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Football Season 2019-20

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Just now, Happenstance said:

Yeah I've enjoyed Amazon's coverage as well.

Shame Liverpool couldnt keep a clean sheet tonight but there were some amazing goals scored.

Yeah, I love it how they give you the option to skip straight to see each and every goal in a game. Lovely little feature.

Indeed. Our long ball game is beautiful to watch.

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I've no doubt streaming is the future, I just don't want to give Amazon my money.

Rashford - really starting to realise his potential this year. One goal away from breaking his previous season record, and exciting every time he gets on the ball. One of the few reasons to watch United at the moment.

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When I lived in Russia they switched to an OTT streaming service for the PL a couple of years ago. It is amazing when you can sit and choose any match you want to watch from all the 3pm kick-offs. They had next to no analysis, but it was so easy to pick a game to watch it in TV-like quality and then stick on the highlights of the others when you had the time.

It is absolutely the future, and the Premier League should think seriously about adopting this model and just cutting the middle-man out. It looks like F1 is slowly going down this road as well and while Sky's PL coverage is generally good, it is vastly overpriced. 

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I return to you now, to confirm that The Arsenal are shite and I haven't topped myself because they are a bunch of useless pricks.

Good day.

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4 minutes ago, Ramar said:

I return to you now, to confirm that The Arsenal are shite and I haven't topped myself because they are a bunch of useless pricks.

Good day.

Nice to see you Ramar! Probably not the Arsenal post you were hoping to post on a return.

If it helps at all, I'm really happy how Liverpool are doing 😝

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On 06/12/2019 at 9:38 PM, Ramar said:

I return to you now, to confirm that The Arsenal are shite and I haven't topped myself because they are a bunch of useless pricks.

Good day.

This afternoon probably hasn’t helped your mood...

It’s a tricky one looking at just the one match vs Man City, who on a good day can blow almost any team out of the water so I wouldn’t judge Ljundberg on this match.  The previous games and performances admittedly haven’t been great though.

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United find it so difficult to break down teams. We started off alright in today's game against Everton and looked a decent team for about 25 minutes. But, the player seem to run out of ideas too quickly and don't seem to have it in them to adapt. With the way Everton have performed this season, it really should have been 3 points at home against them. I think finishing in the top 6 with these players would be a big achievement and realistically we need to get better players in if we want to go higher. So many average players at the club and not a talented enough manager or coaching staff to improve them.

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What a time to be a Blade at the moment! My focus is keeping out of the bottom three but there is a wandering eye looking at the top half of the table. From League 1 to the slim possibility of Europe does seem surreal at the moment. 

All will fall apart during the month of death in January when the likelihood is that we lose 5 on the trot.

Hail to Sir Chris Wilder. UTB.

 

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I'm calling it now, stick a fork in this title race, it's done. The 30 something year old meme is dying this season. Congratulations to Liverpool for their first league title in the Premier League era.

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Yeah, there doesn't seem to be anyone who can beat Liverpool at the moment, let alone the four or five losses they'd need for anyone to catch up.

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On 27/12/2019 at 9:41 AM, bob said:

Yeah, there doesn't seem to be anyone who can beat Liverpool at the moment, let alone the four or five losses they'd need for anyone to catch up.

Agreed. And with last night’s result it seems even more secure.

Liverpool have been excellent this season,  seemingly reminiscent of Alex Ferguson’s Man Utd where if they’re not comfortably beating teams they have a back of grinding out results, more often than not through a stroke of luck or injury time goals.  That’s not a criticism though, it’s how what teams that win leagues do, and they have so far been the best team in the league and deserve the top spot.

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Even as a Liverpool fan I can admit that Wolves were robbed by that second var check. Once this season is done the rules for all of this need a complete overhaul.

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VAR seriously needs binning. Ruining the game. 
The equivalent of a left testicle hair is a ridiculous measurement for offside. It should be daylight between. 

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52 minutes ago, Nicktendo said:

VAR seriously needs binning. Ruining the game. 
The equivalent of a left testicle hair is a ridiculous measurement for offside. It should be daylight between. 

They should treat offside just the goal-line decision - all of the ball has to cross the line, so for offside it should be all of the man.

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12 minutes ago, Kav said:

They should treat offside just the goal-line decision - all of the ball has to cross the line, so for offside it should be all of the man.

Couldn't agree more. How much of your shoulder blade being in front of the defender actually constitutes gaining an advantage? 

There should be a blatant advantages in my opinion, visible immediately on VAR - daylight or no? This way we won't need people with a higher maths degree spending 25 minutes looking at lines and angles and Pythagoras equations. And the refs / assistants need to call it immediately or let it go. None of this IT guy sitting in a room saying he might have seen something the ref might have missed. 

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I was highly encouraged by the performance today, we didn't deserve to lose that game and Jorginho shouldn't have been on the pitch to equalise for Chelsea and turn the game ultimately in Chelsea's favour.

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8 hours ago, Nicktendo said:

VAR seriously needs binning. Ruining the game. 
The equivalent of a left testicle hair is a ridiculous measurement for offside. It should be daylight between. 

For me VAR isn't the issue, the offside rule is.

VAR is working fine (although it can admittedly be a bit slow at times), however with the offside rule being as it is these extremely marginal decisions, that seem harsh but are technically correct, are being made.

It seems bad at the moment as there have been a large number of them over the Christmas period but I would much rather have VAR and these decisions being made if it means that an obvious offside error is also corrected every once in a while.

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I'd rather not have VAR than have it in this state. It just kills all the momentum of the game. But if you want to fix it just give a 15 second deadline to overrule. If you can't be sure the decision needs overturning in that time then the error is minimal and can be ignored. It's not science, it's entertainment.

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I'll post about the VAR stuff a bit later as I have a fair bit to say about it.

But I'll talk about United first. We are such a mess and the only real way we're going to get out of it is by heavily investing (again) in new, better players. But, above all, the tactics, strategy and direction that the club seems to be going in really has me worried. We are so incredibly inconsistent for starters, but there are certain aspects of our play that seem to be happening in most games. The passing is slow and we seem to take an age making decisions. When we get the ball out wide and pump it into the box, the cross is usually poor. When a cross happens to be good, there's no one in there as we never overload the box. We don't have a creative midfield, so our strikers don't get the ball. Rashford is having his best season yet, but there is so much that is asked of him, yet very little seems to be asked of our other players. If he and Martial don't score, we have very few other players who can chip in.

The results worry me, but the lack of learning worries me more. When a human being makes a mistake, you expect them to learn from it and to improve. But, our players seem incapable of doing this. It's the same mistakes over and over again. The crossing is the worst facet of our game and it really has to be seen to be believed, but the decision making by our players at times (and also those at management and boardroom level) is shocking. 

We're looking at maybe 6 or 7 players coming in to improve this squad, maybe even more. I like what I've seen from Fred and McTominay this season, but they need to be working alongside a more creative midfielder. Not convinced by Luke Shaw at left back, who looked absolutely awful the other night. We still don't look great in defence and so maybe another player to either challenge for a spot or to play alongside Maguire is a must. We also need more attacking players who can come on and make a difference during a game, as our bench is pretty poor.

The standard of the Premier League has improved and you see so many teams filled with players who are confident on the ball, can pick out a pass, and can move the ball quickly in order to create chances. Our movement is diabolical in comparison to so many other teams in the league. Looking at that top 10, I would say the majority of those teams play better football than we do. It is a game, after all, but we're not playing the game well. I do think a large part of this is down to coaching and maybe we need to be working the players harder. But the squad isn't a huge one to begin with and it's not packed with quality. There is a lot of inexperienced, younger players. Sometimes this is good, but only when they have the right training. I question that.

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We played terrible in the first half and then alright in the second. Midway through the second half, we started to create a few chances and Martial and Fred both missed amazing opportunities. At that point, Ole should have made a sub and brought on Greenwood. He waited too long, imo. Had the subs happened 10 minutes earlier, we could have turned the 2-0 loss into a 1-1. 

All three of our Summer signings looked dire today. Maguire has been quite disappointing, tbh. Probably the worst out of the three. 

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The VAR call was bullshit. Not necessarily saying it was or wasn't a foul but for them to say the goal was disallowed because Van Dijk wasn't going for the ball is ridiculous.

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1 minute ago, Happenstance said:

The VAR call was bullshit. Not necessarily saying it was or wasn't a foul but for them to say the goal was disallowed because Van Dijk wasn't going for the ball is ridiculous.

I had it down as a clear and obvious foul from the beginning and was a bit shocked that the referee initially allowed play to go on! Seemed like a clear foul to me.

Whether that goal stood or not, I don't think it would have had any bearing on the game, thankfully or not. Liverpool looked 2 or 3 levels better than us and looked like they could really have destroyed us had they wanted to. Aside from 15-20 minutes in the second half, we were second best everywhere. 

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Sold our best player, had a transfer ban and we’re 4th.

Keane compares Ole to Lampard when Ole has spent how much in comparison?

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5 hours ago, Kav said:

Sold our best player, had a transfer ban and we’re 4th.

Keane compares Ole to Lampard when Ole has spent how much in comparison?

Exactly. What Lampard has done with Chelsea, given the little he had to work with, has been amazing to watch.

There is something fundamentally wrong with Utd and has been for years now. They keep trying to throw money at the situation but it's not working when the problems go deeper than what players they've got. A couple of months back Gary Neville was spot on when he said that the club needs to have a massive clear out from top to bottom and spend a few years just getting things in order, even if it means not competing during this time.

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