Mails: Would you take fourth place now?

Mails: Would you take fourth place now?

Send your thoughts to theeditor@football365.com.

Actually enjoying United again
Can we hold back the hyperbole about Jose kicking a water bottle please? I half expected the anti-Mourinho brigade following another draw at Old Trafford and I am certainly no Mourinho fan but hold on a minute. Yes the draw was frustrating but the way we’re playing at the moment I actually really enjoy watching Man Utd play football again.

We currently sit sixth and that’s about right. Yes I’d love us to be top of the league but all the teams ahead of us have had better results, that’s how these things work. I don’t buy this three transfer windows line, there are enough players at the club who are capable of playing well together in a way that gets results. But if any of the other 7 shots on target (more than any other team in top-6) had gone in we’d be celebrating a great result and display and their keeper was terrific (COYBIG). It’s small margins at the moment and when it wasn’t working Jose changed it bringing on Rooney, Ctrl+V Mkhitaryan, and Fellaini.

I’m no longer dreading Utd. play. Three of the back four yesterday were reserve players and they still played well. Paul Pogba is starting to look like the player he was at Juve, still a long way to go but encouraging. Ctrl+V is starting to get into the team. Herrera shows he cares and can play. Even Rooney’s playing well.  I can’t believe I’m saying this but I’m beginning to trust the reprehensible bottle kicker.

I also don’t think it was a dive by Pogba. Yes, there was no contact but I think he anticipated getting kicked and jumped out of the way to avoid that. That doesn’t make it a foul and players, especially good ones need to be willing to  get kicked in order to get the foul. That said I totally see why he received his yellow but I  don’t think it was simulation per se.
Bren, Dublin

The other side of the fence
Well that was my first visit to Old Trafford since deciding not to renew my season ticket following the sale of Ronaldo for 80 million and the purchase of Valencia for 15 million. Nothing against Valencia but that particular transaction made my mind up.

The good wife has access to 4 tickets in the Evolution suite so it was through the fog of several pints of Guinness and glasses of champagne that I enjoyed yesterday afternoons entertainment. The food was good, service excellent however my efforts at winning the quiz were undone by my 3 teammates who were cluelessly drunk and therefore no use. All in all a thoroughly enjoyable day was had.

And that’s where the positivity ends. I don’t think Pogba will ever have a better opportunity to take a game by the scruff of the neck and deliver a win and 3 points. Mourinho’s team selections are becoming ever more damaging and frustrating with each game and it’s beginning to feel horribly similar to the Van Gaal era of baffling team selection.

I hate to say this but the future is not looking good if Mourinho cannot get on the right track soon. It’s not as if we can all see the direction he is trying to take and we just need to swallow some pain and come out of the other side together. He looks confused, the team looks confused and I am hungover.
Plato – MUFC (Benitez in 2017/18?)

The learning curve
I think there’s a lot to be said about an individual in their ability to self-reflect. I’m not looking to compare technical skills or other competencies, but for some managers to choose to take time out of the game to reflect on what they’ve learned and develop new ways of thinking genuinely gives an impression they are a good coach / manager. I don’t intend to draw comparisons on this, but Guardiola and Mourinho are two perfect examples of this. In the time that Mourinho was away from the game, I don’t get the impression that he looked to reflect upon what he had learned from being sacked and the situation arising out their title “protection”. If anything, it feels like he’s dwelled on a lot of issues in an introverted manner, almost fuelling the fire. I’m not saying he can’t turn it around and lead Utd to the title – crazier things have happened in football…
Phil, London

Justice for Southampton
I’ve never written to you before regarding your Winners & Losers feature but this week I have to. I can’t believe Storey didn’t include Southampton in with the winners. Not only did we beat a previous manager who Judased us for what he believed was better things (that alone should have qualified us) but the Man of the Match was a young boy whom Koeman had, until yesterday, never heard of.

There is a delicious irony in Koeman being undone by a player who, had he still been the manager of Southampton, would not have been anywhere near the first team and, though most Saints fans were disappointed to see him go, the one thing we all recognised was that, good though he was, he was not a perfect fit for us because he had no interest in bringing youth players through to the first team.

If I was an Everton fan I’d be worried about having another 16-year old Wayne Rooney in the youth team that Koeman will know nothing about until he is sold and excels somewhere else.
Mort Snort
Saints.

Surely Southampton’s Academy merited a mention in the Winner’s column. Josh Sims MoTM on debut, particularly as it was against the manager who only last season said there was no talent of sufficient quality coming through.
Rob, London

The real unlucky one
I am not sure i like the Man United is unlucky thing. We werent unlucky. We were sh*te. Why on earth would be change what was fluid and exciting? Anyways, this email isnt about that?

How unlucky is Luke Shaw? Seeing Alonso having the license to bomb forward at Chelsea and do a terrible job in the attacking third leaves you with the feeling of “What might have been?”. Well, that is not bad luck, he made a choice to go to United.

The bad luck is that Mourinho showed up and plays Darmian. Freaking Darmian who is horrible in the attacking third on the left when he has Shaw to bomb forward. There are some things that work. Toying with what works is not ballsy. It is stupid.

Just play a goddamn attacking left back on the left. Play Lingard as an impact sub. He would do better then.
Sudarsan Ravi (The team was slow, ponderous and ineffective. Have we seen that before?)

 

Would you take fourth if offered it now?
For years the idea of finishing 4th being a trophy has been derided. But is this year 4th place more important than 1st? This year there are six clubs and six managers for whom anything less than 4th is failure and a probable sacking. Klopp is probably the only manager who could successfully play the ‘’I still need more time to build things’’ card. The others either work for chairman who do not tolerate failure at all irrespective of time (Conté or Pochettino) or have spent so much that they don’t get time (Mourinho or Guardiola) or who may, with a place outside the top four, have just run out of time and excuses (Wenger). Six into four does not fit. We are guaranteed, I would argue, at least one and possibly two high profile sackings by next summer.

Employing game theory and asking if this happened would that happen and if so what would have happen if an alternative happened. Clearly all six of these teams would be delighted with winning the league. How would they all react to finishing 2nd? I think all would see it as reasonable. 2nd in first (full) season with a new manager or progress from last season’s position or in Arsenal’s case 2nd is better than 4th . What about 3rd? Again this looks reasonable it is still progress and a return to the champions league for Chelsea, Liverpool and Man Utd. For Spurs it means finishing above three bigger teams. For City it is nothing to celebrate but they are not going to sack Guardiola after one season of 3rd. For Arsenal we know they, or the board at least, are happy. Then how do these clubs react to finishing 4th? Again for Utd, Liverpool and Chelsea it is a big improvement on last year and they have achieved the minimum acceptable position in first season with new manager. For City they a bit miffed that the Guardiola magic has not had instant success and they are certainly not dancing in the streets of Abu Dhabi but they are also not yet making seductive glances at Unai Emery, Thomas Tuchel or whoever else. Spurs are happy to be in the champions league again. And Arsenal, they have Arsenaled and nobody will get too angry except the overly excitable people on Arsenal FanTV.

But what if these clubs were to finish 5th? Disaster, manager likely gone, back to square one.

All this means that at this moment 4th really is the new 1st.

Alternatively ask yourself which of Klopp, Mourinho, Guardiola, Conté, Wenger or  Pochettino is offered the 4th place trophy today and takes the risk to turn it down on the belief that they can do no worse than 4th over the remainder of the season?
Jo (I’d say all of them still take the security of 4th today. Though if Spurs and Man Utd continue to drop points I’d say that the current top 4 will be opting to take the risk and go for the title pretty soon).

Some thoughts on soccer
Well thank you, Johnny Nic, for standing up for us Yanks. (You lived in California? I grew up in Los Angeles.) I particularly appreciated the portrait of American fans. Because soccer is a bit of a niche sport here, the average fan is pretty knowledgeable. Ethnic diversity also produces fans of many teams in many leagues. If you have the right cable company, the TV coverage of European and Latin American leagues is astounding. And that’s not even counting streaming video.

But I have to admit that the quality of our football/soccer has stagnated in recent years. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is a poor development system. There was an excellent article on this in the Guardian last summer:

The “pay-to-play” system, as it’s called, uses the parents of young players to provide significant financing for youth soccer clubs. So the system doesn’t work to maximize the development of players below the middle class.

Really the only answers to this are for MLS clubs to develop a strong academy system, or to pour money into youth soccer in some form. But since soccer remains a niche sport here, the money isn’t available. Here’s another article which explains the problem very well:

As for coaching, we’re at a very early stage. The vast majority of MLS head coaches are American, but it’s rare for an American coach to go abroad and get international experience. I’ve never been a big Bob Bradley fan, but he put in the hard yards in Europe and Egypt, and I’m glad he’s getting a chance, although he’s been dropped into a very difficult situation. But until the American coaches hard-work their way into the less glamorous European leagues, we rightly won’t see American coaches in prominent spots.

For all that, this is a golden age for soccer in the USA. When I first got serious about the sport, back in the 1960s, it was rare to get any news at all from Europe, much less games on television. I was lucky to grow up in Los Angeles, where the large Latin American population could support a UHF station (anyone else remember those?) that brought in the World Cup, plus a weekly match or two from Mexico. Americans playing and coaching in Europe? That was unimaginable. I hope the sport continues to progress here, but even if it doesn’t, to go from almost nothing to where it is now is pretty satisfying.
Peter G, Pennsylvania, USA (it was a decent season for DC United)

For the sake of Bob Bradley and what he represents, I hope Swansea stay up at the end of the season. Just to spite those that woud gladly take away his job and give it to Alan Curbishley.
Tunji, Lagos

On Pards and more
*Tweet of the weekend: Duncan Alexander (@oilysailor): Bob Bradley 5-4 Job Badly.

*Well done to Swansea City on their victory.  It was deserved because their defending was less inept than ours.  Worth pointing out that Crystal Palace had four shots on target, from which three goals came (I presume own goals don’t count).

For all the talk of classic, this was a game in which City committed 12 fouls and Palace 24.  This seems a lot but Watford and Stoke City apparently had more.

*Let’s start with a positive note.  Wilfried Zaha was once again head and shoulders above every other Palace player, and will be massively missed in January.  A baffling lack of interest from England has led him to change his nationality to Cote d’Ivoire, so will spend at least part of January tormenting full-backs at the AFCON.

*Palace are completely and utterly f###ed unless something changes soon.  They were a total shambles defensively, City scoring goals as a result of generous defending.  Bob Bradley’s interview preparation was rightly lauded by Rory Smith in the New York Times, and he clearly worked out a plan for beating the Eagles.  That said, if they’d worked harder in training and run around a lot more they wouldn’t have conceded four goals.

*The free kick that Gylffi Sigurdsson scored was very well-taken, but wasn’t beyond saveable if anyone other than Wayne Hennessey was in goal.  I’d appreciate a goalkeeping expert’s opinion on this, but it seems entirely pointless standing behind the wall, where you can’t see, and then hoping you can guess where the ball will go.  This is what Hennessey did – what he always does – he got caught out guessing the ball would come to his left, and gave away a soft goal.  I’m not sure if this is what goalkeepers are taught to do, or if they can do anything differently with free kicks like that.

*For the second goal, Leroy Fer’s first, it was probably best that he scored, because if he hadn’t, the referee would have sent off Yohan Cabaye for handball on the goalline, which would really have left us in the sh!t.  Fer’s second goal was tapping in a flick-on, Fernando Llorente pokes in a rebound, and then gets a brace with a tap-in.

*That fifth goal really infuriated me, and summed up all of Palace’s problems.  A free kick comes into the box and City’s star striker is being man-marked by Palace’s striker, who is not a strong defender.  Palace’s two centre-backs, meanwhile, were in a completely different postcode.  There are individual errors, and then there is a completely failure of any sort of organisation, which comes from the manager and coaches.

*Before the game, Dean Saunders said Bob Bradley’s accent “isn’t helping him”.  A few things: firstly, that’s surely on the borderline of xenophobia; secondly, Deano has a Swansea accent but is an atrocious manager; thirdly, Alan Pardew has a South London accent and he is doing terribly.

*Mystic Meg award: At 16:46 the BBC’s website ran a quote from Martin Keown, with the score at City 3-4 Palace, saying the Eagles were “fighting for their manager.  It’s quite remarkable”.  By 16:51 it was City 5-4 Palace.  Maybe that’s why the players chucked it away.

*Pardew after the game blamed the referee, quelle surprise, and then said “we just can’t seem to defend set plays, that’s four today. We need to look at that”.

Four today, and 13/26 for the entire season.

*Pardew: “the goals we’ve conceded don’t reflect well on us”.

Thanks, Captain Obvious, they may not reflect well on us but they do reflect accurately.

*Pardew: “I think the group understand that we have some options, we can change the team around?”

Can we, though? The squad is paper thin, we’ve now got one fit reserve striker, and two incomplete left-backs (he doesn’t trust Martin Kelly to attack or Zeki Fryers to defend), when he should have invested in the summer.  So now the club will have to throw a lot of money at players to get them to come and play second fiddle to a team in the relegation battle.

*Pardew: “I’m going to get my team in and get them working before Southampton next week.”

Arguably his efforts to get the team working have got us in this current mess.  His record against former teams is awful, so put the Soton game in the bin, and that brings us to Hull away, another six-pointer.

*Pardew: “I’ve been here before and I know how it works”

So have the fans, and that’s why we want you out:  A poll on Twitter run by the Palace blogger HLTCO showed 86% of over 4,000 respondants want Alan Pardew gone.

*Short version: if that c##t is allowed to keep his job after that then Crystal Palace deserve to be relegated for stupidity alone.
Ed Quoththeraven

 

Someone’s seen this week’s top ten already
Great mail from John (we’ll miss Pickford come February), Sunderland.

So…first of all, I really like Gibson at ‘Boro and Keane at Burnley and having seen Jagielka in the last England squad (and getting pitch time), I’m exasperated by the big club bias of England selections. Can we have a look at them please? We are not currently blessed for CB options.

I’ve also thought over the years that Puncheon should have had a look in too, although perhaps not at the moment given the form of Palace recently.

I like Pickford too, and would have had him in the last squad over Heaton, who, let’s be honest, at 30 years of age will never be England’s Number One.

To be sure there is no “England bias” in this mail, I have a lot of love for Rondon who has been performing admirably in a Pulis formation of 9 – HUGE SPACE – 1, and I think he could be a wonderful first choice for a team like Southampton now, or Everton (when Lukaku inevitably leaves). I also think he could be good for Chelsea and Spurs, should he be willing to play second fiddle to Costa or Kane, until proving himself.

And finally, a little love for Marney at Burnley, who, whilst technically limited, is quite the warrior.
Naz, Gooner.

Facts
It seems Spurs fans are keen on their facts (see Pat (THFC) in the mailbox this morning) so here are a few;

· Spurs have scored fewer league goals than Crystal Palace

· They have won one more match than Watford

· By the time they next kick off Spurs won’t have had the lead after 90 minutes of any match in any competition for 2 months

· They have only conceded four fewer league goals than Liverpool who have the worst defence in the world™

· Spurs lost their unbeaten record on the weekend by losing their fifth match of the season

Sometimes, just sometimes, you need to hold your hands up and say it isn’t going so great at the moment. Sometimes, a little humility to accept perhaps things aren’t clicking at the moment. One win in ten is not a good look but pretending that everything in the garden is rosy is a worse one.
Micki Attridge

Six-player swap deal
This weekend marked the final Premier League team (Spurs) to lose a game meaning the Invincibles record is safe for another year. For some reason I am very happy when this happens, it is of far more importance to me than St Totteringhams day or whatever. My Man U supporting mate has a similar feeling when the treble is no longer on for any Premier League club.

Following Micki Attridge’s email on Friday I’ve often thought Ramsey, The Ox and maybe even Gibbs would be better under a more demanding coach like Mourinho. Similarly I think Martial, Shaw and Smalling would be better under a more supportive manager like Wenger. I’m not suggesting for one second a swap would be possible but I think it would actually strengthen both clubs in the long run.
Spence Gooner

Yes
It shouldn’t surprise me but I want to draw attention to some of the comments on Arsenal’s Facebook page after they adorned the badge with a rainbow background at the weekend. I think it was in support of Stonewall.

Some of the comments from the Arsenal faithful ranged from fans saying they did not like the update, to some telling the club to stop playing politics, to some saying they would no longer support the club.

The club’s move was clearly in solidarity with a group of our fans and I’m sorry to break it to you numpties but if you think some of Arsenal fans aren’t gay, you’re living in cloud cuckoo land – there’s a bloody great ‘Gay Gooners’ banner in the stadium and comedian Matt Lucas is one of the biggest gooners out there.

Haven’t we got beyond this mentality that football is the weekend pursuit of a select group? It’s particularly annoying as Arsenal have had a diverse following for years.

Arsenal is for everyone – whatever their sexuality, creed or colour. If you don’t like it sod off and support someone else – you won’t be missed.

As for Arsenal – it makes me proud the way you reach out to different communities of the club’s following whether that be at Eid, Hanukah, Divali or Christmas – keep it up!
Graham Simons, Gooner, Norf London