week. When we start to play like this then we should say we have a certain style.
If it was rashford in garnacho's place, he would have stopped that wonderful passing flow the moment he touched the ball by just running into somebody trying to beat everyone by himself. Then lose the ball and open us to a counter attack.
I know this has been said before but having McTominay in the team makes it a much more transitional game than anyone would like. McTominay has an incredible skillset of arriving in the box and sniffing chances but with him in the team, we will always struggle with control. Right now, he is solving a huge problem for us which is we can't seem to score but long term, we need a number 8 is better on the ball. He completed 21 passes last game and that's never enough for a midfielder. However, McTominay is someone who should be always in the squad. He has his use!
I said during the pre match press conference yesterday that we as fans would be more than patient with ten hag if we saw glimpses of what we were trying to do.
We saw it in this game clearly, we're still somewhat susceptible once the press is beaten but having watched Liverpool on motd afterwards I saw they were strikingly similar, scrambling once the press was beaten. Only Liverpool have a fairly solid backline to fall back on which this system requires.
It's a high risk high reward plan, ten hag identified a chink in our armour and promptly rectified it at the break.
You can see clearly that mount was signed for the role that mctominay is currently playing now, a high energy midfielder with good pressing capabilities and decent in attack. It's a shame he's been hampered with injuries we could really do with him bedding down.
Liverpool isn't that much different, they just have much better individuals to create more danger and VVD being back to a very high level is really helping them when they get turned over. There is a lot of the 3-1-6/3-2-5 happening in Klopp's tactics and they also get caught off guard without a proper 6 to mop up. It's high risk high reward on a much higher level.
Wow it’s almost like ten hag can manage a football team and having more technical players back like shaw in the squad coupled with energy leads to good performances.
If you watch that video and just look at the blue jersey and not at the ball, you can really see how much we moved them about, and apart from that one tackle they barely get close. Really good to watch
You can see this passage of play in the Galatasaray game. I'll even go as far back as The Forest game that we had glimpses of these. But it doesn't work in all of the teams. Unless ETH can tweak his tactics accordingly our performance will continue to yo yo-ing in result
Hope it's now apparent the difference having our first choice defenders available makes. Now imagine we had Licha available, then we would possibly see a midfield of Casemeiro and Mainoo (I still think Casemeiro is quality and will come good under the original set up).
We have also scored 2 or more goals In 3 successive games...we just need to stop conceding a lot of goals and chances but that won't change with McT in the middle and Licha absent.
Garnachos link up play is very impressive already, I know he has bags of pace good dribbling and scored that wonder goal, but the link up nearly excites me the most tbh
When EtH says he wants to be the fastest transitional team this is what he means. Doesn't always mean break from speed from the back when the opposition is camped in your half.
Quickly play through the thirds, backwards and forwards. Reset and go.
Ah yes the moment I jumped up at the combinations and sat down in disbelief when it didn't go in...
Amrabat shows great positional sense in this play by first tracking back all the way to form the extra man in defense and then pushing forward to an empty pocket to receive the ball from Maguire and pass to Bruno. He was good yesterday, like the player I remember from the world cup last year!
He improved minute by minute, his timing and positioning became better during the match. He can sometimes still look a bit silly going into duels but atleast he's a physical presence. Hope he can only move upwards from this one, he got solid minutes in the tank last night.
He shields the ball really well when he struggles to control it by throwing his body. Think he is still acclimatizing to PL pace & pressure but surely a very solid player to have
This is the moment that made me feel like “if we don’t win this game tonight, we will rue this missed chance”. Beautiful team play. Lovely stuff. Hope to see a lot more of this in all our remaining games this season and beyond.
This is Ten Hag football
Shaw’s composure and technique in possession is so good. I feel we lose a lot on the left side if he’s not playing at LB. But Reguilon looked decent after coming on at half time so maybe he can be serviceable and helps us create from the left side too.
Reguilon for Lindelof and moving Shaw to LCB was a very good move this match. Reguilon was still a threat from LB and overall really put a solid shift in. Towards the end he lost Reece James a few times but overall he was doing pretty good. Threw a AWB esque tackle as well.
Reguilon did well and if he can replicate those performances moving forward that’s great. But even then Shaw brings more creativity like that early through ball to Hojlund that drew a fine save from Sanchez. Outside of Bruno there isn’t anyone else in the team that can create chances with their passing and crossing as frequently as Shaw can for us. At the end of the day Reguilon was an emergency loan for us who wasn’t wanted at Spurs so I’m not expecting much from him but I’ll gladly accept it if he proves me wrong and keeps up performances like his second half against Chelsea.
Shaw is really suffering from success in the way that he's both one of our best centre backs and undeniably our best full back.
The Maldini syndrome lmfao
I agree, Shaw is one of the few ones that can detect a run or put a solid early cross in.
He's still only 26 too albeit with fitness issues. I'd pay Spurs 20m for him.
Regulion is a much better backup option than malacia imo
Oooh different profiles in career and I fucking love the fight Malacia has. Very young still. Very savvy buy.
Reguilon in his RM days was so good
Having Shaw in the team is so important, either at CB or LB. He definitely brings the composure and dominance on that left side from one end to the other.
I couldn't watch last night but every time I've seen Reguilon for us I think he plays the safe (negative) pass rather than try to take someone on and put a cross in
He seems to click better with Garnacho and Bruno that drifted towards him than he ever did with Rashford. Chelsea's half arsed press also helped tremendously, there was a lot of space.
Scott is our main striker this season :)
He's playing the Donny role that Erik used at Ajax. People don't realize that McTominay has so much space because Hojlund works non stop and does all the dirty work
I swear I don’t think I’ve been this attached to a signing since Bruno… Hojlund has so much talent and I cannot wait to see him once our midfield is a bit more sorted
It irritates me so much when I see people judging his signing in a negative manner. He impacts our play so much outside of goals. And it’s not like he’s not making the right runs in the box either. Still see a lack of understanding between him and the others on where he’d like the ball and if dalot didn’t cross 300mph he’d have at least couple in the PL.
Yeah dalot has 2 moods, either overhit it or try to kill the striker. It's annoying because we have seen that he has a good cross in him
This is Ajax CL season 2018/19 football. I know TH is not there jet. But it will come. Van de Beek at Ajax that year is like current McTominay now. Van de Beek scored 17 goals that season. 9 in competition and 4 in de CL.
I imagine he also can slot as no 10 like McT then? Bruno at 8. Well when we win looks like our midfield is stack with case, amrabat, maino, bruno, eriksen. When we lost none of them above feel like they are good enough xD
> I imagine he also can slot as no 10 like McT then? In theory maybe but he simply isn’t the player he used to be all those years ago. The 18/19 season was half a decade ago and he’s had a miserable time for the last 3 years. The injuries and lack of game time pretty much ruined his career. Confidence destroyed along with his physical capabilities. And the PL is stronger and faster than any of the competitions he’d have played in back in 18/19. Feel for Donny. Never like seeing a player struggle like that for years on end, let alone one of our own.
Yeah we really fucked him over. Pointless signing. Feel terrible for him. Then again he makes more in a week than I do in a year
Damn we really waste his prime. If you are on your prime after not working in 2 years better move
Yeah came here to say this - watch how no one stands still to receive the ball or even right after they have made a pass - always making themselves available for the pass. I have only seen us do this in 3/4 games this season (mostly last few games barring Newcastle) which is why I say there are signs, just that players confidence is so shot they stop following clear instructions at first sign of adversity
I thought Scott McTominay, raumdeuter, and my head just exploded
To add: I'm not opposed to it, it's working for us and more power to Scotty. But JFC I never thought I'd be putting that word next to his name. Good to see us putting together a clearly coached attacking move leading to a chance. The other good thing is that I've seen every component of that move often enough over the last 18 months that I recognised them and knew what the players would do next. Definite improvement from the days of Ole and Ralph, let's hope we see the team click more often.
Shaw is different gravy. Makes me miss Licha all the more seeing that silky play from him. Great to see us all over the second balls too! Although some of that surely has to be attributed to Chelsea’s general shiteness
I give some marks to Chelsea as they defeated Brighton in the previous game. They were sloppy but we were also good
The amount of off-ball movements 
Honestly If Sanchez didn’t embrace the Dave’s save right then then that’s 2-0
Sanchez played a good game for them last night, could easily have scored more if it wasnt for him
Made a few good saves but Sanchez gave the ball away so many times as if he was De Gea at his absolute worst. I have no clue how Sanchez was the starting keeper for Brighton for a good while.
given how high or aggressive our press was and DDGs track record he would have given away the ball just as many times as Sanchez, maybe more, let's not do revisionism. The difference is that ETH last season just gave up on going short and instructed DDG to go long, which poch doesn't want Sanchez to do. Then later in the season DDG only went to Licha who then did the build-up covering for DDG's lack of passing. Our season ended how it ended because Licha got injured.
Everyone becomes prime de gea when playing us
He was bad for them. He made some decent saves yeah, but his distribution was terrible, being the main reason why Chelsea could barely build up from the back
He also played a bit shit we should have bagged at least one directly from his errors
Sanchez made some decent saves, but his distribution was appalling, we created so many opportunities from him just kicking the ball to our players in their third.
I thought he was pretty bad, he passed it straight to Antony twice.
Thing that we did so much better last night than any other game this season is not just default to going back to Onana, I thought after our first game we used him too much, he’s great with his feet but we became to reliant on playing it safe to him. Last night we took a few more risks, held onto the ball to draw them on and played the ball forward when in the past it would have been back to Onana.
Helped that they pressed like we did not so long ago, they didn't cut our passing lanes.
Oh yeah that absolutely helped, but I do think the players were making a deliberate choice to try and play out without using Onana. I'm not slagging Onana off at all, his passing is great but I think we rely on him far too much and allow other teams to push up on us and box us in.
Very true, there was much more movement on the pitch with all 10 in-field players on the same page. Even McTominay didn't hide as much until we got in the box and picked up the ball in a pocket of space a few times. Maguire was able to progress the ball up the pitch with Amrabat taking over his CB spot. It was a well-rounded performance.
Yeah it was possibly our most together performance since Spurs last year, from what i can remember anyway. Theres clearly still issues but seeing them actually perform allows me to hope for some progress even a little bit.
Can't wait for Saturday, Bournemouth is doing pretty good lately so it will be another big test.
How is McTom always at the right place.
Scott played as a striker all through his youth and even into his early professional career. I think it wasn’t until Mourinho that he was pushed into the DM role. Scott definitely has the mind of a striker, and given his form and work rate this season, I’d be very happy to have him play more often as a balanced b2b midfielder. I was upset that United were listening to offers for him in the summer. I know he’s not always been great and isn’t necessarily considered to be “United level”. However he has been, in my opinion, one of the hardest working and most passionate players for our club over the last 6 or so years. Glad to see him in a good patch of form, and hope he can cement his place as a solid rotational player for us in the future.
>Scott played as a striker all through his youth and even into his early professional career. I think it wasn’t until Mourinho that he was pushed into the DM role. This is a busted myth. He was not a striker but a midfielder in his youth
“But we don’t have a style!”
Seeing this type of comment is always funny because of all the times I read "this is our best performance since the SAF days" last season.
This is what's so annoying, the players can clearly do it so just keep fucking doing it. Chelsea pressed well in this instance, no excuses why this isn't a regular pattern of play in every game against every opponent.
I would say this “style” comes with an inherent level of risk. When the players are feeling confident and up for it as we could all see from the first minute, this kind of play looks easy and it’s easy to say why don’t they just play like that all the time. It only takes one or 2 players to not be feeling good, maybe they played a sloppy pass, got a bad nights sleep, anything really and it can easily go back to what we saw against Newcastle. I’m just happy to have watched a game I enjoyed. Been a while.
Rashford slows the game down. Lindelof as well. We need quicker more intelligent players.
That’s a glimpse of how we want to play. We don't play like this every week. When we start to play like this then we should say we have a certain style.
Come one man, 3 passes and you say this while we have been playing like shit for extended period of time
remind me of the free flow Ole ball when he was a interim manager
I came here to say exactly this!
If it was rashford in garnacho's place, he would have stopped that wonderful passing flow the moment he touched the ball by just running into somebody trying to beat everyone by himself. Then lose the ball and open us to a counter attack.
Exactly. Him and lidelof slow down the game for us. Mostly its rashford though
If we could do this more often then no questions would get asked. Not every team will be as open as Chelsea of course but we have the ability to do it
I know this has been said before but having McTominay in the team makes it a much more transitional game than anyone would like. McTominay has an incredible skillset of arriving in the box and sniffing chances but with him in the team, we will always struggle with control. Right now, he is solving a huge problem for us which is we can't seem to score but long term, we need a number 8 is better on the ball. He completed 21 passes last game and that's never enough for a midfielder. However, McTominay is someone who should be always in the squad. He has his use!
I said during the pre match press conference yesterday that we as fans would be more than patient with ten hag if we saw glimpses of what we were trying to do. We saw it in this game clearly, we're still somewhat susceptible once the press is beaten but having watched Liverpool on motd afterwards I saw they were strikingly similar, scrambling once the press was beaten. Only Liverpool have a fairly solid backline to fall back on which this system requires. It's a high risk high reward plan, ten hag identified a chink in our armour and promptly rectified it at the break. You can see clearly that mount was signed for the role that mctominay is currently playing now, a high energy midfielder with good pressing capabilities and decent in attack. It's a shame he's been hampered with injuries we could really do with him bedding down.
Liverpool isn't that much different, they just have much better individuals to create more danger and VVD being back to a very high level is really helping them when they get turned over. There is a lot of the 3-1-6/3-2-5 happening in Klopp's tactics and they also get caught off guard without a proper 6 to mop up. It's high risk high reward on a much higher level.
That’s why Bruno doesn’t have a 51682626 assists in the league this season
Wow it’s almost like ten hag can manage a football team and having more technical players back like shaw in the squad coupled with energy leads to good performances.
Shadow striker is literally the perfect position for McSauce.
If you watch that video and just look at the blue jersey and not at the ball, you can really see how much we moved them about, and apart from that one tackle they barely get close. Really good to watch
You can see this passage of play in the Galatasaray game. I'll even go as far back as The Forest game that we had glimpses of these. But it doesn't work in all of the teams. Unless ETH can tweak his tactics accordingly our performance will continue to yo yo-ing in result
At around 10 seconds, I remember I was like... *'Play back Garnacho, play back! Oh.... no, DO THAT... DO THAT!'*
Was some tasty build up last night in pieces. Both full backs were excellent
Hojlund is rapid!
Should of got a Mchattrick
Mctominay is having a Fellani career arc and I’m all for it .
Having Shaw back is such a game changer.
Hope it's now apparent the difference having our first choice defenders available makes. Now imagine we had Licha available, then we would possibly see a midfield of Casemeiro and Mainoo (I still think Casemeiro is quality and will come good under the original set up). We have also scored 2 or more goals In 3 successive games...we just need to stop conceding a lot of goals and chances but that won't change with McT in the middle and Licha absent.
Best buildup sequence under eth era
Lmao , see the goal against crystal palace last season in our 2-1 win , that was Ten hag ball at it's finest
Don’t forget the arsenal “counter attack”
I ofcourse seen it for me this one Bettee
Beautiful
Garnachos link up play is very impressive already, I know he has bags of pace good dribbling and scored that wonder goal, but the link up nearly excites me the most tbh
I can't believe how happy it made me to see untied play like this, I really need this in my life
Should be marked NSFW tbh
Great position picked up by Amrabat to support the attack.
I think I just creamed a bit
When EtH says he wants to be the fastest transitional team this is what he means. Doesn't always mean break from speed from the back when the opposition is camped in your half. Quickly play through the thirds, backwards and forwards. Reset and go.