Arsene's Kick up the Barca: CL Last 16 Week 2

[Satchmo Distel]

Arsene's Kick up the Barca: CL Last 16 Week 2

Man U's fit 13 includes some big buys (Martial, Mata) so there should still be enough quality there to overcome Danish and lower Premiership opponents. I don't get the claim that it disrupts tactics: everyone trains together and should know the pack drill. There's still more continuity than many international teams get.

The problem surely is that LvG is not imposing tactics that suit his players, and he's relying on goals from Martial, whose record is not that great when measured purely on that basis.

[dalliance]

Arsene's Kick up the Barca: CL Last 16 Week 2

The salient question is how many of the Danish team's players would get in that Man United first team? Not one. The Midtjylland manager would climb up a 2000 foot Lurpak mountain to be able to call on the services of Donald Love and Daley Blind at full-back in his team.

[dalliance]

Arsene's Kick up the Barca: CL Last 16 Week 2

And not a single time have you answered the sodding point that MAN UNITED WERE NOT MISSING 13 FIRST TEAM PLAYERS.

How many times are you going to ignore this point that has been made by myself, Janik and others? From that team you would take out just Love, McNair and Depay - on that evening's performance Romero was no trade down from De Gea.

So you were THREE PLAYERS SHORT OF A STRONGEST TEAM.

[Tony C]

Arsene's Kick up the Barca: CL Last 16 Week 2

ad hoc wrote: I thought that Dinamo Kiev match was supposed to be played behind closed doors. What happened there?

They let people in then closed the doors, I think.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Arsene's Kick up the Barca: CL Last 16 Week 2

And not a single time have you answered the sodding point that MAN UNITED WERE NOT MISSING 13 FIRST TEAM PLAYERS.

But I never fucking said that they were. My whole fucking point is that the injuries are primarily concentrated in the defence which means that man utd now have to field the reserve of the reserve of the reserve of the reserve of the reserve of the right back, and the reserve of the reserve of the reserve of the reserve of the reserve of the left back.

But once you get above a certain number of injuries, the distribution becomes irrelevant, because there are three ways in which a lot of injuries can affect a teams level of importance. You seem to only be interested in one.

The one you are interested in is the quality impact, where you have to pick a player that isn't good. So I suppose for example you'd accept that the step down from Matteo Darmian to donald love is a large and meaningful quality drop. Donald Love wouldn't have got in the Midtjylland team.

But there are two other impacts that a lot of injuries have. the biggest one is on organisation as a team. If you are continually having to chop and change your team, because bits have fallen off, it's quite difficult to develop and maintain the high level of organization needed to be successful or play well.

Now you pretend to be interested in sophisticated foreign football, because it's so tactically more advanced and sophisticated. So you should be the first to recognise that having to change your team all the time, and introduce a lot of people who've never played first team football before is going to play havoc with a teams overall level of organization. Particularly say if you're going to be doing something like replacing the Italian international right back with a player who might wind up at rangers this summer.

And the third effect is on form and momentum. It's very difficult to build up a head of steam if you wind up losing players to injury all the time and having to change your team. Having watched man utd put together runs of 8 and 9 consecutive wins over the years, I couldn't help but notice that they usually happened when they had a settled team. When they had lots of injuries, their form became a lot more patchy.

My point is that in general, if a team has a fuckmountain of injured players, then things are going to be pretty grim. It doesn't matter who the club is, or who is the manager, for the three reasons outlined above. People shouldn't be surprised if they lose games. It's more surprising if they don't.

[dalliance]

Arsene's Kick up the Barca: CL Last 16 Week 2

And not a single time have you answered the sodding point that MAN UNITED WERE NOT MISSING 13 FIRST TEAM PLAYERS.

But I never fucking said that they were.

The following Berbaslug posts are taken from the Europa League alone. I can't be arsed going through the other ones though I remember he later complained about it being 15 injuries now.

oh for god's sake. Man utd narrowly lost a europa league knock out tie away from home, while having 13 players out injured. I have never seen a manager take such criticism in such circumstances.

Perhaps, but van gaal is getting a lot of the blame for man utd being rather chaotic at the back, when to be honest, I think that 11 senior players, and two players promoted from the academy being out goes most of the way to covering that.

But there actually are 13 players injured. if it only was 3 injuries, then last season's right back Antonio Valencia would have played at right back, not donald love,

I am very impressed that you are trying to argue down an injury list of 13 players to just three. I'm not surprised though.

Either way, I'm very surprised at how surprised people are that a side suffering perhaps the longest injury list I've seen a top flight team suffer,

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Arsene's Kick up the Barca: CL Last 16 Week 2

You see, this is exactly what I'm talking about. I say X, Dalliance turns it into Y, and argues with that.

Dalliance, do you see the phrase "13 first team players" in that quote?

It's not there is it?

The reason it's not there, is because it wouldn't be accurate. The closest thing to that is 11 senior players (players from the 25 man list) and two players who started the season in the academy. That is not the same thing by a long shot. The point you are arguing with is one you made up yourself.

You're not arguing with any point I've made. You're fighting with the voices in your head.

[Kevin S]

Arsene's Kick up the Barca: CL Last 16 Week 2

Oh FFS, now this is on the CL thread as well?!

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Arsene's Kick up the Barca: CL Last 16 Week 2

Yeah this has to stop. I think it's clear from that last post that dalliance is arguing with some version of my words that better suits his purposes.