Football: Just Slaven Away

[Consigliere]

I'm not quite sure why Özil gets labelled as lazy either. Mexal is probably right that it has to do with his defensive work rate but I also think part of it is that a number of English pundits and journalists like players who run around like headless chickens chasing lost causes. Özil in comparison looks casual on the pitch and that gets labelled as lazy. If United do make a move for him, I think his defensive work rate would be less of an issue since we have a top class specialist DM in Matic in addition to Pogba who provides enough of a defensive overlap when we are not in possession.

[Jordan La Cabra]

The problem could be that an Ozil working for Jose at Real Madrid and an Ozil working for Jose at Man United could be two very different players.

Real Madrid dominated most of their games under Jose, so he asked less of his attacking players than he ever has at a club, yet still it is rumoured that he and Ronaldo fell out over Jose asking him to track back. In the Premier League, Jose expects a lot more defensive work from his attacking players; even Hazard, Chelsea's best attacking player in Jose's second spell, got public criticism from Jose for his poor defensive work at times. In fact, the reason Juan Mata was ousted from the XI at Chelsea was because Oscar pressed and harried the opposition defenders and midfielders, a job Mata couldn't adapt to, which is a similar scenario to Lingard being chosen over the technically superior Mata and Mkhi right now.

At Arsenal, Ozil has a manager who gives a lot more freedom to his attacking players than Jose does, and one that has always had his back despite all the criticism levelled at him over the years. You wonder, despite the seemingly strong relationship Jose has with Ozil, if Jose would always stick up for him the way Wenger does. I'm saying this only because Ozil seems to be a player who needs to have the backing of his manager. One of the reasons he left Real was because he didn't feel Ancelotti had faith in him and one of the reasons he joined Arsenal was the faith Wenger was showing towards him when trying to sign him.

Would love him at Chelsea, as I would have in 2013 when Arsenal signed him, but the chances of that happening are a lot less likely than they were even in 2013.

 

[polishgenius]

Ozil has the same problem as Berbatov did when he frequently covered more ground than Rooney per game but got accused of being lazy. He just doesn't look like he's putting effort in, like Consigliere says.

My only real issue with Ozil as a player in our team is that while he's not lazy, he does have a tendency to go on runs of games where he's not super-influential, perhaps a confidence thing, and we have that problem - much more so, he'd improve us- with two guys already. If the off-runs of Mata, Ozil, and Mihki co-incide, we haven't solved much (mind, I think we should be getting rid of Mata and Mikhi anyway, and looking to get Griezmann or similar in as well as whatever traditional no10 we end up with).

But he is arguably the best provider of the through-pass in the league. KDB is alongside him, and a better player all-round, but no-one else.

[Mark Antony]

2 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

But he is arguably the best provider of the through-pass in the league. KDB is alongside him, and a better player all-round, but no-one else.

Cesc?

[Consigliere]

1 hour ago, JordanJH1993 said:

The problem could be that an Ozil working for Jose at Real Madrid and an Ozil working for Jose at Man United could be two very different players.

I don't watch a great deal of Arsenal so I'm taking Mexal's word that Özil's defensive work has significantly improved so I don't see a problem here.

[dooog]

On 11/30/2017 at 4:11 AM, Nas! said:

I'm not okay, but I appreciate your concern, my friend.

That game showed what a total sporting failure this ownership group has been since their arrival.

They claim to love the club, but they've made a lot of really poor footballing decisions since purchasing it from an extremely motivated (i.e. bankrupt) Icelandic banking consortium all those years ago now.  

The London Stadium move will have made them a lot of money, but little thought or planning seemed to go into the transition.  I'm not going to say that it was a bad move for the club just yet, but I will say that it came with a lot of cheap talk from the owners about being a top six side.

This could have been off-set by the owners having an actual fucking plan for the club, but instead they've flip-flopped from one wildly different playing ethos to another, hiring optimistically and then showing their timidity and lack of footballing comprehension by their reluctance to make the tough decisions on behalf of the club at the appropriate time.  Basically, they've been consistently reactive instead of proactive and the result is a total mish-mash of playing styles and an incohesive unit as they bounced from Zola to Grant to Allardyce to Bilic to Moyes. 

I feel bad for Manuel Lanzini.  As a West Ham fan I would be crushed to lose him, but as a decent human being I'd like to see him move to a proper club and get the credit he deserves as a player (and not just from Polish Genius, who recognized early on just how good Lanzini is).  He faded towards the end of the game tonight, and he was a bit confused by his number eight position at the start, but for the middle half of the game he was pure quality.  Honestly, if he played for Barcelona, you'd all agree with me that he's a real peach. 

Joe Hart was dogshit, and exemplifies why West Ham are useless from the top down.  I mean, what did Adrian really do to deserve this? He was brilliant for Allardyce and brilliant for Bilic's first (and by far most successful) season.  He got replaced by Darren Randolph during a shaky patch last season and then got properly fucked by the loan arrival of Joe Hart this season and the public dick-slapping of the owners when they announced that Hart was the best player they'd ever signed or some similar nonsense. 

And this is really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  And it all boils down to a total disregard for the business of football.  There is clearly no overall plan.  

Meanwhile, the club continue to  sign an aimless and horribly expensive array of players and then change managers and playing philosophies just to complicate their woes.  While Moyes says differently, what the fuck is Javier Hernandez really going to do in a David Moyes managed side? Haven't we seen this play out already once before?

It is bad business.  It is poor general management.  It is failure at the highest level.  How could any thinking person believe otherwise?

Having said all of this, I still suspect Moyes will keep us up this season. Which is probably a shame for the club in the long run.   I don't even think we were as bad today as the scoreline indicated.  Penalties that went different ways, et al.  I think Moyes has inherited a complete mess and is doing his best to organize it.  I've seen worse performances that got better results this season. 

The sad truth is: I don't see any lasting, long term improvement without a change in ownership.  And I don't think a change in ownership will happen anytime soon. 

Agree with most of your post apart from Moyes, the man is clueless. Was genuinely gobsmacked he managed to land another EPL gig, I thought for sure he'd need to go to a bottom table championship team or someone like Rangers to attempt to rebuild his reputation.  He seems to think commitment, rolling up your sleeves and puffing out your chest etc is a substitute for tactics and playing style. This was West Ham's main issue under Bilic who had no strategy or playing identity. At least with the likes of Fat Sam his teams are set up to play a certain way and players know what's required of them.

Hearing people praise them for Sunday's City performance would drive me mad if I supported them, with the whole "well if we play that well in future we should be juuuust fine" spiel.  Backs to the wall defending with the odd counter for the majority of the 90 isn't of much use in the crunch games they will  NEED to win against lower table opposition.

With Chelsea, Arsenal and Stoke away in their next 3, West Ham should find themselves bottom come christmas. If it was any other club i'd say Moyes get sacked in early January but since the Dildo Brothers usually take their time on these things, perhaps he makes it to March.

[Mexal]

It has. Watch Ozil against Spurs as an example. He was awesome. He was great against United as well, even if they ended up on the wrong side of that. 

To polish's point, Ozil does disappear but that's not always his fault. Ozil lives and dies by the assist statistic and goals scored by the team. If the players around him aren't making good runs or finishing his key chances, he looks like he's not doing much. If his midfield is constantly losing the ball, Ozil gets the blame because he didn't create any goals that were actually scored. For the English media, Ozil is everything that is wrong with Arsenal whenever they don't score enough goals. And a lot of that comes from the fact that Ozil isn't particularly good on the ball, will never really beat one or two men in front of him or create a goal out of absolutely nothing. That is what gets praised and it should. So if the team is poor, Ozil likely plays some part because he cannot be as influential without the players around him playing well. He's a luxury player that makes really good sides better but won't single handedly take a team from a losing position to a winning position.

I just wish he got treated the same in the English media as say Alli, who's form has been abysmal at times, yet doesn't get 1/4th of the shit that Ozil gets on a weekly basis.

[polishgenius]

15 minutes ago, dooog said:

He seems to think commitment, rolling up your sleeves and puffing out your chest etc is a substitute for tactics and playing style.

I'd say this is the opposite of true. He's so obssessed with controlling the tactical nuance that the players don't feel the freedom to play to their strengths, but he's shite at geeing players up. I mean, he proved for years at Everton he knows how to do tactics.
That said, they played pretty well against City and I can see him whipping them into a competent shape as long as he doesn't lose the dressing room with his pessimism, which he can't disguise at all.

26 minutes ago, Mark Antony said:

Cesc?

Yeah, he's up there.

[Jordan La Cabra]

34 minutes ago, Consigliere said:

I don't watch a great deal of Arsenal so I'm taking Mexal's word that Özil's defensive work has significantly improved so I don't see a problem here.

I don’t mean it in the sense that his defensive work is bad. I mean it in the sense that his defensive work for an attacking player is about decent at best. That’s not quite enough for someone like Jose. 

His defensive work for Arsenal hasn’t been as bad as people make out, but is he much better in that respect than Mata or Mkhi? Probably not by much. And certainly not to the level of Lingard.

The media criticise him for his defensive work at Arsenal but Wenger never does; Mourinho definitely would if he wasn’t up to scratch. Jose has had the tendency to shackle some brilliant attacking players in the past. You wonder if Özil would follow in that suit should he join Man United.

Side note: Just watching the highlights from Man United vs CSKA last night. Quite pleased to see Luke Shaw playing well and also to see him receive praise from Jose that wasn’t also Jose crediting himself: ‘he played with his body and my mind’...

I’ve seen a lot of rumours linking Man United to Danny Rose and rumours linking Shaw with leaving Man U, potentially to Tottenham. For me, that would be a stupid deal. If Shaw can reach his full potential, he will be a far better player than Rose imho. Rose is good, but I wouldn’t even put him above Ryan Bertrand. Shaw could end up better than them both, though.

[dooog]

32 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I'd say this is the opposite of true. He's so obssessed with controlling the tactical nuance that the players don't feel the freedom to play to their strengths, but he's shite at geeing players up. I mean, he proved for years at Everton he knows how to do tactics.
That said, they played pretty well against City and I can see him whipping them into a competent shape as long as he doesn't lose the dressing room with his pessimism, which he can't disguise at all.

 

Yeah, he's up there.

What tactics? I assume you mean setting his team up to be hard to beat, but what about when his side actually have the ball? If you look at the jobs he did at Sunderland, Sociedad and United it's impossible to say any of them had a playing identity or for that matter, a strategy. The exact same thing could be said of Bilic for the past 2 years even with Payet smoothing over the cracks in 15/16. It's a key reason why Moyes was so utterly hopeless at United, a club where they're expected to have possession and the attacking impetus, not just be difficult to break down. The man is bereft of any ideas and has the charisma of a sick bag. 

 

[Consigliere]

48 minutes ago, JordanJH1993 said:

I don’t mean it in the sense that his defensive work is bad. I mean it in the sense that his defensive work for an attacking player is about decent at best. That’s not quite enough for someone like Jose. 

His defensive work for Arsenal hasn’t been as bad as people make out, but is he much better in that respect than Mata or Mkhi? Probably not by much. And certainly not to the level of Lingard.

I don't think Mourinho requires a high degree of defensive work rate from his #10. For example, Martial/Rashford on the left and Mata on the right were required to do more defensive work than Mkhi. Mourinho seems to be fine now with his #10 being no more than decent enough defensively.

[Consigliere]

Ronaldo becomes the first player to score in every game in the group stage and he did it in style. Great strike. Dortmund are done already.

[mormont]

2 hours ago, dooog said:

I thought for sure he'd need to go to a bottom table championship team or someone like Rangers to attempt to rebuild his reputation.

Rangers is not the team you need to go to in order to restore a reputation right now. The expectations exceed the resources available: the team is clogged up with overpaid relics of the two past managers, it's existing on loans from the directors, the board is divided and the fans expect you to seriously challenge Celtic, who are currently much wealthier with a much better playing staff and a decent manager.

[Consigliere]

Real knocked in two early goals and Dortmund were looking seriously vulnerable. It's been a good end-to-end game though and Dortmund have managed to pull a goal back.

[Philokles]

33 minutes ago, Consigliere said:

Ronaldo becomes the first player to score in every game in the group stage and he did it in style. Great strike. Dortmund are done already.

Instead of 'already' read 'by mid-October.'

Monaco challenging BVB in the incompetence stakes. They are also stuck on two points but with no hope of adding to that in the second half. Whilst their group lacked a Real Madrid or Spurs, there was no should be walkover like APOEL.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Just now, Horse of Kent said:

Instead of 'already' read 'by mid-October.'

Monaco challenging BVB in the incompetence stakes. They are also stuck on two points but with no hope of adding to that in the second half. Whilst their group lacked a Real Madrid or Spurs, there was no should be walkover like APOEL.

Difference is, Monaco is essentially fielding a reserve team, tonight.

Anyway, I am curious for how much longer Bosz will be Dortmund's manager. There were some rumours a few weeks ago, that Dortmund wait for Köln to pull the trigger on Stöger, and bring him in to replace Bosz. Stöger has been sacked now.

[ljkeane]

Cracking finish from Mane.

There's no way we can let a 4 goal lead slip, right?

[Consigliere]

Spartak haven't look any better than CSKA and CSKA are pants. Another seven incoming?

[ljkeane]

5 minutes ago, Consigliere said:

Spartak haven't look any better than CSKA and CSKA are pants. Another seven incoming?

In fairness they haven't been bad before this game, they battered Sevilla at home and got a draw against Liverpool. Going behind early and having to come out and give Liverpool space wasn't the position they wanted to be in though.

[Mark Antony]

That was enjoyable. Coutinho/Firmino have been on fire.