The Mailbox leaps to the defence of Erik ten Hag, who is ‘working miracles’ at Man Utd. Also: Only four starters at Brighton were ‘there on merit’.
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Ten Hag ‘truth bombs’
Not sure why I should feel the need to defend the man, the myth, the legend that is Erik ten Hag but some of the negativity in the mailbox and comments sections have me somewhat irked. I shall do this in three parts, a trilogy of tantalising truth bombs.
Firstly, a reminder of the quagmire that was last season (giggity giggity). This time last season we were 6th on 54 points, 3 points off Spurs who were in 4th with a game in hand. We had just got humped by Liverpool (like we do), scraped a 3-2 win against bottom team Norwich and lost to Everton (17th). We went out of all of the cups early doors. Fast forward to this season and we are 4th on 63 points, 4 points ahead of Liverpool and have a game in hand. We have lost one home game all season (the very first) and have reached the final of both domestic cups, with one in the bag. Ask a supporter of any team below us if they would swap seasons with us and they would bite your hand off Luis Suarez-style.
ETH has a win rate of 66%, this is higher than any permanent manager in our history. Now, he has only been with us for one season so it’s a relatively small sample but it’s still impressive, given a lot of the tools (some literal) he has to work with are legacies from other (failed) managers. He has us playing good football most of the time and we’re a team that people enjoy watching again. Not 1000 crosses a game. Not possession for possession’s sake. Not only a counter-attacking team. We’re not the finished article, we don’t dominate possession in games away from home and keep the ball well enough, but we do a good job of that at home and so the foundations are there. We are making chances (Bruno is only behind KDB in big chances created, our xG is 1.75pg – City’s is 2.19) but we’re not clinical enough yet. We have also been missing our two first-choice CBs for a large portion of the season and have a patched-up defence. Give him a couple more transfer windows and a proper #9 and we’ll see where we are.
Finally, a comparison against Pep and Klopp’s first full seasons in charge (both always good benchmarks given they built title-winning teams). In 16/17 City were 4th after 33 games, 65 points and we were a point behind them in 5th (they finished 3rd, 3…
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