Suggests that we are a team that dominates the ball. But the problem is, when we get to the final third, we drop down to being ranked 10th. That suggests that we’ve got a problem getting the ball from the middle third to the final third. And I think when we watch the team, it’s very, very obvious.
Problem number one is the middle of the pitch. We don’t really have much interest at all in progressing through the middle of the pitch. Now, I understand why. This isn’t necessarily daft from Ruben Amrim and the way he’s approaching the game. I understand why. Because if you lose the ball in the middle, you are in trouble, right? It’s a dangerous area to lose possession.
So it’s safer. It’s a little bit easier to move the ball into wider areas. So I do understand why we do this. So we don’t play through the middle. We don’t take the risks. Partly because Amrim doesn’t want us to. And secondly, because we don’t really have the personnel to do it unless Bruno Fernandes starts dropping a little bit deeper, which he, of course, has done occasionally.
But if we can’t progress through the middle, that means we are going to have to progress out wide. And this is where I think Manchester United in this system have the potential to be quite good. Because we’ve got four players here. We do generate these sort of side diamonds, if you like. So the wing back, the centre back, the central midfielder, and the inside forward. And we’ve got the same on the other side: a centre back, a central midfielder, a wing back, and an inside forward.
The problem I have again, though, is first of all, personnel. If you look at those two little sets of four, this four here and this four here, are they particularly balanced? I don’t think so. For starters, on the left hand side, we don’t really have anyone who can dribble the ball particularly effectively apart from Lenny Yoro, and he’s playing pretty deep. So that’s problem number one. On this side, we don’t really have a winger, someone that can stand up a fullback and beat them. It’s a problem.
If we now go to the right side, we don’t really have someone who is an expansive passer, someone who is amazingly good at linking up play and moving the ball forward. So that’s one of the problems. The personnel, in terms of quality and the balance they bring to each other, is just lacking.
The other problem we really have is the fact that we have Dallo and Dorgu in the two wingback positions. Now I think these are two pretty good footballers. I actually quite like both of them. The problem we do have with both of them, though, is that they are fullbacks, not wingers.
So when the ball goes wide into these positions here, and we’re put into a 1vs1 situation, which can be quite common out wide. This is one of the areas on a football pitch where you do tend to see more 1vs1 battles. It’s in the wide zones.
The problem for United is when it’s Dallo and Dorgu, who realistically profile as two fullbacks, granted attacking fullbacks, but fullbacks, they’re not natural problem solvers in these situations. They’re not players that are going to pick the ball up.
You know, Dallo on this side and constantly look to try and beat this man here. And it’s particularly the case for Dorgu. Dorgu is a player who is more about coming inside the pitch and trying to combine. And I’m going to do another video on that. But this is one of the big problems in the middle phase.
Our wingbacks are deep to try and help us build up in these areas. But for me, they just don’t offer enough. We would probably be better off pushing them much higher up the pitch so we are at least pinning the opposition back. But at the moment, we’re not. They are playing in this deeper position initially to try and help us build through the pitch.
And that’s where I think Ammerim is coming to the wrong conclusions. He is seeing an area of the pitch where we struggle to progress, whether that be the first phase or the middle phase now. And he sees that we can’t progress there. So what he does is he tries to put more players there. And for me, it’s not the right solution. We need to stretch the opposition more to try and get forward. Although to be honest, even when we do get forward, it’s still not very good.
Okay, so let’s assume Manchester United have actually done a little bit better in the first two phases and we’ve actually worked the ball into the final third. Even in these positions, we are not very good. We saw that earlier with the lack of goals, the lack of goal scorers as well at the football club.
Why? Why could Manchester United not attack the final third? Well, for me, I think it’s largely about player habits and player instincts. You can coach footballers so much. You can teach them so much. You can teach them different ways to do different things, how to approach certain situations.
But at the end of the day, these are people that have played football from the age of four or five years old, right? They have habits, they have instincts that they lean towards. Particularly when they’re fatigued or particularly when they’re a little bit uncertain of a situation, they will always resort back to an old habit.
If we look at the personnel we’ve got in our front five, the habits are not those of killers in the final third. Again, we look at Dorgu and Dallo. So much has been made of this this season, the fact that we play two fullbacks here. But it is a problem because when we try and break teams down and we get into our attacking five here, you know, we’ve got five players across the front line.
When two of them are fullbacks, again, that’s not attacking instinct. They are not killers in the final third. They’re not players that necessarily constantly want to beat a man, you know, bomb past a fullback and put a ball into the box.
Dorgu tries to cross but isn’t actually the best at beating his man in the first place. Dallo is a little bit better at beating his man, but the final delivery is then poor. We don’t have winger threat in the final third. And that’s because, first of all, we don’t start with many wingers at all and we don’t even have many wingers in the squad.
But the onewe do have, Garnacho, is playing a much more narrow position. He’s playing in this area a little bit more. And what this means is that when United get the ball into the final third, someone like Dallo, he is not instinctively, he’s not naturally a player who’s going to beat his man. and cross into the box. And even if he does, we then don’t have enough players actually attacking the penalty area.
So let’s say Dallo actually beats his man down the left-hand side, he gets himself into the final third or perhaps we combine well to get to this position, whatever it may be, when he actually looks to get his head up and cross into the penalty area, there’s not enough in there. And this is where I get a little bit stuck over who we should blame.
Do you blame Amarin? Because is there an argument that he’s not given these players enough attacking freedom, enough attacking license? You know, when the ball goes wide, does he tell these guys to stay on the edge? I don’t know. Or is it that the players have the wrong instincts?
So again, let’s say Dallo’s got the ball on the right-hand side and is looking to cross. Dorgu is a full-back. He’s not a winger. He’s not an attacking midfielder. He’s not a 10. He’s not a striker, whatever you want to talk about.
He’s not someone who has that killer instinct to always attack the penalty area. So instead we see situations like this where we’re trying to deliver the ball into the box and we have no one there apart from a striker that is really struggling with making the right movement. No wonder we don’t score goals.
Now struggling to score goals is not exactly a new problem for Manchester United. We’ve had this issue for 5, 6 years, something like that now. United have not been good in the final third. But what we have always, always been able to lean on is attacking transitions. So we’ve often said that the squad isn’t built to play slow possession-based football where you try and break a team down. But it is made for counter-attacking moments. The problem is Manchester United have also lost that.
If we look at the stats, United are 14th for goals scored from counter-attacking situations this season in the Premier League. That’s not the Manchester United identity. United have been built for years on being a team which plays fast, which is entertaining, that attacks the opposition. And currently we don’t have that.
I think the West Ham game at the weekend was a brilliant example of this. Because Manchester United got into a position where we could counter-attack with Ahmad. But what he does is he turns around and he plays backwards. He moves the ball backwards. Obviously Ugarte makes a horrendous individual error. It’s awful from him. I don’t know what he’s doing. But it all comes from initially United not having transitioning threat, not having the ability to counter-attack.
And I think a lot of that comes from the system that we play. You see because we play wing-backs, not full-backs and wingers, we don’t have that much wide options, wide threats when we look to counter-attack. So let’s say we defend in our back five like this. And often our wingers are going to come deep in as well and tuck into a sort of 5-4-1 shape. When we do win the ball back, we get the ball to Hoyland. Or maybe we get the ball to one of our midfielders like Ugarte. We really struggle to have immediate width.
That was the problem that Ahmad had in that clip earlier. When he gets the ball here, yes Mason Mount is in front of him and he is an option. But he’s not immediately in the wide zone. And transitioning through the centre of the pitch is much more difficult. Particularly when the opposition know that we’re not going to trouble them out wide, they can overload the centre. And basically just constrict us in the middle and we can’t attack through that area.
So basically what I’m saying is we’re struggling in the first phase. We’re struggling in the middle phase. We’re struggling in the final phase. And we’re also struggling in transitions. That’s why I said United are ****. Because we are. We are very, very bad on the ball. We are seeing glimpses and moments where we improve. You know we were speaking about cutbacks recently and I think we are growing and improving in that area. But certainly collectively as a whole entire football team, we are just bad on the ball.
And the problem is, normally if you’re bad on the ball, because you’ve got loads of defenders like we’ve got, you’re at least going to be secure defensively. But if we look at the table, United aren’t secure defensively either. There’s big, big problems at this football club that need to be solved.
In terms of solutions, we will cover that another day. Probably not this season. We will leave it until the season is finished now. Because of course now attention has turned to the Europa League final, which we will be building up to over the next week or so.
So yeah, in terms of solutions, we’ll discuss that another day. Right now the problems are very, very obvious in my opinion and there is a lot of work to do. But like I said, that’s for another day. In terms of today, we’re finished there.
