Manchester United Thread 25/26 - Teamtalk/Transfers/Gossip Mod Note in OP 12.02.26

wolves have recently taken 7 points from villa, Liverpool

And arsenal, dunno what’s happened but they are not the worst team in the league anymore

Because Case is old with Ugarte his only back up?

The performances in the first 2 games are completely at odds to what we have seen since then.

The drop off in intensity is hard to fathom .

Hopefully we can push on and make a champions league spot .

Unfortunately Mainoo is not proving to be Carricks saviour as some have predicted.

Need to sign at least 1 if not 2 full backs in the summer. It's getting to crisis point.

The likes of Casemiro, Maguire, Shaw, Malacia, Zirkzee and Ugarte are all players clearly on the way out. Yet they are still getting game time as there is nobody else.

It's coming back to bite them a bit now that they didn't even get a midfielder on loan in January.

Results went downhill. Dorgu is a big loss

I think we are lethargic and the big gaps in between games doesn't help, you can't get any rhythm going.

I don't agree with lads talking about fitness, you don't just lose fitness as a professional athlete in a matter of weeks, where you are training every day, I think it's match sharpness we are lacking.

Last night was lost in midfield, we couldn't sustain any sort of decent possession to provide a foundation to attack.

I think when we have been lauding Lammens, we should acknowledge he should have done better for the winner, it was the only place it was plausibly going.

Martinez is the biggest loss in setting the tempo of any game he plays.

Bruno is back to pressing like a madman and generally having the free role he once had. It's great when it goes well but it causes issues.

I think all of us agree that Amorim was wrong to be playing him in a 2 man midfield, but I could see some logic behind it, that logic being that it kept Bruno disciplined / generally stopped him from pressing solo.

Bruno always puts in a huge shift, but he's a law unto himself when it comes to pressing opponents, and he leaves the team exposed while doing it. Him running past Sesko to press a CB was common last night, that is completely detrimental imo.

Good point on Mainoo. Thought he was pushed around the place last night. We need a strong physical presence in the middle of the park to replace Casemiro. The likes of Locatelli could possibly be tempted from Juve, though may lack a yard of pace for the Prem League

Our biggest problem is not having Martinez fit.

His ability to play the ball quick into the middle and find the man means teams have to be compact and leave space out wide.

Without him doing that, we just seem to be shifting ball from right to left with very little overlap, and it’s easily defended.

Not a surprise either that Mainoo has gone off the boil with Martinez, Mainoo is best on the ball facing towards goal and linking it up, but he’s not getting that at the minute.

Add In Martinez’s defensive capabilities, and he’s a massive loss.

We've different views of the game so, pressing is a team effort and you can't have one guy running around doing his own thing. It needs to be a group effort. We see the individual brilliance from Bruno when in possession at times but this individualism is a weakness when we don't have the ball.

Why the group isn't putting in the effort is another thing altogether. I would say that what we've seen from Carrick tells us that he's a much more conservative manager than Amorim. We're not pressing as much, we're not getting full backs forward as much.

The same players were doing a fairly decent job of pressing under Amorim, from what we've seen so far, Carrick doesn't want them pressing as high up the pitch or as often as Amorim did.

When he goes rogue on the press like a headless chicken by himself they just play around him and then there is any amount of space to get at us. Press needs to be coordinated and at the right time to work effectively.

He's won games.

Something Amorim struggled to do.