Mails: Man United have no chemistry; Spurs do

Mails: Man United have no chemistry; Spurs do

You know what to do – watch Arsenal and mail theeditor@football365.com

What’s Man United’s style?
Watching United this season has left me with a confused taste on the tongue.

Sure the football is better than what came off the Van Gaal menu, but it still leaves me thinking it needs more salt.

While United keep the ball well enough there is this niggling question of where is the goal going to come from? Is it going to be a good cross finished by a Zlatan header or an intricate move made up of one touches that carve the opposition up? No attacking options seem to be consistently viable except for Pogba hitting the post.

Watching their games I see nothing that says, that’s our style, that’s how we do damage to teams and that’s what we’re building on.

Eventually in the Sunderland match Zlatan popped up with a moment of magic and Mkhityryan did the same to break the opposition. Both were goals made out of individual quality and there’s no doubting that United have spent enough to have that in their squad. The problem is, when the magicians have an off day it seems as if the team can’t create something as a unit.

What I’m saying is that Jose has assembled a pretty good squad and as a result they are going to score the odd great goal but they really don’t seem to have any team cohesion and chemistry.
RedCos

This Spurs won’t be forgotten by Spurs fans
Maybe it was a pipe dream, but I hoped that Spurs would become everyone’s second favourite team this year, fans of the other London clubs aside of course.

We’re no Leicester fairytale, but scintillating football and a core of exciting young players, many of them English, led by a likeable, intelligent manager, is the sort of story you’d hope football lovers could get behind.

Instead this morning’s mailbox offered us an insight into the bitter and entitled mindset of some fans of certain clubs. Some people out there simply cannot cope with Spurs having their moment in the sunshine. You just have to play Buzz Killington, don’t you?

Most Spurs fans I know are hungry for genuine success, an FA Cup, a good run in the Champions League, even a Premier League title. If we come away from this excellent period without any of that, it would certainly be disappointing.

But why do we watch football?

I’m 34 and have never once felt Spurs had the slightest chance of winning the league. Hell, fans of a good 85-odd league clubs don’t expect to win anything, bar the odd promotion.

Yet still, fool that I am, I fork out my hard-earned cash trekking up to Tottenham every other weekend. I sit in the traffic jams, wedge myself in between fat bastards at the cramped urinals and occasionally queue for 20 minutes to pay nearly a fiver for a fizzy-pop Carlsberg or a pie made out of cat food.

I do it because I love the club, love watching some of the great players we’ve had at the Lane down the years and, somewhere at the very back of my mind, hope we might win something.

In 25 years of going to the Lane, I’ve never enjoyed it as much as I do now. This team, these players, the manager, the atmosphere as we wind down our tenure at one of football’s historic stadiums and prepare for the next chapter…it’s been hugely enjoyable.

Obviously I’d love to come away from this period with something to show for it. If this team doesn’t win anything, it could be a very long wait before we have a project like this again.

But let’s face it, football has changed. By rights, either Chelsea or Man City – and to a lesser extent United – should win the league every year. They are playing the game with the “unlimited funds” cheat switched on.

What Spurs have achieved, even without trophies, should be hugely admired. We pay lower wages and spend less on transfers than the teams around us. Yet there we are, tearing most of the league a new one every week.

That must be hard for fans of teams such as Liverpool to accept. But maybe they should just enjoy football for what it is – entertainment, excitement, gasps, groans, disappointment and delight. Not an endless pursuit to add another notch to your trophy bedpost so you can say you’re the bestest ever club in England.

Spurs are the most fun you can have with your clothes on right now. If we don’t win anything, fans of other clubs may forget this team. Spurs fans couldn’t care less. We will remember it forever.
Rob Davies, THFC

Why are so many strikers scoring so many goals?
Not seen this mentioned anywhere, but how many good strikers are there in the league this season? We could potentially have Lukaku (currently 23), Kane (19), Sanchez (18), Zlatan (17), Costa (17) and Aguero (16) all score more than 20 league goals this season! And that is without mentioning Alli (16) and Hazard (14) – potential long shots but both in great form so not outside the realms of possibility.

When was the last time so many forwards scored so many goals? Is it a case of a small number of players scoring a higher % of their team goals, or are we in a bit of a golden age for forwards in the Premier League?

The last season I can see where five or more players scored 20 league goals was ’09-’10 (Drogba, Rooney, Bent, Tevez, Lampard). In fact, the only season we have seen six or more was in ’93-’94, when Cole, Shearer, Le Tissier, Sutton, Wright and Beardsley all got over 20 (all English as well – how times change).

For reference, we can see that these players account for 40% (Lukaku), 30% (Kane), 30% (Sanchez), 37% (Zlatan), 26% (Costa) and 27% (Aguero) of their team’s total goals. Is this normal? Short answer is…sort of. It certainly isn’t strange that the top goalscorers account for about 30% of their teams total league goals over the course of a season.

However, having this many in-form forwards is a bit of an anomaly. So, while we all got terribly excited by the managers at the start of the season, perhaps we should have been focusing on the forwards?
Jack (Why does everyone think we are going to win the Europa? I really don’t feel comfortable backing us to beat good teams in a knock-out format – if we have one of our, many, off days…) Manchester

The drugs might work
I am reading Seven Deadly Sins by David Walsh at the moment. This is the Irish journalist who refused to believe the Lance Armstrong story and continued to pursue the truth even after his paper, the Sunday Times, was successfully sued by Armstrong. Armstrong was paid £300,000 to settle a libel case in 2004 after the newspaper alleged he had cheated. The Sunday Times then sued him for £1m when it turned out he had cheated.

Walsh describes collaboration between the governing body, the UCI, riders, teams and journalists not to rock the boat and to believe in the hero narrative. This was at the expense of the fans, the riders who didn’t dope and the health of the riders who did.

Walsh also touches on athletics, including the cases of Merlene Ottey and Linford Christie who both tested positive at the age of 39 within a month of each other. In both cases the athletics world rallied around them to defend them. Ottey overturned her ban on appeal and Christine maintains his innocence to this day.

In both sports very, very few people caught ever admit anything. All have eaten contaminated meat, or been massaged by a vindictive masseuse etc. I still watch cycling and believe it is cleaner than it has been. I cannot really watch athletics any more. I used to love it and some of my happiest memories are of me and my dad watching the Olympics and World Championships, especially the heats. Now, any breakthrough performance is met with (usually justified) suspicion.

So, what has this got to do with football? Football is a sport hardly touched by performance-enhancing drugs. The occasional missed test ban or recreational use ban when drinks have been spiked is all we come across. However, I find myself being increasingly concerned by the fact that football is a sport hardly touched by performance enhancing drugs. In the English game Abel Xavier is the only player ever to be banned for their use. Kolo Toure’s ban was six months after the panel accepted his explanation of use of fat burning water tablets.

The Russian doping scandal showed the scale of doping worldwide and included footballers. Serie A, especially in the 1980s had numerous anecdotes about performance enhancing programmes. And, to link cycling to football, Operation Puerto, which was an investigation focused on elite level cycling, allegedly found documents which spoke of ‘seasonal preparation plans’ for two major Spanish sides (one plays in all white and one has a bitey forward) which included notes which implied doping. Again allegedly, of the 200 people involved in Operation Puerto, only about 50 were cyclists. The remaining 150 were from other sports, including football. Eufemiano Fuentes, the Spanish doctor at the centre of the scandal, said he worked with footballers. The allegations against the footballers were never pursued. The blood samples from Operation Puerto currently sit in a laboratory in Barcelona.

The game today is faster and more based on physicality than ever before. Stats used by television and newspapers now routinely tell us how many kilometres a player has run and how many sprints they have completed. Pressing, or gegenpressing, is now expected as routine. This is a sport in which players like Frank Lampard or Luke Shaw get labelled as fat. And yet, football is a sport hardly touched by performance enhancing drugs.

There also seems to be a lack of injuries among the absolute elite. Top La Liga sides are able to turn out the same starters for league, cup, super cup and European games. In this age of increased physical demands this is to be applauded. For example Lionel Messi has incredible levels of fitness. In the eight seasons preceding the current one Messi played 503 games for club and country which is an average of 63 games a season. For a sport with a nine month (10 in a major tournament year) season, this is a game around every 4.5 days for eight years.

Football strikes me as the type of industry where as long as the money keeps rolling in people will not look in dark corners. In any industry huge money brings corruption and ultimately the health of the game is in the hands of FIFA, a body which has proved itself especially adept at corruption. Recently two Premier League clubs were charged or fined for breaches of FA anti-doping rules. The fine was £35,000 for a club in the richest league in the world.

I cannot shake the feeling that a David Walsh style book on football is just around the corner. I look forward to all the tales of contaminated samples and the wrong boxes ticked on forms. However, I fear that there is just too much money, too many agents and too much PR for the likes of Nike and Adidas and there might just be a massive carpet somewhere in Switzerland with a whole heap swept under it.
Micki Attridge

Sexism is a problem in football
It’s a shame that the issue of sexism in football has to be spoon-fed like in John Nicholson’s article today, and an even greater shame so many people wish to spit it straight back at him (as can be seen in the comments section).

If you doubt the prevalence of sexism in football, just look and listen to what’s around you. My female friends and relatives who watch and play football are constantly accused of “just doing it for attention”, have their sexual orientations questioned, are subjects of mockery and derision for their chosen hobby and their appearance whilst doing it. This is the national pastime for goodness sake, how on earth is this still consistently happening?

Of course this is anecdotal but I’ve been told of the same experiences time and time again by enough girls and women to know this is an endemic, deep-rooted issue. The fact I’m amongst the keenest football fans I know and yet can’t name more than three female footballers also speaks volumes to me. I’m by no means blameless and could do far more to seek out women’s football, but it’s hardly thrust upon me by the media like the men’s game (unfortunately, this website included).

All of this tells me two things:

– Women and girls have several barriers when it comes to participating in football.
– There is little exposure of positive role models to help negate these barriers.

Don’t get me wrong, there is some great work being done to help resolve these two issues. Why though, do so many deny the mere notion that there is a problem at all, and so vehemently oppose the idea that anything be done to fix it?

I don’t know exactly what needs to happen, but they say the first step to solve a problem is to admit that there actually is one. Can all of us start to do that at the very least?
Laurence, Reading

…I’m really pleased to see an article on a mainstream football website about the often-overlooked sexism in how women playing football are viewed.

There are plenty of people willing to stick their heads above the parapet and condemn pantomime villains like Sepp Blatter and his ‘tighter shorts’ manifesto, but it’s harder to take aim at the inherent prejudices in the words and actions of the rest of us.

Take Johnny’s point about ‘calling it the Women’s Premier League when it’s not called the Men’s Premier League’. A handful of the commenters make the quite reasonable point that the obvious solutions are impractical – either replacing the word ‘Women’s’ or removing the word ‘Men’s’. But they miss the more important point that the issue is more than just the language. To me, Johnny’s point was not that the solution is changing the name/s, but that we should consciously acknowledge that the names are symptomatic of a wider attitude.

It doesn’t mean that anyone who calls it ‘women’s football’ is a bad person, just that in using that term we should be aware that we are part of a society which treats men and women differently. We don’t have to take personal responsibility for that, not in the way that Moyes should take more responsibility for his language as a man in a position of power, but the least we can do is to be supportive of any attempts to shift our collective attitudes to somewhere more positive and more equal for all.

So maybe Johnny doesn’t have the solution yet, maybe no-one does yet, but that shouldn’t be used as a reason to ignore his point. Let’s use this well-reasoned article to help shape our own views so that when we see opportunities to bring about, or simply support, positive change we can recognise that taking a small step towards equality is better than simply standing still.
Peter, Oxford (ITFC)

But…
In rightfully lambasting David Moyes for his recent comments (although that does seem to have been done to death recently), John Nicholson makes some comments that I feel are a little one sided.

While the FA certainly could have been more accommodating to women’s football, is it really so bad that football grounds were designated as male only after WW1? The male population had been decimated after the war and to make the call that the iconic pastime of the male working class would essentially need to ground share with a competing league would have been an unpopular decision.

With hindsight we can say it’s wrong but to say spurious or pathetic? I think that does an injustice to the extraordinary circumstances of the time.

I’m also surprised whenever people roll out the ‘patriarchy has ruled forever’ line – I know what gender I’d like to have been during WW1 and WW2 – and it strikes me as a bit myopic when people talk about women losing some of the freedoms gained during the wars. People felt the overwhelmingly male combatants were owed a debt and society, at least till the 60s, tried to revert to how it was when they went to war.

And finally, the Premier League not being called the Men’s Premier League is sexist? That’s not how language works I’m afraid; the men’s PL came first so whatever comes after needs something to differentiate it. And even if it were to be changed to men’s it wouldn’t be effective as everyone (rightly or wrongly) would still call it ‘the Premier League’. A better suggestion would be to not call the female league the Premier League so that it doesn’t need a reference to gender at all.
Adam, LFC, Macc

Thank you Mailboxer
I would just like to say a massive thank you to Daniel Storeys Biggest Fan for his mail today.

Football wise as an Albion fan I am happy with the world especially as I missed our home defeat to Southampton because I am away for work. And therein is why I would like to extend a huge thank you.

I am currently in Melbourne and after three weeks missing home. I am sat in bar drinking my fourth house white. I have spent two weeks with a total dick of an Australian who has made my life a misery since September. I miss home and I can’t wait to return on Thursday. No sympathy required, I am home for a week before going on a cruise for work. So yes, First World problems.

But tonight I am low and as anybody who travels for a living will tell you that can happen from time to time but hey, it’s better than a real job.

Long-winded explanation I know and I’m sorry but it’s sets the context for praising the amazingly funny email mentioned above. I usually dread long United/Arsenal/Liverpool emails, but this one was genuinely funny.

He stuck to his theme throughout and it was a parody worthy of the Neviller diaries. Something this great website has never surpassed.

So thank you. You have cheered me up. And you know what as a staunch Remainer I thought the British were bad but blimey, Australia would be great apart from the Aussies. Lol.
Ben the Baggie

Dear Daniel Storeys Biggest Fan…
Hate to break this to you but although you loved your Dad, everyone else in the street thought he was a bit of an arse. Before 1992 the street was a fun, varied place to be, but in 1992 your Mum struck it lucky and came into some money and your Dad certainly spent it wisely, but basically watching him lord the place like he owned it was a tad tedious. Watching other Mums in the street getting a new car and then seeing your dad either getting a bigger model or buying theirs, just made the street a sterile place to be. At least the French guy down the road had some class. Your Dad, not so much.

As for him constantly getting narky with the local police, constantly insisting on a couple of extra minutes before curfew just because he would cop the nark if he didn’t get it, well that just summed him up as the bully everyone thought he was. Sorry Daniel Storeys Biggest Fan, I’m sure that he was a great Dad for you, but now he binned your Mum and she’s having to slum it for the first time in ages, nobody is going to shed any tears for you. Sure she still has money, but she’s just not the attractive proposition she was, there a load of new models taking her place, and to be honest nobody can disagree the street isn’t a better place for it. You should have seen who moved in last year, what a stunning result that was.

So the fact of the matter is you should be thankful for the memories you had of your Dad, but nobody else cares to dwell on that, things move on. The fact that other kids are getting to enjoy the things you did, and the fact that your reaction is to get really whiny about it, kinda confirms to all the other kids what we knew all along. You were just spoilt. My advice would be to suck it up.
Agony Aunt, ITFC, Liverpool

The well ran dry
For around 10 mins this afternoon I could not get on the site due to what chrome said was a ‘503 Service unavailable error’.

After pressing F5 12 times I realised i may have to make conversation with my colleagues on my lunch break. So I just sat there pretending to read the blank screen, wondering if this was real life or just a dystopian nightmare.

Don’t​ ever leave again.
HM (you don’t appreciate something until it’s gone for 10 mins) MUFC