Manchester United have endured a horrific start to the season…
Manchester United have endured a difficult start to the season. Despite what looked an attractive fixture list at the start of the season, they have managed just one win from six games in all competitions thus far.
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New manager Louis van Gaal invested £150m on revamping his squad in the summer, but has just a solitary victory against newly promoted Queens Park Rangers to show for his trouble.
The Old Trafford side have just five points, and sit 12th in the league table after Sunday’s 5-3 humiliation at Leicester. They already sit eight points behind league leaders Chelsea.
So what is continuing to go wrong? CaughtOffside analyses ten issues United need to solve:
10) Lack of leaders
Look at the names that have gone over the last decade: Roy Keane, Gary Neville, Paul Scholes, Rio Ferdinand, Nemanja Vidic – the list goes on. How many have them have been replaced? Outside of Wayne Rooney, where are United’s leaders. When the chips are down, who is going to dig in and get the scruffy goal to get United back in the game? Rio Ferdinand used to talk of how players would be going 100% during training because they were encouraged by the generals in the squad. It will be down to the new signings to now stand up and be counted.
9) Louis van Gaal
It’s hard to shake the sense that Van Gaal underestimated the job that was required of him at Old Trafford. It was not completely down to David Moyes that United finished seventh last season. The Dutchman failed to realise the lack of quality available to him in his squad, and by the time he had made a full assessment of what he had the season had already started.
8) Struggle when the going gets tough
United choked against Leicester, and badly. How often to United throw away a two goal lead and lose a match? Answer – never – Sunday’s loss was the first time United have surrendered such an advantage in Premier League history. Not only that, but they lack the stomach to fight back. During the Leicester comeback, United did not react, they did not seem to have the mentality needed to shut Leicester down and assert their authority despite dominating an hour of the game.
7) Lacking balance
You can’t argue with their team on paper. Most clubs would love to have Wayne Rooney, Robin van Persie, Radamel Falcao, Juan Mata, Angel di Maria, Adnan Januzaj… but that doesn’t mean they can all play together. Rooney is not an adequate number ten, he is a striker. You can’t expect Di Maria and Mata to do lots of tracking back, they are attacking players. Add in their difficulties in defence, and it seems extraordinary that Van Gaal focused almost all of his attention on strengthening United going forward, rather than at the back this summer.
6) Which formation?
As soon as Van Gaal became manager, he looked to install the 3-5-2 formation that served him so well with Holland. This produced good results in the pre-season tour, but it soon became apparent that it wasn’t going to work long term. United simply don’t have the right players to make this formation work: there is a lack of quality in defence, there are no natural wing backs in the squad, nor the quality defensive midfielder needed to protect the back three. He has since changed this, but how it took him so long to realise the issues surrounding it is beyond belief.
5) Fear factor has gone
Under Fergie, opponents always knew they would be in for a fight and would arrive at Old Trafford with the battle already half lost. This changed under Moyes. Teams would have a crack at United, and realised that United weren’t fighting back, teams stopped being afraid of turning up and having a go. This is still the case so far this season. Van Gaal needs to restore what has been the trade mark of Manchester United for years, attacking football matched with a desire to win no matter what.
4) Confidence
One obvious factor is that under Moyes, the players had lost confidence. Perhaps this was always going to happen, they had just lost the most successful manager of all time. Van Gaal has worked on this over the summer with some brilliant results in pre-season, however any setbacks at the moment make United panic, which leads to mistakes and ultimately losses such as the defeat to Leicester.
3) Slow transfer activity
As with David Moyes the previous summer, United were slow off the mark to sign the players they needed to improve the team’s quality. To his credit, Van Gaal wanted to give the players he had a chance, but the time this took left him with a team still in need of time to gel by the start of the Premier League season. It also took United a while to identify and clear out the deadwood, while Van Gaal seems to have issues with one of his new men already, full-back Luke Shaw.
2) Robin van Persie
Alex Ferguson brought Van Persie in for a specific task, to score the goals needed to win the 2012/2013 title and enable him to disappear into the sunset, Premier League title in hand. This worked, Van Persie scored the goals and United won the league. Since then Van Persie seems to have been hit once again by his niggling injuries and has fallen off the wagon that at one point made him one of Europe’s best strikers.
1) The defence
What was apparent last season under David Moyes was that time had finally begun to catch up with the previously impregnable defence and needed a summer overhaul. What actually happened was that Evra, Ferdinand and Vidic were allowed to leave and Jones, Smalling and Evans amongst others have not stepped up to the level needed. They lack a leader, organisation and experience, something that needs to be fixed pretty quickly.
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