Never looked like scoring in a month of Sundays

[Sideshow Bob]

That was unbelievably poor. No urgency, no idea. Everyone was rubbish. I feel numb. So bad.

 

[bludsucker]

Very very poor. Performance looks like the last days of moyes. The players showed no passion. It's so very tedious to watch us.

 

[AshTurner129]

Sorry but Van Gaal has got to go. I was losing patience but refused to call for his head, but that changed after the Norwich defeat last month. Not often someone like Mourinho comes available, he would be my choice. Baggage yes, but the greater good outweighs his bad.

 

[Berba_God]

It was horrendous. No words can do justice to how poor we play.

Doesn't help that our depth of squad is nul and void.

No positives for a long time.

 

[Sideshow Bob]

I'm struggling to think of a valid reason for why 3-5-2 was used.

 

[boothstownred]

We should have gone 4 4 2, back to basics. Pivotal point today, I think it's the day lvg fully lost the fans. Can't see anyway forward with him.

 

[RichH2016]

The club need to move on from him now.

He's actually taken us backwards and with pep and Jose available we've got to go and get one of them. Otherwise things will get a whole lot worse.

Can't believe I want Jose but that's how bad LVG is!!!

 

[se7en]

Surely people weren't expecting anything different? We got lucky against Sheffield United, just barely scraping past teams.

 

[JSNFRMN]

I think we did progress under him, progression stopped in October and we've been going backwards since November/December. I'm not really sure what the board are thinking, but I imagine it's blind faith. Hopefully they have a plan in place.

 

[RichH2016]

See I'd argue that I've not seen progress.

Sure we finished top 4 last season but points wise we weren't much better off. And we scraped through in the end. The football has been pretty dire bar a handful of games and I just don't see that we've improved. Certainly not for the money that's been spent.

What I do find rather odd though is how bad the footballs gotten since his first pre season tour. During that tour we played football that I more associated with LVG. It was quick, it was with purpose, it was incisive. So what happened? OK it was pre season so the pressure is off but if you compare that with our style now... It's like he's trained all talent out of the players.

 

[JSNFRMN]

The brand of football was dire but the team had improved in terms of what Van Gaal wanted them to do, the defence was organised, we were keeping the ball better and chances were being created. Since beating Everton 3-0, we've got worse at all 3 of those aspects of the game. The brand of football was poor, that wasn't going to change but I believe we were getting better at it.

 

[RichH2016]

See I don't think actually our defense has improved. When we look to go for a more attacking approach we are really shaky at the back. We look more solid most the time because we've got numbers back and keep so much of the ball... But pretty much any team can do that. Chances have always been scarce under LVG with maybe only one or two quality chances a game.

 

[JSNFRMN]

While I agree with some of what you're saying, I can't agree that we didn't improve at all at playing his style of football. We've gone backwards since October but we performed his brand of football much better at the beginning of this season than we did in his first few games. In terms of what he wanted, he'd have been happier in September 2015 than September 2014, that's improvement. I'm not saying it was an improvement aesthetically, for what Van Gaal wanted it was though.

 

[se7en]

Our best period was about this time last year and haven't touched it since. We gained in defence for a while this season but we still weren't great.

 

[RichH2016]

While I agree with some of what you're saying, I can't agree that we didn't improve at all at playing his style of football. We've gone backwards since October but we performed his brand of football much better at the beginning of this season than we did in his first few games. In terms of what he wanted, he'd have been happier in September 2015 than September 2014, that's improvement. I'm not saying it was an improvement aesthetically, for what Van Gaal wanted it was though.

Yes maybe LVG was happy with how we were playing in September 15 compared with 14... But that doesn't mean he'd improved us. Just means we were playing more the way he wanted us to play. That doesn't mean it was an improvement though.