Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 61

A Manchester United clearout is needed. None of the parts fit together | Jonathan Wilson

A keeper that can’t use his feet and forward line lacking mobility – there is not a single element of this side that works

It was less than a year ago that Manchester United won at West Ham to stretch their record unbeaten league run away from home to 29 games. What a happy, uncomplicated time that must seem for them now, in the wake of a seventh successive away defeat with a cumulative score of 2-21.

This is United’s worst away run since 1936. Was the performance in west London worse than the 5-0 defeat at Crystal Palace in 1972? It’s probably too early to be sure, but Saturday was haplessness at a volume that will resonate through the generations.

Continue reading...

Has Nottingham Forest’s sudden ascent led to too many changes? | Jonathan Wilson

Promoted club have brought in more than a dozen players this summer, illustrating that progress can be destabilising

When was it that alarm bells began to ring? Was it when Omar Richards arrived from Bayern Munich for £8.5m to become Nottingham Forest’s sixth summer signing? Was it Lewis O’Brien’s £6m switch from Huddersfield? Or perhaps Remo Freuler, signed this past week from Atalanta for £7.6m, was one signing too many – and that was before a £20m fee was agreed for Emmanuel Dennis.

Saturday night’s confirmation of that move means Forest have now brought in 15 players this summer at a cost of just under £110m, and they have been strongly linked with Morgan Gibbs‑White. That figure, irrespective of the quality of the players or the logic of each individual signing, is enough to inspire a qualm of anxiety.

Continue reading...

The feud between Best and Charlton that shattered Manchester United

By the early 1970s the warring club legends were so divided that they were no longer speaking – nor passing – to one another

When Matt Busby retired in 1969, Manchester United’s three exceptional talents, three winners of the Ballon d’Or, were in decline. Bobby Charlton was 31 and age was closing in. Denis Law was 29 but had never fully recovered from his knee injury. George Best was 22 but had already won his last trophy.

“I represented the future of Manchester United – or should have done,” Best acknowledged. “Charlton represented the past.” That was not simply about age; it was also about attitude. Best once said that he was “grateful” to have been born in 1946 and not 1926. “We don’t have to stick rigidly to the short back and sides and wear-your-club-blazer-at-all-times routine of the past,” he said.

Continue reading...

Manchester United optimism quickly snuffed out by return of old failings | Jonathan Wilson

The manager is new and Cristiano Ronaldo did not start but none of that fixed problems that have haunted United for years

A bright sun, a blue sky, the temperature climbing beyond 20C. The trams packed well over three hours before kick-off, the megastore rammed. The stewards and security men disconcertingly chirpy. The face of the new manager glaring from the scarves stretched out on the stalls on Matt Busby Way. A distinct buzz in the air. Perhaps even, if one really looked for it, a sense of optimism. Then they kicked off.

There have been plenty of dispiriting afternoons for Manchester United in recent years but few quite so dispiriting as this. The feeling was perhaps that Brighton, having sold Yves Bissouma and Marc Cucurella, would not be quite what they had been last season, the hope for home fans that Erik ten Hag’s hardline approach would have transformed them. But Brighton outplayed United for long periods and might, in truth, have won more comfortably, particularly had Lisandro Martínez been penalised for what seemed an obvious barge in the box on Danny Welbeck. All the familiar late United surge achieved was to reduce the margin of defeat to 2-1. New dawn? Same old United.

Continue reading...

Ten Hag’s first task is to sort out United’s biggest mistake: bringing Ronaldo back | Jonathan Wilson

A fresh start will be difficult if the forward lingers, with his lack of movement causing problems on and off the pitch

It wouldn’t quite be true to say that everything was rosy at Manchester United a year ago, but they had finished second in the Premier League the previous season and had added Jadon Sancho and Raphäel Varane to the squad. The doubts around Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s management meant a serious title challenge still seemed unlikely but nobody really expected them to fall to sixth, with 16 points fewer than they had gathered the previous season.

The campaign began well enough, with a 5-1 demolition of Leeds and then four points from admittedly less-than-inspiring performances in away games at Southampton and Wolves. This seemed the familiar pattern: Solskjær’s United excelled against teams who came at them and left space for the pace of their forward line to exploit, but found it harder against teams who sat deep.

Continue reading...

Premier League season preview: Leicester to Wolves – Football Weekly

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson and Simon Burnton for our second round of top-flight season previews

Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.

Today: the Premier League season kicks off this weekend and in the second of our two prediction shows the panel discuss the runners and riders in the second half of the division (alphabetically).

Continue reading...

Will Manchester City play to strengths of Erling Haaland after Liverpool loss?

Two golden chances were missed but more concerning was that the striker was playing a different game to his teammates

Andriy Shevchenko, it might be remembered, seemingly had a very good Community Shield in 2006. He’d just joined Chelsea for £31million. Nobody seemed in any doubt that this was a transfer initiated by the owner Roman Abramovich and there were questions right from the start about how he and Didier Drogba could play together and doubts as to whether José Mourinho wanted him, but after a 2-1 defeat in which he scored Chelsea’s goal and was by some way their most potent attacking presence, the assumption was that he would turn out to be an upgrade on Drogba, who ended up stuck on in the right.

As it turned out, Drogba hit 20 goals for the first time in the Premier League that season while Shevchenko struggling with fitness issues, never settled, scored just nine times in two seasons before returning on loan to Milan; his acquisition a background detail in the cooling relationship between Mourinho and Abramovich.

Continue reading...

Will Manchester City play to strengths of Erling Haaland after Liverpool loss? | Jonathan Wilson

Two golden chances were missed in the Community Shield and the striker was playing a different game to his teammates

Andriy Shevchenko, it might be remembered, had a very good Community Shield in 2006. He’d just joined Chelsea for £31m. Nobody seemed in any doubt that this was a transfer initiated by the owner Roman Abramovich. There were questions from the start about how he and Didier Drogba could play together and doubts regarding whether José Mourinho wanted him, but after a 2-1 defeat in which he scored Chelsea’s goal and was by some way their most potent attacking presence, the assumption was that he would turn out to be an upgrade on Drogba, who ended up stuck on in the right.

As it turned out, Drogba hit 20 goals for the first time in the Premier League that season while Shevchenko, struggling with fitness issues, never settled, scored just nine times in two seasons before returning on loan to Milan; his acquisition a background detail in the cooling relationship between Mourinho and Abramovich.

Continue reading...

From Haaland to Núñez, big six’s striking rejigs raise more questions than answers | Jonathan Wilson

There is jeopardy in fresh forward lines and that is where the initial fascination of this season’s Premier League title race lies

Can a team be too perfect? Could it be that if you have technically brilliant players in every position who have fully assimilated into a slickly intelligent system, the result is not a remorseless winning machine but a slightly cold entity so fixated on order that when disruption comes it is unable to cope?

In the aftermath of last season’s the Champions League exit against Real Madrid, Pep Guardiola dismissed suggestions that his team could not handle adversity, that crisis could send his sophisticated mechanisms haywire. But it is at the very least intriguing that City’s two highest-profile recent signings, Jack Grealish and Erling Haaland, are both disruptors who do not seem a natural fit for his precisely ordered universe.

Continue reading...

Barcelona have abandoned Guardiola’s DNA principles by signing Lewandowski | Jonathan Wilson

Barça have opted to buy big instead of backing a young squad and a manager steeped in the club’s values and traditions

The greatest trick Pep Guardiola ever pulled was to convince the world that club DNA exists. Football changed when Guardiola was appointed Barcelona manager in 2008. It’s not just that the world’s eyes were opened to the full potential of possession football or that goals a game shot up in the knockout stages of the Champions League – although both did happen – but that a model was presented of how things could be.

Here was a coach with no first-team experience who immediately offloaded two big-name foreign stars in Ronaldinho and Deco and, in his first season, won the Champions League, La Liga and the Copa del Rey with a side featuring seven players who had come through the same youth ranks that had produced him. It was successful, it was beautiful and it was cheap: what club executive wouldn’t want to follow the model?

Continue reading...