The Mailbox still has plenty on Liverpool’s youthful triumph over Chelsea but we start with the problems at Man Utd.
Send your views on any and all subjects to theeditor@football365.com
The five players Man Utd must sell this summer
With INEOS investing into United, it’s inevitable that they will splash some cash this summer given it’s the first opportunity to do so, and it’s safe to say it needed in some areas on the pitch, particularly in defence. Yes the easier thing is to spend money, then worry about selling the players afterwards or waiting for the contract to expire, but ultimately a terrible way of getting a good return in cash and the return on investment for most players in the last 10 years has been poor.
I think in the current United team and with a couple of youngsters pushing themselves and proving they are good enough to play in the first team and start league games etc, there are some players this season given its the manager’s second season and the fact that some of them are average at best, that really should be placed on the transfer list this summer.
The big issue is the wages some of the players make, which is absolute madness. If I were Ratcliffe, or whoever’s job it is working under him in terms of recruitment, I would look to move on 5 players (Max) as a realistic target. My choices would be Varane, Casemiro, Sancho, Lindelof and Wan-Bissaka.
Now I was very split between Rashford & Varane, but I think given Varane is very injury prone and is older, I thought that would make more sense, but if PSG or another team were to bid £60-70 million for Rashford, then I think it would make sense in accepting it. Given Hojlund & Garnacho are still quite young as well despite how promising they have been this season, Rashford is actually needed by United but is unfortunately an inconsistent player, if you had to compare him to a former United player, you would have to say its a mix between Nani & Welbeck, but unfortunately thinks in his head he is Cristiano Ronaldo without putting the work in, how standards have changed! I think this season alone has proved he isn’t World Class and may never be in that category now.
So from my argument here, it could actually be six players sold this summer! If it was one thing Ralf Rangnick was correct about, it’s the fact he openly said it’s not cosmetic surgery needed for United, it is open heart surgery. Two years on, I would say its actually worse than the squad he inherited, but he was 100% correct. So, the most important thing is new faces and the experiences and skills they can add and is needed in this team, and they have a massive chance to do that with part new ownership taking place. However, it is KEY that United ship out the players first before they add in preventing poor choices being made.
On a quick one for the manager, I think what Ten Haag is currently doing is actually very smart but also a bit sneaky in convincing INEOS in providing more funds in the summer by playing the youngsters, but also injuries haven’t helped and he doesn’t have a choice in some areas. I can see why people are calling him a fraud now though, because his actions suggests he is not really taking responsibility in games given he how tactically inept United can be at times against some opposition.
Long story short, he just doesn’t seem good enough with what fans ultimately want, I think he may have peaked last season and I think he should leave at the end of the season, he isn’t good enough and also seems a bit of a suck-up too.
Rami, Manchester
What about the captain?
I don’t think I will get much argument that the worst result of the weekend was MUFC’s loss AT HOME to Fulham. Now the vast majority of MUFC fans on here have probably been spoilt on a diet of the Class of ’92, Ronaldo and Rooney so think, in comparison, that it was a dire result. However, I have been watching MUFC since Best, relegation and years of players like Clayton Blackmore and Michael Duxbury and I have NEVER seen a team who just didn’t seem to care.
People keep trotting out the usual excuses such as the Glazers or the tactics or ETH, but to me, the biggest fault lies in the captain… Fernandes. I hate to say this but I cannot recall a more odious player to “grace” the Premier League especially considering the Rogue’s Gallery to choose from (Diouf, Bellamy, Suarez, Barton to name a few).
He’s a cheat, he’s petulant, gives up easy, doesn’t run back and gives the ball away incessantly. People seemed to put up with him in the past because he created and scored a lot of goals but we were all taught that games are won and lost in midfield.
To quote a movie phrase “Attitude reflects Leadership” and Fernandes is the epitome of and maybe a significant cause of much of our current malaise. Can you imagine Keane allowing these types of performances to happen? Or Gerrard, or Terry or Vieira? If your Captain gives up, everyone else will down tools. No wonder he never gets injured! The only times we have shown a glimmer of hope is when the Academy players play. I realize we are currently a mediocre side but at least look like you are trying!
Adidasmufc (And we still have to play Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and City!)
Fulham: Funny old team
I think I see why Fulham sometimes win 5-0. They’ve got a bunch of super talented – but slightly inconsistent – forwards; they create loads of chances and when it clicks they blow teams away.
If anything what this result shows me is the strength in depth of the Premier League.
That said, I felt at times Utd played like a team that thought they were supposed to win.
Man Utd eh? Feast or famine.
Apologies in advance for this weekend Utd supporters.
Hartley MCFC Somerset (the Red Cartel is real; so does that make City, Chelsea and, er, Everton [?] the Blue Cartel? )
The Carabao Cup final: A neutral’s perspective
As an Ipswich fan, I have no skin in this game (heaven knows we’ve got bigger fish to fry right now), but I seem to have been watching a different League Cup final to everybody else. What I saw was a very even game, with both teams taking turns to dominate and retreat, missing easy chances and being very unlucky. The narrative going into the game – Liverpool had injuries, Chelsea create chances but can’t score – seemed to play out through the 120 minutes. It was only decided by one team failing to mark another team’s captain at a corner.
Where all this ‘Liverpool were amazing, Chelsea were rubbish’ stuff is coming from, I’ve no idea. As a neutral watching the game, it was totally 50/50 on who was going to win. All I wanted was more goals, from anybody. And what Sky Sports’ problem is, who knows. Call themselves professional broadcasters…!
Mark, Suffolk
READ: Klopp and Liverpool granted undue Carabao praise by trio of Sky Sports underdog peddlers
On Liverpool kids and Chelsea depth
This argument regarding Chelsea playing kids as well as Liverpool is very odd. As is the argument that Chelsea were also missing players.
The Chelsea “kids” under 24 cost £400m. The Liverpool “kids” under 24 cost £39m..and £34m of that was on Gravenberch.
Liverpool ended the game with:
3 teenagers.
A 20 year old.
A 21 year old all on the pitch
They cost a combined £5m.
When has that happened before in a domestic cup final?
How many teenagers had Chelsea on the pitch when the final whistle blew?
How many players 21 and under that cost nothing?
People say Chelsea were missing players but they still had 2 midfielders worth a combined £200m and forwards worth £200m combined.
Cole Palmer alone cost £45m.
That’s more than Kelleher, Robertson, Bradley and Konate COMBINED.
Look at the substitutions made.
For Chelsea:
Mudryk cost £90m.
Nkunku cost £52m.
Liverpool brought on:
Tsimikas-£8m.
Gomez-£2.5m.
Quansah-Academy.
Clarke-Academy.
Danns-Academy
McConnell-Academy.
These players Chelsea are missing are players who have “led” Chelsea to 11th, with a +1 gd,have no European football and have only the FA Cup to play for.
Liverpool are missing players who have them top of the league, are top scorers, have the second best defensive record , have a +36gd, are unbeaten at home all season and have them in with a chance of winning 4 trophies in February.
People aren’t comparing like with like. Chelsea are the blue billion pound bottle jobs but they still spent that amount in 18 months.
Gussy, Ireland
…The debate around “Klopp’s kids vs billion pound bottlejobs” is an interesting one; it certainly makes for a change of pace from arguing about VAR.
The observation seems to ‘feel’ right to many, not just to myself and other Liverpool supporters, but to plenty of neutral fans and those in the media. Others disagree, citing each side’s average/median ages. I find this take to be a strange combination of being overly simplistic and arbitrarily pedantic. I think they might as well be saying “none of the players were under the age of 18, so actually (smirk), none of the players were kids”. The simple response would be “Yes, but you know what we meant, stop being obtuse”.
This annoyed me enough to lead to me putting a bunch of this data into Excel to go deeper into it. As it turns out, most of the data supports the surface-level observation that Chelsea and Liverpool had similar squad profiles, in terms of both average age and average senior appearances. This also holds up even if you count it based on the players who finished the match, or if you use weighting on the stats based on the number of minutes each player played.
The major difference highlighted by the data is on transfer fees paid. Using transfermarkt figures (which admittedly do not seem to include EPPP tribunal fees paid), Chelsea’s squad cost a (mean) average of 35.5m EUR per player, vs. Liverpool’s average of 17.1m EUR per player. If you weight the average fee by minutes played by the respective players, this gets even bigger: 48.2m EUR vs. 24.6m EUR. The most striking difference is on the median transfer fee paid: Chelsea’s median transfer fee was 32.5m, Liverpool’s was 2.45m EUR. This is because 10 of Liverpool’s 20 players were not signed for transfer fees, while only 6 of Chelsea’s were free. (This analysis is imprecise because the tribunal fees are missing, but I’m pretty sure the point would stand if you added them in).
Funnily enough, rather than the statistics themselves being interesting, I found that the most revealing aspect of the data was to simply take all the players and sort them in a list from youngest to oldest. If you include only the 32 players who played, 7 of the 9 youngest players were Liverpool’s, aged 18-22. The 10th through 18th youngest players were all Chelsea’s, aged 22-25. (If you also include the 8 players who did not feature, the trend is basically the same but less striking).
One simple statistic noted elsewhere: Liverpool 6-4 Chelsea. This is the number of subs used by Klopp and Pochettino respectively. Klopp gave 30+ minutes to Clark, Danns and McConnell. Pochettino left Gee, Gilchrist and Taurianianen on the bench and later said they couldn’t push for a winner in ET because his team was too tired.
To finish off, one non-data-related point: Chelsea’s team was not a matter of fate or circumstance. They built their squad this way deliberately, at great expense. With the exception of Thiago Silva, the players they were missing through injury (James, Badiashile, Chukwuemeka, Cucurella, Fofana, Lavia, Ugochukwu) may or may not be better than the ones they had available (I genuinely do not know), but they are not any more experienced than the ones who played, nor any cheaper. Liverpool’s team was not by design. Liverpool were forced into a difficult situation and Klopp chose to trust his kids. There is a marked difference, even if it isn’t reflected in average age.
Oliver (not a statistician; probably made methodology errors) Dziggel, Geneva Switzerland
…It’s interesting to see Will Ford double down on his anti-kids narrative.
I think most agree that the average ages of the teams were comparable, so there was a little more to the narrative than ‘Klopp’s kids’ winning against the tired men of Chelsea.
Plus, a little hypocritical to talk about Chelsea’s young players while also claiming they didn’t have the capacity to play the 120 minutes – as older men might.
Poch had 2 unused subs he could have made out of the 6 allowed, while Klopp maximised his. (Having to use one very early in the game to replace Gravenberch.)
Poch was clearly playing for penalties – he said so himself – so wasn’t willing to ‘risk’ taking off Caicedo and Fernández for younger, less tired legs. He clearly didn’t think his ‘kids’ were up to it, or up for it, but in that sense he did bottle it a bit.
Chelsea had a whole week between games, while Liverpool played in midweek. So more time to prepare and less load on Chelsea players. With minimum recovery time, Liverpool also had less time to work on a specific game plan.
Chelsea don’t have European commitments either, so less minutes in total to stress the team.
Gallagher was arguably the best outfield player on the park – definitely for Chelsea – and Palmer played reasonably well. Caicedo, on the other hand, sucked and Fernández only marginally better. So while they would have been tired in extra time, it wasn’t from putting in the effort Gallagher and Palmer put in.
The real narrative was the way the four younger players with limited Liverpool first team minutes slotted in so smoothly. With four dropped in together the expectation would be they would get overwhelmed by the more savvy players with more first team minutes for Chelsea. Their positioning, passing, desire to want the ball and not shirk, lack of fear was what astonished.
In fact, Klopp understands that to compete on four fronts means using the full squad and some academy players working within a system that requires minimal tweaks for each game – as there will never be enough time to work on the strategy for the next opponent, the way say, an Everton or Brentford can. It requires trust and to be willing to take risks – be fearless.
But hey you just keep focusing on one small point in the whole storyline.
Paul McDevitt
…Look it’s good to see Will move through the grief process, especially after his last article. I say article but in retrospect it reads like an existential crisis in text format.
But let’s move onto his latest “my narrative building is different to your narrative building” which suggests; hey, the poor little sods where tired, ok? Will claims that Carragher (mate?!?) is missing the obvious but is there a chance here that having played 120 minutes of elite football against elite players that them being tuckered out doesn’t justify what occurred in extra time? Also for Will’s argument to make any sense wouldn’t Elliot and Endo have to have regressed significantly in extra time?
I would argue that “bottling it” is a far easier fix than not athletic enough to carry out a game plan past 90 minutes in February against vastly inferior opponents.
Dan
Fact-checking the stroke victim
Important preface: It is a big relief that John Nicholson is doing better. I’m a big fan of his overall. It was very upsetting to learn of his stroke. It was great to see he was able to continue writing during this 4+ month stay in hospital; I’m sure that helped him immensely.
I need to call John out on some of the B.S. he claims in the sanctimonious middle section of his latest article, though. John portrays himself as some kind of beacon of positivity, like a football-writing-Gandhi.
Factually: John published 13 F365 articles during the hospitalization time period. Of those, I would describe 4 of them as clearly positive (3 top 10 lists + a Beckenbauer obituary). 4 of them were neutral (VAR discussion, Player schedules/workloads, Premiership deadnaming, buying football clubs). But 5 of them were overtly negative or critical – rants about blue cards, David Moyes (x2), Joey Barton, and Klopp hysteria.
Nothing wrong with the above whatsoever. But it’s a bit rich for John to describe people who disagree with him as “energy vampires” “getting off on their own nastiness” who are “a waste of space and time”.
Oliver Dziggel, Geneva Switzerland
Extraordinarily mad at Jon Champion
I’m not sure what we in the USA have done to be punished in the worst way possible, but not only do we have to put up with the insufferable Jon Champion on ESPN for the likes of the Carabao Cup, but he’s now on the regular rotation of commentators on NBC Sports for their Premier League coverage.
Champion is one of those throwback commentators who knows little about the game he is watching. He has no concept of tactics, no concept of team selection, no concept of on-field adjustments, no concept of why substitutions are made, and no concept of anything other than being an insufferable snob.
He also never has grasped the fundamental fact that he is there to describe events happening in the match he is watching, not to give opinion nor editorialize (see also Beglin, Jim). He will never understand that no-one (except Jon Champion) cares what he thinks.
Just in the last couple of weeks, he has sneered “Margate would be very high on my list of places I would not want to spend a week’s holiday”, insulted “you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of friends Craig Burley has” ignores events on the pitch to reel off irrelevant and insufferable anecdotes and continually delights in throwing up the thesaurus every time he speaks.
He might like to check himself. He is not a gilded member of high society, existing solely to look down on the working-class rabble beneath him. He was born in Yorkshire, his daddy was a teacher at a minor public school and he went to a Catholic college in Leeds which specializes in training teachers for, yes, Catholic schools. Nothing wrong with any of that, except he behaves as if he is above any of that, and above any of us. He might also like to consider that for a very large proportion of the football-watching TV audience English is their second language and can’t understand a lot of his elitist pontifications.
I’m sick and tired of his pearl-clutching histrionics and his snobbery. I consider myself to be relatively well-spoken, but no-one I know performs verbal gymnastics to shoe-horn as many overblown descriptions as possible into one sentence as Champion, who appears to believe that if you can’t strangle someone to death with alliteration you might as well not open your mouth.
It’s reached the point where we actively avoid matches where he is commentating, preferring instead the Spanish-language feed where available (although we keep the mute button handy for the “goooooooooooooooooooool” nonsense.)
I suppose the plus side is we don’t have to listen to Gary Neville’s drivelling on Sky Sports.
Steve, Los Angeles
Mad at F365
I read F365 fairly religiously over the last decade. Daniel Storey and other of your esteemed colleagues have, in that time, written dozens of articles begging the footballing world to re-embrace the cup competitions. It would be accurate to describe the overall tenor of the website as one that demanded supporters value those secondary cups. And with good reason.
So it’s a bit shocking to discover how “underwhelming” those victories are. It seems the greatest crime a football supporter could commit to Mr Oldham is to celebrate their team and savor those emotions. The less said about the 16 Conclusions that spend most of their time scolding fans as well. Honest to God why do you feature writers who don’t seem to actually enjoy football?
Supporters being overboard and using hyperbole? For shame! Imagine a football supporter supporting their team?
Genuinely baffled as to what the point of this website is even supposed to be anymore. I understand this isn’t an airport and you don’t have to care but I urge whoever is actually in charge to evaluate the overall tone of F365 because it does not appear to be for those who actually love the game anymore. Yesterday my favorite team won a trophy so you’re gonna have to excuse me if I refuse to be “underwhelmed”
Matthew
…I love F365 I really do, but Will Ford’s article was deliberately written for clicks.
Winners and Losers column for Liverpool the same.
Saying it’s for banter, but it’s not really is it?
Sorry, but you need to read the room. Is your web site going under now. Is this the peak of what you originally set out ? Sarah, this surely wasn’t your intention, to piss off people, all the while relying on clicks for an example to some unknown conglomerate of white 50 year olds enjoying their share dividends.
Why though ? To make headlines? To get clicks. To make money.
Your website stood alone. It stood for actual fair and balanced reporting. But no more.
Mediawatch section, do you have the courage to add yourself ? You are just as bad as the tabloids you seek to mock.
I won’t be alone on this view. If you are struggling I understand. But please go out in glory, not an embarrassment of what your page was.
It was incredible, guess finances catch up with all.
Looking forward to the Suns editor and his weekly column. Just like talk sport money talks and bullshit walks.
Thanks for the brilliance especially Jonny Nic and PFM
So do the right thing. Change. Before you lose millions of fans
Publish this. You won’t because that will mean admittance of everything I’ve written above.
With thanks.v
Ade Walker LLB CMI
…We all get that you can’t bear the Reds winning. It’s literally why we are the Unbearables. So cry more bitches 👋
So sorry to deprive your beloved and entirely honest Man City 🤔 🤔 of a trophy but yeah not really. Get that you try to 🎣 fans of real clubs like Liverpool, Manchester Utd & Arsenal, just for clicks, but it’s getting a little obvious.
V
