People are very annoyed at anybody praising Thomas Tuchel and his progress at Chelsea. Plus we have more mails on Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. Mail your thoughts to theeditor@football365.com
Chelsea the new Sheffield United?
I hate to piss on the chips of those Chelsea fans enjoying their sudden resurgence, but from the outside they aren’t half looking a lot like 2020 Sheffield United. Great defence, not making particularly many chances but still getting an awful lot of one-goal victories. They should have conceded a penalty against Man Utd and should have conceded a penalty and had a man sent off last night against Atletico. Another example would be Atletico in the first leg and the Tottenham game where both managers chose the worst way to set up that absolutely played in to Chelsea’s hands. They met Liverpool right in the middle of the slump while they also had players still injured (Jota etc), and Everton played one of their worst matches of the season.
Tuchel is clearly at least a good manager, but the media do seem to be getting carried away by a number of largely uninspired performances that happen to have fallen the right side of the line for them.
I wonder if Wilder would have been sacked if he’d had £250m of new signings added to the squad after his good season.
Calum, MUFC, Wokingham
Chelsea: Not all that
In light of Matt Stead’s praise for Tuchel I feel like a sensible follow up article would look at all the Chelsea new manager bounces in the Abramovich era.
I can’t help but wonder if this is something we haven’t seen before or if it’s Di Matteo part 2.
Also think it was never denied that Lampard was underperforming with his expensively assembled parts so not sure why Tuchel’s improvement is getting quite this level of gushing – surely this is par for the course as opposed to gross over performance?
Minty, LFC
Why not keep teams apart?
As fans of different clubs anxiously await (myself included) for the draws tomorrow for the quarter-final stages of both the Champions League and the Europa League, an intriguing thought crossed my mind.
Why not have the “country protection rule” as mandatory until at least the semi-final stage of these competitions, instead of the quarter-final stage as it currently stands?
This would make for some intriguing ties, and would guarantee that, should all three English sides safely negotiate their quarter-final ties in the Champions League (I should interject at this point that as I am composing this e-mail the Europa League quarter-final ties have not been concluded), at least one English team in this year’s Champions League final when the “country protection rule” is then eliminated at the semi-final stage?
This would also, obviously, be beneficial to teams from other countries who have multiple quarter-finalists in any given season.
I have no doubt tomorrow’s draw will throw-up some scintillating quarter-finals, especially for the three remaining English teams.
Cautiously Optimistic Liverpool Supporter
(That’s a long-winded way of saying you don’t fancy playing Man City or Chelsea – Ed)
Actually, Ole not contradicting himself
Football managers really shouldn’t try and be sensible when they hold press conferences. Wasn’t really much wrong with what Solskjaer said in his presser and the statement made at the beginning of his tenure and his most recent one aren’t entirely inconsistent. You can be trying to win trophies but not use it as a measure of progress. Trophies are the end goal for sure, but we could win the League Cup, FA Cup and Europa League treble every season for ten years in a row and whilst it would be impressive (!) does it demonstrate United’s progress towards the goal of dominating English and European football? I don’t think so. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be nice to achieve!
The problem Ole has with this statement now is that he has clearly shown his hand that the goal for United is to win the league so now every season United don’t is a failure and his job would appear to be in jeopardy. I don’t think that’s right, and I hope that United have learned their lesson and there are some achievable objectives set every season leading up to the goal of challenging for the league title consistently by a certain date.
One other problem I have with his statement is about the egos of Clubs and Managers being bolstered by winning a trophy. Well this happens for players too and Fergie himself used the cups to get players used to winning when he was building teams. His last great side started their winning period with a league cup win in 2006. It’s definitely not a bad thing to win a cup, but league performance is a better measure of progress – if your aim is perform consistently. And Ole’s right, if you do that, trophies will follow.
Ash Metcalfe
More on Ole…
Although Paul McDermott and Calvino completely missed the point of my mail (hint: it was a question, not as assertion), I get the sense that I think we can agree that sacking Ole at the end of this season would be a pretty dumb idea. I agree mostly with Paul, except with the underestimation of my own club bit. Nothing that I said in my mail was factually incorrect.
Man United are the only ‘project’ where winning trophies is instantly demanded, especially if you are considered an elite manager. Past United legends (who aren’t considered elite) enjoy some immunity to that, but obviously not much, as ‘the lack of experience’ argument is currently blinding most people to the good work Ole is doing. So my question still stands I’m afraid.
Also, Calvino asks which are these managers that people always always seem to be saying will just walk in and replace Ole and guarantee a PL/CL next season? You and me both. Allegri, Pochetino, Zindane and anyone else will obviously “seem interested” in the United job. Every single player on earth is also linked to United, which obviously doesn’t mean anything. What I’m asking is would Allegri prefer United over Juve, would Zidane leave Real to come manage United? If so, why would they? Poch might be an exception, but if you think he is ‘elite’, I’ll take your word for it.
You are also saying “Have someone more competent than Ed Woodward and we may have gotten Klopp”, which is exactly what I’m saying. And yes, by my logic Everton seem to be more attractive to an elite manager, which is technically true because they have Ancelotti and we don’t? What I’m asking is for you to tell me why that is so.
MM, Man United, India
Injury-time nonsense
Phil’s rant on timekeeping in this morning’s mailbox really resonated with me. For all the advances in the game of football; for all the money that is poured into it; for all the constant tinkering of rules and sub-rules; for all the commercial sponsorships of the match clock by actual Swiss watch manufacturers; it is baffling to me that NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE THAT INJURY TIME IS COMPLETELY ARBITRARY! (I admit, I have no idea how to use a semi-colon, I just guessed)
We can slow the game down infinitely to check whether someone is fractionally offside, or to see if the ball brushed their hand (the merits of which can and will be debated elsewhere), but we cannot track how long the game has actually been played. Not to mention the fact that the average injury time still seems to be 3 minutes since VAR has been introduced despite these VAR decisions eating up minutes at a time.
The Juventus Porto second leg last week famously went to injury time. The second half of injury time went on for 4.5 minutes after the allotted 15 minutes. That was obviously just tacked on to try and make an exciting game go on longer, as the 45 minute equivalent would have been 13.5 minutes added time.
The Wolves Liverpool game on Monday saw Rui Patricio go down on the 87th minute, and then saw him stretchered off on the 90+11th minute, a whole 14 minutes later. How much injury time was there after that…7 MINUTES!!! Making a mockery of the term ‘injury time’.
Even more weirdly, in the North London Derby, 46.30 was on the clock, 2 minutes added on were to be played. The commentator said “and the referee hasn’t yet decided to end this half, much to the frustration of…”, and then the ref blew up 5 seconds early and they said something like “and he’s finally blown the whistle for half time”.
I don’t want to start a discussion about how they manage time better in that other sport popular with urine-drinkers and horrible shoe enthusiasts. I just want people to start to realise that the laws of space and time are distorted beyond all recognition when it comes to injury time. It’s based on complete guesswork when there should surely be an easy solution.
Bizarre rant over.
Sam in Stockwell
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