‘Attack, attack, attack,’ chanted the Manchester United crowd to a team passing the ball with all the urgency of your grandfather taking a Sunday afternoon nap after his roast dinner.
Cue the manager’s irked reply. Something along the lines of ‘you don’t know what you’re doing.’ Except he didn’t communicate with the fans through chant. He did it at a press conference. And blamed Paul Scholes.
I was hoping for a West End Story-inspired musical number with menacing, yet catchy chants all round. Alas, this is as close as I’m likely to get.
There’s obviously nothing wrong with expressing your displeasure at team tactics. United are particularly dull this season after being particularly dull at the end of last season. But what fans must remember is just how poor this team were defensively at the start of Louis Van Gaal’s reign.
They seem to have completely turned around. From being a team hit on the counter every week, conceding through some awful positioning and defensive lapses, to a team with the best defensive record in the division but having scored noticeably fewer than those around them.
United’s defence was all over the place under the first few months of Van Gaal’s time in charge, but they’ve settled into a passing style that threatens to pen the opposition into their own penalty box for the entirety of the game, their only hope being a plucky counter attack. But United are now adept at cutting them out too.
The weekend’s game against West Brom showed this well. The last two Manchester United v West Brom games at Old Trafford have finished with United having the lion’s share of possession – 80% in May, when they lost 1-0, and 68% at the weekend, when they won 2-0.
That’s progress in some sense, but the possession level is Bayern Munich and Barcelona-like. It’s just they have all the penetration of a blunt needle at present.
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But when a manager takes over at a team with a bad defence, his first job should be to sort that out. The Dutch manager needed to build his team up from his defence, making sure they conceded fewer goals. It’s as simple as football gets. It’s easier to score more goals than the opposition whenever you limit the number they score. Simples.
But Van Gaal makes football anything other than simple.
He makes it way too complicated from time to time. Last season’s tactic of hump it long to Marouane Fellaini saw him play Wayne Rooney and Robin Van Persie in behind the Belgian midfielder who was fielded as a Number 9.
Van Gaal made long-ball football sophisticated by employing a deep-lying playmaker to lump it up to the big man. When Wayne Rooney – yeah, I know – played in that role against Chelsea last season, it was probably the only time that calling the deep-lying playmaker role the ‘quarterback role’ was socially acceptable. He actually did throw it long, hail Mary-ing it to the Belgian’s ‘fro.
This season long ball has been a thing of the past, but not because it hasn’t worked, as such. Van Gaal seems now to prefer his team to break teams down by passing the ball around and working an opening. Where last season they had to go more direct, this time he seems to trust his team to find a way through. Something they have done often enough to position themselves right up there with the Premier League leaders – only two points behind – and right at the top of their Champions League group.
Now imagine what they could do if they managed to get Juan Mata, Wayne Rooney and Anthony Martial scoring goals!
The fans are wrong to mutiny. They can vent their displeasure at a lack of attacking penetration if they want, but to go to a game and tell the team they have to score is like going to a restaurant and telling them they have to cook your steak. I think they know that already, but how they go about doing it is where the problem lies.
The thing is, United are making progress. Over the last few months they’ve shored up the defence, and progressed from a team hoofing the ball long to a big man up front into a team who try to draw the opposition out of their positions so as to create space in behind.
What they need to do now is add goals. But they just haven’t found a way. Give them time. It will come. Otherwise it’s going to descend into a musical. And no one wants that.
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