Goalkeeper is an outstanding shot-stopper but does not excel at passing and this is reflected in how Manchester United playDavid de Gea has been named in the PFA team of the year in five of the past six seasons. He has been Manchester United’s player of the year in four of the past five seasons. Last December, in Manchester United’s win at Arsenal, he equalled the Premier League record of 14 saves in a game. He is, by any measure, an exceptional goalkeeper, perhaps the best in the world. And yet De Gea’s position in the Spain starting lineup is far from certain after a run of indifferent form for the national side, the peak of which saw him allow...
José Mourinho’s dig at Antonio Conte has diverted attention from the FA Cup final’s pivotal confrontation in which Chelsea’s midfield could be overrun by Manchester United“I’m not,” José Mourinho said after Manchester United’s home win over Liverpool in March, “the kind of mechanic coach that says player A pass to player B, player B pass to player C and player C to player D. I’m much more a supporter of preparing the players to decide well and feel the game.”As so often with Mourinho, there was perhaps a coded jibe; this may have been (it’s very hard to know for sure with a man whose every utterance is subjected to intense scrutiny) another sortie in his protracted war of words...
As the gulf grows between rich and poor clubs so, too, does a culture in which some teams enter games accepting the only way they can compete is by not competingTactics are always contingent, never discreet. No manager can ever casually decide how he will play and only then turn to his squad and decide how best to array his resources within the system he has selected, before finally paying attention to the situation and the opposition. Everything is inter‑related. As Barney Ronay observed last week, the Premier League has never seemed so stratified and that, inevitably, has had an impact on how teams play.As with so much in football, the issue is one of degree. Since Herbert Chapman first...
Arsène Wenger’s lively forwards were undermined by shoddy defending on a day when Newcastle all but secured safetyThe quest for meaning, the need to form the unbearably random constituents of our existence into some kind of order, to create a narrative or a value-system, to believe it all somehow matters – it seems integral to humanity. But sometimes a late-season game between two sides with nothing much to play for is just a late-season game between two sides with nothing much to play for. Related: Arsenal slump to another defeat as Matt Ritchie hits Newcastle winner Continue reading...
By the benchmark they have set, Manchester City were terrible at Liverpool – light up front, porous at the back and less than tigerish in midfield – and they need to react quicklyOnly four managers have outwitted Pep Guardiola this season, and while Wigan’s Paul Cook, Shakhtar Donetsk’s Paulo Fonseca and Basel’s Raphaël Wicky were perhaps unexpected beneficiaries of propitious circumstances, Jürgen Klopp has done it twice to order.The stakes could not have been much higher than in the last encounter either, and the emphatic nature of Liverpool’s win in the first leg of the Champions League quarter-final gives some credence to Klopp’s insistence that but for Sadio Mané’s unfortunate dismissal at the Etihad in September, Manchester City might not...