With all this focus on Wilcox needing to go, it is blissfully wonderful to recall that Ratcliff spent critical squad rebuilding time waiting for Ashworth to finish his gardening leave and then immediately undermined before forcing him out in favour of the “gets shit done” approach of Wilcox.
Imagine if 3 years ago Jim would have just sat the fuck down and let Ashworth do his job
I am fairly convinced that Amorim could have been successful there, if he had more time, a different personality, and buy-in from upper management that they would need a major overhaul. It probably wouldn’t have been the most efficient, because Amorim seemingly saw almost no players with a long term future at the club, but at least it was an idea. But instead the brief became ‘win now with the inchoate mess of multiple regimes fighting internal conflicts because we spent a crap load just before you arrived’.
Carrick was a good enough manager to look at what he had, and by that point the team was clearly rather beaten down. Just stopping that, putting out something vaguely sensible not constructed to send a message to someone in the hierarchy, and being positive was enough to turn the ship around. That isn’t enough for a sustained campaign.
You also need to fully appreciate the massive outlier seasons that both Bruno and Casemiro had. Many of their performances in the latter half of the season were dire, but they could sit in a low-mid block to mask how slow their defense was and just have Bruno pump a load of balls into the box and many times Casemiro would get on the end of them and head in a goal to nick a result. There was ALWAYS going to be regression to the mean this season, but United fans are so utterly fucking gormless that they can’t see that. Exact same thing happened with Ole and with Ten Hag - good early performances that were mostly the result of sitting back and hitting teams on the counter that were absolutely unsustainable.
Bruno is the key to all of this - he is literally ONLY able to play well in that setup, he has no positional discipline, no ability to adapt to a more progressive style, just heroball and freestyling and hoping something comes off. United fans are all completely deluded believing he’s been their best player post-Fergie (maybe he has, I guess?), and believing he’s “world class”, when the reality is that outside of playing in a low-block shithouse counter attacking side, he does absolutely nothing and routinely goes missing in big games.
That’s why I made the comment a few days ago that this match would probably be the end for Carrick. Como is a ‘minnow’ to most English fans, when the reality is they are well put together, well drilled, and seem to be getting everything out of their talent - the exact opposite of ManU. The gap between expectations and reality is a killer for a manager on shaky ground.
I was talking to a new found friend who happens to support Man U and he said the biggest mistake was getting rid of Ragnick as he cottoned on straight away that the needed a complete overhaul and that he had also identified several young players that they should have signed and didn’t and all have done well.
Amorim for me wasn’t flexible tactical wise to suceed.
I have been relatively impressed with his management of Milan, a club that was coming off a catastrophic end to a season that has punctuated a dysfunctional few years. Milan is not the trainwreck that ManU is, but there are some similarities.
He has shown greater tactical flexibility, perhaps he learned from the experience at ManU, however my suspicion is that at Milan he has accepted that the club has limitations in what it can provide for him to execute his plan because the club has accepted his overall direction. Notably, he resolved the coach-killing question that was Leao. It appears he simply said he did not see a way to work with him, and the club accepted that. That is in stark contrast to the way Amorim was allowed to buy a few toys, but was expected to also be competitive right away with legacy players - despite absolutely no one having been competitive on a sustained basis with those same players.
I don’t think Amorim was the right choice for ManU, because his recent flexibility notwithstanding I just don’t think he is experienced enough to be as pragmatic as he needed to be. But once ManU had chosen him, they were simply wasting time not accepting what he was trying to do, which at the top level I don’t think they ever did. Better to have the fans turn on him and demand the next neck for the chopping block than to have to admit that you have spent about £600M without a clear plan for how the ball gets across the midway line.
The issue is it is the Italian league and with no disrespect, the calibre of the league is way off in both the standard and competitiveness of the Premier League teams.
I also think the unlike a lot that overall the Premier League has a greater and diverse tactical approach compared to other leagues.
I am increasingly underwhelmed by the PL versus Serie A, not least because of the standard of officiating. The money in the PL means those squads are more talented, but at the same time most Serie A teams seem to be doing a better job of getting performances commensurate with their talent level than PL teams (note the thread we are in…). That is exactly why I expected Como to absolutely maul ManU, more than they actually did.
I’d also say Serie A is probably more tactically heterogeneous than most people think.