Did he? I have never seen signs of a style of play.

So you are given the United job, transfixed with these ideals you keep mentioning about how football should be played with pressing and high intensity and inheriting a squad including guaranteed goalscorers such as Ronaldo, Fernandes and Rashford who dont really fit those tactical ideals. Youve got 3 options, what would you do: 1. Play those star players especially Ronaldo and compromise on your ideals, playing tactics better suiting those players. 2. Play those star players especially Ronaldo who arent suited to pressing high but tell them that this how you want to play so you expect them to press high regardless. 3 Drop Ronaldo and Fernandes for inferior players such as Lingard but ones who are more likely to press high and fit your tactics.

Solskjaer never really had clearly defined tactics and was always reliant on individuals getting him out of the shit which Ronaldo has done more than most this season. You cant argue that he would play if United are picking their strongest team so its all about getting the best out of him, not expecting him to do thinks he cant (or wont) do to fit idealistic ideas of tactics. Pressing, high intensity football is not the way they should or can play based on the players they have.

Kane wouldnt press much either. I do have my doubts over the Ronaldo signing but lets face it, he is still a fantastic goalscorer and he has got them out of the shit more than once already. Mourinho has been the most successful manager since Ferguson and won trophies and he wasnt fussed about playing pretty football. These days there is a strange obsession over playing styles of football. The next manager should be judged solely on trophies.

Im not convinced that United have a squad best suited to pressing from the front. Ronaldo is a phenomenal goalscorer but he is not going to press much and Fernandes, Rashford and Sancho arent that type of player either. People obsess over idealistic styles of football but there is no right or wrong way to play, you get the best out of what you have. Perhaps a more pragmatic approach would best suit that set of players because they will win games if motivated and organised with those players at the top end of the pitch.

Its trophies that they should want above all else, not style.

The second half showed an improvement but we still didn't create too many chances still, points on the Ayala was definitely our best player winning every header and Davenport whilst unremarkable was quietly effective. Nyambe was all over the shop and I thought that Buckley was really poor too. The standard/quality in general was again very low, the standard of the Championship seems very low yet the prices are so so high.

Very difficult to expect a player to stop playing for his country, plus Nyambe doesn't always go anyway, he didn't last time due to concussion protocols I think and that is not the first international break that he has not played for Namibia. I wouldn't say that in general he is massively out of form by any means, but he was really poor yesterday, summed up by the foul throw. Would you say that for example Maguire should have pulled himself out of the latest England games, or would you be annoyed if Lenihan was called up but chose not to play to concentrate on Rovers?

I don't understand why Pochettino would be the man of choice, his reputation exceeds what he has actually won. Gutted that Solskjaer has gone. The players had long since stopped playing for him, and there was never any sign of any organisation or any plan, now they will improve without him.

Absolutely rubbish performance in which we simply havent offered any attacking threat. Nyambe has been terrible, Edun has been shaky too. Brereton has been piss poor as a central striker, clumsy and simply doesnt time his runs well enough, keeps straying offside. Khadra has good feet but never gets the last bit right, and Buckley has been really poor, like a performance from him 2 years ago. The sub wont help us get back into the game either.

Apparently travelled with the team which he presumably wouldn't if he wasn't available for selection.

Has Davenport ever played at left back? Makes no sense to have Clarkson as a sub over Pickering and I do wonder if it is potentially contractual, has he ever been left out of the squad?

I would have personally possibly played Pickering and Ayala but I do get sticking with a team that won last time out. Very strange that Pickering isn't at least on the bench though, the bench is imbalanced, do we need Clarkson on there when we have Rothwell and Johnson? We are fucked if either full back gets injured.

I think Davenport did enough against Sheffield United to warrant another start. It was probably his best performance in a Rovers shirt and crucially it adds some more balance that Rothwell beside Travis doesn't give.

Mowbray said that Ayala and Pickering are back, Gallagher is still injured and surprise surprise, sick note Rankin Costello has got a new injury. Unsure if Van Hecke got a 1 or 3 match ban. For me there are 2 decisions to make, I would be tempted to name an unchanged line up but with 2 of undoubtedly our strongest back 4 returning, Edun and Wharton against Pickering and Ayala are the 2 main decisions. Edun has ability but can get caught out of positon and Wharton had signs of understandable rustiness 2 weeks ago. The midfield balance looked better in the last game, so Rothwell is a very capable sub. Kaminski Nyambe Lenihan Ayala Pickering Travis Davenport Poveda Buckley Khadra Brereton Subs: Pears, Wharton, Edun, Johnson, Rothwell, Dolan, Butterworth Clarkson, Van Hecke and Carter to miss out on the squad. Butterworth to make way when Gallagher returns.

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Fair play to Paul Mani, he has done exactly what I suspect that he set out to do by dropping that terrible post in an irrelevant thread and never returning back to it like farting in a room and making a quick getaway. Moving away from allegations of hypocrisy, if people criticise a player when he is playing poorly and then praise a player and rate him more when he starts doing well, is that fickle, or just normal? If anything, the opposite ie being stubborn about player opinions would be more counterproductive.

In regards to your nonsensical backwards argument that any potential FFP breach is down to the manager. Somehow you blame him as if hes the irresponsible one for merely spending the budget given to him by the owners! @Gav pointed out earlier that we have already been in embargo due to failure to fall under regulations well before Mowbray and Waggott rocked up. Venkys are the common denominator. Apologies if I have missed a response but what would you say to that. I also mentioned a metaphor that if you lent me money then ended up getting your house repossessed as a result. Would you kick yourself or blame me for accepting your kind gesture? I get that you may have heard some confidential gossip/whispers but it may well be clouding your judgement. "A lack of oversight" is such a passive, piss poor attempt to try and avoid giving the very same owners who give the money in the first place any blame.

Irrelevant to the point but there is no way that Ayala can be on 30k. Poveda 10k contribution seems beyond unlikely too. Backing the club and covering self inflicted losses after they happen is not the same either.

Again, it was and is newspaper gossip until proven otherwise. Please also note that what often happens is that one newspaper/source reports a rumour, and that is then copied and echoed across various further sources. We may be interested in him, but I could not possibly say that we are (or aren't) definitively.

Nope, not at all. Just to go back, my request was for a degree of flexibility in the budget for renewal of contracts and a couple of million on a striker following the sale of Armstrong. Lets not lose focus of the fact that you had similar requests, hence your daily suggestions of Healey, NIsbet etc, so I am not sure why you are suddenly so keen to go against that But our accounts run from July 1st through to June 30th. This training ground transaction was reported (this article seems to be what Rich Sharpe believes has happened or indeed the reasoning rather than anything official but I will take it as fact) as something done at the end of June to avoid potential FFP implications, at the end of the last accounting year. My request came after the Armstrong sale which as the article states was after June 30th, putting it in the next financial year ending in June 2022. Any signings/signing on fees as suggested by myself at the time would also fall into this accounting year to which we had only just begun. Therefore any issues regarding FFP relating to last year, which were subsequently overcome anyway, had absolutely no relation to what I was suggesting. I repeatedly did point out that any signings would have been in the new accounting year, but you never directly responded to that. In fact the article implicitly states that the Armstrong fee will give us some flexibility underneath the FFP threshold this year, so it actually backs me up that we could spend a bit in the summer if we had chosen too: "With the sale of Armstrong going through in August, for an initial £15m plus add-ons, to Southampton, that will give Rovers even more room to breathe moving forward, with that included in the accounts to the year June 30 2022." All of this is prior to the additional issues that I raised regarding not being able to judge based solely from the accounts how much of any losses were eligible for FFP regulations, and how renewals of contracts would likely be financially beneficial for us in the long term, tying into what was mentioned in the article about making profits on player sales as a more sustainable way of moving the club forward.

These groups that you have created culminating in group 3 are shaped around your own personal views on who is to blame. Venkys didn't make a few mistakes at first, learn from them and then run the club as normal with a vested interest ever since. This is such a bizarre take on things. Mowbray threatens sustainability of club by spending the budget he was given by the owners.

I dont think that its an issue whereby Mowbray would take his foot off the gas if he was given a new deal but there is absolutely no need to give him one before the end of the season, and only then if we overachieve and make the top 6.

Neither Loftus Cheek or Winks will ever come close to dominating anything near the biggest of games. Neither are particularly good, especially Winks. There is something in the methodology of building around our own strengths and minimising our weaknesses, which perhaps leads to a more pragmatic midfield. Bellingham is the obvious break through star although not a typical playmaker himself.

Qualifying is a means to an end, some of those teams had much stronger opposition, Italy have had a bit of post victory complacency and Holland are crap. We lost the most important game of the year unfortunately. Not denying that we have some very good players and albeit with a favourable draw, came so close to winning a tournament but like I said, nothing can be learnt really from smashing teams full of players that went back to their day jobs today. Nothing.