sahomerrocks
Well-Known Member
FIFA would suggest that I increase the difficulty if I were playing as City right now
It Could Get A Bit Messi In Here - The Football Thread.
- Thread starter Joe Mac
- Start date
wokeupnew
Well-Known Member
Watford rage quit after the 5th goal. The rest was CPU simmed.
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
At least they didn’t score a ninth! The record winning margin is still ours haha!
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
Nope. There is nothing to feel confident about with United right now. To be honest if martial and rashford were fit maybe. It could be a Chelsea esque situation where your attacking instincts and lack of defence plays right into our hands. As it is we look very light up front to be honest!
Badams
Member
Lack of defense is a nice way of putting "literally giving away goals". At least Aubameyang remains a beacon of hope.
wokeupnew
Well-Known Member
I genuinely don’t look forward to watching Spurs this weekend. I think I need to manage my expectations so anything better than a loss is good. So many things hinge on top 4 that if Spurs fail and fall out of the CL our finances would be fucked. Arsenal and Utd can handle a couple of years of mediocrity but it feels like Spurs are sitting on a house of cards right now.
Last edited:
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
What I will say though is that there is a perverse sort of fun to this. After years of grinding out results to win titles I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen before a game. If we start scoring goals it could a least be an enjoyable mediocre season...
wokeupnew
Well-Known Member
yeah. I think over the past few seasons, Spurs at least on paper, have a team that could win the league. Even Mourihno said so before this season started. We'd need some help from City and Pool faltering a bit, for sure, but I think on paper, we're a little bit better than Chelsea/Arsenal/Utd/everyone else. So, when we drop points like vs. Newcastle or last week against Leicester it feels like a huge loss because you have to be almost perfect the entire year to win the league. Top 4 is everyone's game. You could have anywhere from 60-80 points for top 4 and with a good run of form anyone can get there.
Need to manage expectations better for sure. As of right now, I'd bite your arm off if you offered me top 4 right now, because how things are going I'm expecting 6th or even 7th for this season.
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
You’ll finish 3rd because there are 17 worse teams than you in the league. I disagree with you on the squad. I think you’ve had a title winning 11-14 players but your squads have been weak and that’s ultimately why you’ve faltered. 2016 was your big chance and you bottled it, sadly I can’t see that coming back around again for Spurs.
wokeupnew
Well-Known Member
I think 16/17 (unless that’s what you mean by 2016) was our best change 86 points gets you the league in most season when Chelsea aren’t breaking records
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
No I mean the year before when every big team had a terrible year at the same time and Leicester won the title. You were the best team that year and should have won the title but bottled it so much when the pressure came on that even arsenal pipped you to second!
Badams
Member
Could just as easily have been Arsenal's too smh. Top of the league in February.
wokeupnew
Well-Known Member
no comment
Badams
Member
I won't let you reverse jinx your way to top 4. There's no way y'all finish below fourth.
wokeupnew
Well-Known Member
You both have much more faith in our squad right now than I do.
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
Yeah I mean you’ve regressed but look at the competition! We’re shit, Arsenal might as well have sideshow bob at Centre half for all the use his doppelgänger is and Chelsea is a bit of a project right now.
Manchester United v Arsenal: the Premier League’s lost rivalry
By Adam Crafton Sep 27, 2019
At Old Trafford on Monday evening, Manchester United’s attack will be led by Mason Greenwood, a teenager still too young to buy a beer or get a tattoo.
For Greenwood, a fixture against Arsenal must be a curious event. He may have seen the YouTube clips and manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer may soliloquise but the 17-year-old is part of a generation who did not see, hear and feel first-hand the Premier League’s most engrossing rivalry.
He was barely seven months old when Sylvain Wiltord’s goal sealed the Premier League title for Arsenal at Old Trafford in 2002. Greenwood approached his second birthday when Martin Keown monstered Ruud van Nistelrooy. He may have moved onto the potty as a mozzarella missile and a carton of soup drenched Sir Alex Ferguson’s suit in the Old Trafford tunnel.
This time around, it is United against Arsenal but not as we know it. In truth, it has not been like the old days for some time now. For a while, as Arsenal paid for a stadium and sold off their playing assets, United almost grew to pity their former sparring partners. Now, however, United’s sharp decline has plunged them into mediocrity and the definitive fixture of the Premier League era is no longer an occasion to capture the imagination.
For United, the flaws are grave and obvious. Even those back home are wary of Solskjaer’s prospects. One Scandinavian journalist seconded to England to cover the Norwegian’s reign has secured a break clause in their Manchester rental contract in the event the United manager is sacked.
Opposite number Unai Emery, for his part, is battling for his own long-term future. It speaks for Arsenal’s stagnation that they are the only Big Six side not to win a Premier League match at Old Trafford since 2013, the year Ferguson retired, and last took all three points there in 2006.
Set against the nostalgia of yesteryear, present-day comparisons may always pale. It is early days yet but it is hard to foresee a scenario where we sit down with the grandchildren to remind them of the night Emery and Solskjaer faced off, or when Granit Xhaka and Nemanja Matic vied for midfield domination. This classic fixture may never again compare.
Has any rivalry provided so many picture-book highlights?
Ferguson against Arsene Wenger. Keown and Van Nistelrooy. Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira. Marc Overmars sprinting clear at Old Trafford, his goal greeted by the primal scream of that curly-haired, black-leather-jacketed Arsenal supporter. Ryan Giggs’ shirt twirling in the air and his hairy chest on full display. Wiltord sealing the title on United’s turf. Giggs missing an open goal against Arsenal on the day Ferguson sent a boot hurtling towards David Beckham’s eye. John O’Shea dinking a finish into the Highbury goal. The Neville brothers tag-teaming Jose Antonio Reyes. United ending the Invincibles’ 49-match unbeaten run. Vieira winning the FA Cup against United with his last kick of a ball in an Arsenal shirt.
It is rare to find two magnificent sporting forces at their peak for an extended period of time.
For an eight-year period between 1996 and 2004, the Ferguson-Wenger rivalry was football’s answer to Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, to Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, to Larry Bird’s Celtics and Magic Johnson’s Lakers. It was breathless and brilliant. But what was it like on the inside, for the executives, the coaches, the referees, the rising stars and the superstars? This was a duel underpinned by needle, spite, paranoia and, above all, magnificent talent.
This is the Premier League’s lost rivalry.
For Ferguson and Wenger, the rivalry consumed their existence — and it came to engulf the nation. As tensions mounted, interventions came from club directors, the Football Association, the Professional Footballers’ Association, police commanders, national newspaper editors, ministers in the British government and even contributions in the House of Lords.
After the Battle of the Buffet in 2004, Lord Dholakia, at the time president of the Liberal Democrats, stood up to ask for condemnation of “the behaviour of managers like Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson that resulted in the fracas which took place in the Old Trafford tunnel.”
Richard Caborn, minister for sport from 2001-07, tells The Athletic: “I recall telling the two managers the best thing would be to get some pizza together and talk. I started writing to every chairman at the start of each season, explaining how what happened on a Saturday on the TV would influence the park pitch on a Sunday. These were real spats and I just thought, ‘For goodness’ sake, you are being watched by all these young people.’ I used to see Sir Alex at Boys Brigade dinners in Parliament and he is a friend. He did not have a problem with me saying these things. It was my job. Sport has privileges and power brings responsibility.”
By 2004, hopes of calm were the stuff of fantasy. In late 1997, the first peace talks — 10 hours in length — took place in a bedroom of a Manchester hotel as Ian Wright’s feud with Peter Schmeichel threatened to spiral.
The FA’s former head of communications David Davies tells The Athletic: “The rivalry was often personalised into Wenger against Ferguson. Curiously, at director level, they seemed to get on OK. The United chairman Martin Edwards and Arsenal’s David Dein had been founder members of the Premier League.
“I remember one day during the furore between Schmeichel and Wright. United were at home the next day and Arsenal were playing up north. So myself, David, Maurice Watkins (a Manchester United director) and Gordon Taylor (the PFA chairman) held a meeting from 10am to 8pm on a Friday. The aim was to bring about a truce between the two players. We were going back and forth and it was to no avail. We failed that weekend. It took months upon months to bring about an exchange of letters.”
If the FA hoped this reconciliation would calm the waters, they were gravely mistaken. Rather, it was instead a precursor to the loathing that devoured the two clubs. Disciplinary hearings became more common. Dein in the Arsenal corner. Watkins in United’s.
Ferguson feared dark forces at work, privately suggesting Dein’s post as FA vice-president would benefit Arsenal. By no small coincidence, Dein’s replacement on the FA board in 2006 would be none other than United’s own executive, David Gill.
The persecution complex stretched far and wide. Ferguson sensed an opportunity for mischief when Arsenal’s long-serving physio Gary Lewin combined his duties with the England national team in the late 1990s.
Davies laughs: “United became worried Arsenal would know too much about their injuries and recovery times. Soon enough, Rod Thornley (a United masseur) ended up on England’s staff.”
It was not only with the FA that Ferguson became wound up by Arsenal favouritism.
Broadcaster Piers Morgan, then editing the Daily Mirror, whipped the nation into a frenzy when United did not participate in the FA Cup in 2000.
According to Morgan’s memoir, The Insider, Mirror reporters found Ferguson at a champagne reception in Manchester in July 1999. Ferguson shouted: “Tell your editor to fuck off to Highbury and stagnate.”
When the first day of Jaap Stam’s book serialisation went down like a bucket of cold sick at United in August 2001, his agent pleaded with the Mirror to “can the serialisation”.
“Bollocks,” Morgan relayed to the agent. “I’m an Arsenal fan and he’s going to be out of Old Trafford by the end of the week, which means we’ll win the league.“ Stam was out by the end of the month and Arsenal did win the Premier League.
United sources do not share Morgan’s view, always maintaining an agreement to sell Stam had been in place even before the book came out but fell through initially due to an Achilles injury.
The competitive streak extended to the transfer market. After Arsenal’s Spanish recruitment network poached Cesc Fabregas from Barcelona, United sharpened their gaze on the Iberian peninsula, beating Wenger to Gerard Pique and then Cristiano Ronaldo.
By Adam Crafton Sep 27, 2019
At Old Trafford on Monday evening, Manchester United’s attack will be led by Mason Greenwood, a teenager still too young to buy a beer or get a tattoo.
For Greenwood, a fixture against Arsenal must be a curious event. He may have seen the YouTube clips and manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer may soliloquise but the 17-year-old is part of a generation who did not see, hear and feel first-hand the Premier League’s most engrossing rivalry.
He was barely seven months old when Sylvain Wiltord’s goal sealed the Premier League title for Arsenal at Old Trafford in 2002. Greenwood approached his second birthday when Martin Keown monstered Ruud van Nistelrooy. He may have moved onto the potty as a mozzarella missile and a carton of soup drenched Sir Alex Ferguson’s suit in the Old Trafford tunnel.
This time around, it is United against Arsenal but not as we know it. In truth, it has not been like the old days for some time now. For a while, as Arsenal paid for a stadium and sold off their playing assets, United almost grew to pity their former sparring partners. Now, however, United’s sharp decline has plunged them into mediocrity and the definitive fixture of the Premier League era is no longer an occasion to capture the imagination.
For United, the flaws are grave and obvious. Even those back home are wary of Solskjaer’s prospects. One Scandinavian journalist seconded to England to cover the Norwegian’s reign has secured a break clause in their Manchester rental contract in the event the United manager is sacked.
Opposite number Unai Emery, for his part, is battling for his own long-term future. It speaks for Arsenal’s stagnation that they are the only Big Six side not to win a Premier League match at Old Trafford since 2013, the year Ferguson retired, and last took all three points there in 2006.
Set against the nostalgia of yesteryear, present-day comparisons may always pale. It is early days yet but it is hard to foresee a scenario where we sit down with the grandchildren to remind them of the night Emery and Solskjaer faced off, or when Granit Xhaka and Nemanja Matic vied for midfield domination. This classic fixture may never again compare.
Has any rivalry provided so many picture-book highlights?
Ferguson against Arsene Wenger. Keown and Van Nistelrooy. Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira. Marc Overmars sprinting clear at Old Trafford, his goal greeted by the primal scream of that curly-haired, black-leather-jacketed Arsenal supporter. Ryan Giggs’ shirt twirling in the air and his hairy chest on full display. Wiltord sealing the title on United’s turf. Giggs missing an open goal against Arsenal on the day Ferguson sent a boot hurtling towards David Beckham’s eye. John O’Shea dinking a finish into the Highbury goal. The Neville brothers tag-teaming Jose Antonio Reyes. United ending the Invincibles’ 49-match unbeaten run. Vieira winning the FA Cup against United with his last kick of a ball in an Arsenal shirt.
It is rare to find two magnificent sporting forces at their peak for an extended period of time.
For an eight-year period between 1996 and 2004, the Ferguson-Wenger rivalry was football’s answer to Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, to Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, to Larry Bird’s Celtics and Magic Johnson’s Lakers. It was breathless and brilliant. But what was it like on the inside, for the executives, the coaches, the referees, the rising stars and the superstars? This was a duel underpinned by needle, spite, paranoia and, above all, magnificent talent.
This is the Premier League’s lost rivalry.
For Ferguson and Wenger, the rivalry consumed their existence — and it came to engulf the nation. As tensions mounted, interventions came from club directors, the Football Association, the Professional Footballers’ Association, police commanders, national newspaper editors, ministers in the British government and even contributions in the House of Lords.
After the Battle of the Buffet in 2004, Lord Dholakia, at the time president of the Liberal Democrats, stood up to ask for condemnation of “the behaviour of managers like Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson that resulted in the fracas which took place in the Old Trafford tunnel.”
Richard Caborn, minister for sport from 2001-07, tells The Athletic: “I recall telling the two managers the best thing would be to get some pizza together and talk. I started writing to every chairman at the start of each season, explaining how what happened on a Saturday on the TV would influence the park pitch on a Sunday. These were real spats and I just thought, ‘For goodness’ sake, you are being watched by all these young people.’ I used to see Sir Alex at Boys Brigade dinners in Parliament and he is a friend. He did not have a problem with me saying these things. It was my job. Sport has privileges and power brings responsibility.”
By 2004, hopes of calm were the stuff of fantasy. In late 1997, the first peace talks — 10 hours in length — took place in a bedroom of a Manchester hotel as Ian Wright’s feud with Peter Schmeichel threatened to spiral.
The FA’s former head of communications David Davies tells The Athletic: “The rivalry was often personalised into Wenger against Ferguson. Curiously, at director level, they seemed to get on OK. The United chairman Martin Edwards and Arsenal’s David Dein had been founder members of the Premier League.
“I remember one day during the furore between Schmeichel and Wright. United were at home the next day and Arsenal were playing up north. So myself, David, Maurice Watkins (a Manchester United director) and Gordon Taylor (the PFA chairman) held a meeting from 10am to 8pm on a Friday. The aim was to bring about a truce between the two players. We were going back and forth and it was to no avail. We failed that weekend. It took months upon months to bring about an exchange of letters.”
If the FA hoped this reconciliation would calm the waters, they were gravely mistaken. Rather, it was instead a precursor to the loathing that devoured the two clubs. Disciplinary hearings became more common. Dein in the Arsenal corner. Watkins in United’s.
Ferguson feared dark forces at work, privately suggesting Dein’s post as FA vice-president would benefit Arsenal. By no small coincidence, Dein’s replacement on the FA board in 2006 would be none other than United’s own executive, David Gill.
The persecution complex stretched far and wide. Ferguson sensed an opportunity for mischief when Arsenal’s long-serving physio Gary Lewin combined his duties with the England national team in the late 1990s.
Davies laughs: “United became worried Arsenal would know too much about their injuries and recovery times. Soon enough, Rod Thornley (a United masseur) ended up on England’s staff.”
It was not only with the FA that Ferguson became wound up by Arsenal favouritism.
Broadcaster Piers Morgan, then editing the Daily Mirror, whipped the nation into a frenzy when United did not participate in the FA Cup in 2000.
According to Morgan’s memoir, The Insider, Mirror reporters found Ferguson at a champagne reception in Manchester in July 1999. Ferguson shouted: “Tell your editor to fuck off to Highbury and stagnate.”
When the first day of Jaap Stam’s book serialisation went down like a bucket of cold sick at United in August 2001, his agent pleaded with the Mirror to “can the serialisation”.
“Bollocks,” Morgan relayed to the agent. “I’m an Arsenal fan and he’s going to be out of Old Trafford by the end of the week, which means we’ll win the league.“ Stam was out by the end of the month and Arsenal did win the Premier League.
United sources do not share Morgan’s view, always maintaining an agreement to sell Stam had been in place even before the book came out but fell through initially due to an Achilles injury.
The competitive streak extended to the transfer market. After Arsenal’s Spanish recruitment network poached Cesc Fabregas from Barcelona, United sharpened their gaze on the Iberian peninsula, beating Wenger to Gerard Pique and then Cristiano Ronaldo.
The rancour was mutual.
Wenger was at first baffled and then incensed by the numerous barbs. Upon the Frenchman’s arrival in England, Ferguson hissed: “Intelligence! They say he’s an intelligent man, right? Speaks five languages! I’ve got a 15-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast who speaks five languages.”
Those who know Ferguson believe he was irked not only by Wenger’s talent but also by his sense of superiority. The Scot felt Wenger was credited as a revolutionary, ripping up the diet and fitness regime at Arsenal, while he was cast as a typical British manager.
Ferguson, for his part, was a trailblazer of his own.
He clamped down on United’s own drinking culture. Staff recalled to The Athletic this week how he spoke of “marginal gains” at United’s Cliff training ground long before Dave Brailsford and British Cycling came along. He would request tapes for video analysis and statistical breakdowns before most Premier League clubs had tuned in to the data era.
Another source remembers Ferguson spending long sessions with the United groundsman at the turn of the millennium and demanding printouts with the detail for every square metre of the Old Trafford pitch. He would then discuss his tactical strategy with the groundsman and ensure the pitch was to his liking, both in length and how it was watered, to benefit his players. After a peripheral-vision specialist wrote to him, he invited her in to ensure the vision of United’s players was perfectly monitored.
To see Wenger cast as the Messiah, therefore, rankled with Ferguson.
The to-ing and fro-ing flowed. When Ferguson suggested his United side remained superior despite Arsenal’s 2002 title triumph, Wenger said: “Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.”
Wenger enjoyed the battle. One source recalls how he always declined a drink with Ferguson after games but then decided he’d actually quite like one — after sealing the league at Old Trafford that day in May 2002.
Ferguson, the Glaswegian street-fighter, sensed an aloofness in the more middle-class Wenger and did not like it. Even following painful defeats, such as the 3-1 defeat at Maine Road against Manchester City in November 2002, he would still stomach half-an-hour in the company of a rival boss and could be seen chuckling away with Kevin Keegan even after Gary Neville’s wretched error allowed Shaun Goater to score.
Also, Ferguson did maintain standards. When Arsenal claimed the title on his turf, he insisted on entering the triumphant away dressing room to congratulate the new champions. The former Arsenal striker Nwankwo Kanu, who started on the night, tells The Athletic: “When that game arrived, it was the best of me. When (Sylvain) Wiltord scored the winner, I jumped over his head in the celebration. That is how much it meant. I wouldn’t say ‘enemies’ but… to win there, it meant so much to us and the manager. We lost 6-1 there the previous season. Nobody was happy. We know when Arsene is not happy because he is always so calm and he does not normally shout like a madman. But that day, it was bad for everyone and he just would not accept it. He was really, really upset.”
The relationship continued to sour. The FA pleaded for restraint.
“But the reputation of English football abroad was built upon occasions like this,” former FA executive Davies explains. “Yes, the incidents filled the back pages but the TV audiences were ginormous. It was an extraordinary period.”
Wenger sensed conspiracies of his own, believing journalists based in the north gave Ferguson an easy ride. After one game away to Bolton, he said: “What I don’t understand is that he, Ferguson, does whatever he wants and you are all at his feet.”
Curiously, players on both sides say they paid little attention to the press conferences. Former United goalkeeper Roy Carroll says he “never once heard a player mention it in the dressing room.”
Defender Lauren, a member of the Arsenal Invincibles, says: “We weren’t on the training ground thinking about that. One thing is media, the public, another is the players. Players didn’t care what managers said in the media. If anything, it was a way to deflect pressure from us. Jose Mourinho does it too.”
By 2005, the verbal jousting was over — until the next time.
Wenger said: “I will never talk about that man again.”
Wenger was at first baffled and then incensed by the numerous barbs. Upon the Frenchman’s arrival in England, Ferguson hissed: “Intelligence! They say he’s an intelligent man, right? Speaks five languages! I’ve got a 15-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast who speaks five languages.”
Those who know Ferguson believe he was irked not only by Wenger’s talent but also by his sense of superiority. The Scot felt Wenger was credited as a revolutionary, ripping up the diet and fitness regime at Arsenal, while he was cast as a typical British manager.
Ferguson, for his part, was a trailblazer of his own.
He clamped down on United’s own drinking culture. Staff recalled to The Athletic this week how he spoke of “marginal gains” at United’s Cliff training ground long before Dave Brailsford and British Cycling came along. He would request tapes for video analysis and statistical breakdowns before most Premier League clubs had tuned in to the data era.
Another source remembers Ferguson spending long sessions with the United groundsman at the turn of the millennium and demanding printouts with the detail for every square metre of the Old Trafford pitch. He would then discuss his tactical strategy with the groundsman and ensure the pitch was to his liking, both in length and how it was watered, to benefit his players. After a peripheral-vision specialist wrote to him, he invited her in to ensure the vision of United’s players was perfectly monitored.
To see Wenger cast as the Messiah, therefore, rankled with Ferguson.
The to-ing and fro-ing flowed. When Ferguson suggested his United side remained superior despite Arsenal’s 2002 title triumph, Wenger said: “Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.”
Wenger enjoyed the battle. One source recalls how he always declined a drink with Ferguson after games but then decided he’d actually quite like one — after sealing the league at Old Trafford that day in May 2002.
Ferguson, the Glaswegian street-fighter, sensed an aloofness in the more middle-class Wenger and did not like it. Even following painful defeats, such as the 3-1 defeat at Maine Road against Manchester City in November 2002, he would still stomach half-an-hour in the company of a rival boss and could be seen chuckling away with Kevin Keegan even after Gary Neville’s wretched error allowed Shaun Goater to score.
Also, Ferguson did maintain standards. When Arsenal claimed the title on his turf, he insisted on entering the triumphant away dressing room to congratulate the new champions. The former Arsenal striker Nwankwo Kanu, who started on the night, tells The Athletic: “When that game arrived, it was the best of me. When (Sylvain) Wiltord scored the winner, I jumped over his head in the celebration. That is how much it meant. I wouldn’t say ‘enemies’ but… to win there, it meant so much to us and the manager. We lost 6-1 there the previous season. Nobody was happy. We know when Arsene is not happy because he is always so calm and he does not normally shout like a madman. But that day, it was bad for everyone and he just would not accept it. He was really, really upset.”
The relationship continued to sour. The FA pleaded for restraint.
“But the reputation of English football abroad was built upon occasions like this,” former FA executive Davies explains. “Yes, the incidents filled the back pages but the TV audiences were ginormous. It was an extraordinary period.”
Wenger sensed conspiracies of his own, believing journalists based in the north gave Ferguson an easy ride. After one game away to Bolton, he said: “What I don’t understand is that he, Ferguson, does whatever he wants and you are all at his feet.”
Curiously, players on both sides say they paid little attention to the press conferences. Former United goalkeeper Roy Carroll says he “never once heard a player mention it in the dressing room.”
Defender Lauren, a member of the Arsenal Invincibles, says: “We weren’t on the training ground thinking about that. One thing is media, the public, another is the players. Players didn’t care what managers said in the media. If anything, it was a way to deflect pressure from us. Jose Mourinho does it too.”
By 2005, the verbal jousting was over — until the next time.
Wenger said: “I will never talk about that man again.”