da bet vitoria： Yet another Manchester United signing has been confirmed, and yet another attacker will join up with his fellow Red Devils at Carrington in July.
da apostaganha： Anyone who watched United’s 5-3 defeat at Leicester earlier this season would wonder why on Earth United are prioritising another attacking midfielder, especially another winger.
United’s defensive frailties were all too obvious in that defeat. They were exposed on the counter attack, and the back three made up of relatively inexperienced defenders were exposed as rough and uncut. That’s not to say they won’t be better in the future, but they were still raw that day.
Many saw that as a complete restatement of the problem at Old Trafford. In the last year or so, United had spent hundreds of millions of pounds on players like Juan Mata, Angel Di Maria and the loan signing of Radamel Falcao.
United had added the their plethora of attacking options and had failed to replace the departing Rio Ferdinand, Nemanja Vidic and Patrice Evra. Any team of the best XI in Premier League history would surely have to consider all three of these players in their respective positions. So surely it’s huge to lose these three without replacing them.
Yet looking at the stats United haven’t been that bad at the back. They’ve conceded fewer goals than Manchester City, who aren’t exactly famed for their defending this season but they’re hardly awful at it either.
In fact, United have become more solid. It looks like the players have bought more into Van Gaal’s system and don’t get hit quite so fatally on the counter quite so much.
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Yet recent events have probably made that claim a little harder to defend. United lost 3-0 to Everton the other week, and that was almost exclusively Everton on the counter. In fact, United’s last three games have yielded worrying scorelines with defeat to Chelsea precipitating another two defeats on the spin.
But my point isn’t that United’s defence is good, more that it isn’t bad. And the worrying thing for Van Gaal is surely not the fact that they’ve been conceding goals and more than they haven’t scored in their last three games.
They dominated each of those games comfortably – they had 70% of the possession against Chelsea, 65% against Everton and then a staggering 80% against West Brom. Yet they managed a grand total of 0 goals.
It’s not the defence that turns these possession stats into goals, it’s the attack.
In fact, had United scored in any of those games, it could’ve changed the course of the game immeasurably. United would have had less need to attack, less need to throw men forward, and the opposition would have had to come out of their shells. Had United scored, they may have conceded fewer against Everton, and they might have coaxed Chelsea and West Brom into more attacking positions, leaving them more exposed at the back.
But in order to create more attacking opportunities in these sorts of games, you first have to score a goal. And United, for all their attacking options, couldn’t find one. And that’s the worrying part.
So going out and spending a reported £25-30m on Memphis Depay does seem somehow prudent, even for a team that has spent so much on attackers of late, and a team that can already count Wayne Rooney, Robin Van Persie, Ashley Young and Adnan Januzaj in its ranks.
The defence is surely still a priority: Mats Hummels is still on the radar and a defensive midfielder like Ilkay Gundogan could still be a Manchester United player next season. But it just goes to show that despite all of the money that United have spent recently, they are still an attacking player short of being where they want to be.
And that’s what will concern LvG. It’s not so much the goals they’ve conceded, or even the fact that they’ve lost these matches. It’s the fact that they’ve lost matches they should have won. If you have 80% possession and lose, it’s never the defence’s fault. They could’ve been awful, but the attackers still had enough of the ball to score more than they conceded. Only because they had so much of the ball.
The cause for concern at United is the attackers, and Van Gaal realises this. He has everything at his disposal to rectify this, and I suspect he’ll do more buying before the summer’s out.
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