I agree Declan Rice is over-hyped now, as it happens often with British players.

Right now, he is nothing special, but we should consider his years.

As I said, I'm not sure he will grow to be a player of Man Utd level, but I could understand there is potential.

If the people at Old Trafford believe in him and if the price is right, then I wouldn't be against such move, but I doubt he will cost less than 50mil, which is too much.

About Wan-Bissaka, I think he would be an upgrade, especially the defensive part, but also physically. He would be a good competition for Dalot and I think both would find the space to play in a very long season. Then, the one who proves to be better player and in better form would have a place in the starting 11 more often.

Sancho is also a bit over-hyped right now, as he still has a lot to prove, in order to be worth 80mil or more. He surely is a great talent, but it doesn't mean he's worth that kind of money.

We don't need to buy someone who can be a backup. We need to buy players who are going to be influential for us. I don't see him becoming one of the best 5 midfielders in the world. He can become a good midfielder, but that's not enough. IMO Schneiderlin is a good analogy here. He was a good player, but didn't really do anything special at Southampton. At the time it felt we needed ANYONE in midfield, but he wasn't a real upgrade and in the end he was a poor transfer. He was also not someone who could become one of the greats.

I'm really sad we didn't try to get Frenkie from Ajax. I know of the Ajax-Barcelona connection and it was always likely he'd go there, but that was a missed opportunity. We have van der Sar in there to put in a good word for United.

There are some that we could look at - NDombele, Rabiot, Aouar, Barella are the types of players that would get me excited. None are really DMs, but I don't think we need a designated DM. If we have New CM, Herrera and Pogba as our midfield three, then we should be fine if the two behind Pogba are CMs, not CM and DM.

Sancho is also a bit over-hyped right now, as he still has a lot to prove, in order to be worth 80mil or more. He surely is a great talent, but it doesn't mean he's worth that kind of money.

The reason why I think he is worth that much is because he could be one of players of his generation. Now he is more talent than actual production, but at age 19(well, he was 18 until a few days ago) he already produces as much as Martial for example. And he is a right winger, exactly what we need.

It's also his age - at 19 players are going to improve immensely in terms of their physique, decision making and.. well in every aspect.

The fact that at that age he has 20 goals+assists in the Bundesliga already this season shows his ability. And also last season in his limited minutes he produced goals and assists at a similar rate as well.

A good way to determine a price of someone like Sancho: (https://statsbomb.com/2017/05/valuing-kylian-mb...)
While Mbappe is better than Sancho, I think most of those things apply for him as well.

*Produces about 0,5 goals per game - that's worth ~50m, at least at such an age as he'd do that for a decade or could be sold for a lot.
*Has the ability to dribble past his man - that's special and worth a lot.
*Has the ability to pick out his teammates regularly, creating assists.
*Can be one of the greats of his generation - once Real/Barca/City/Juve/Bayern buy him, it's impossible or insanely hard to buy him. The Ronaldos and Neymars and Messis don't get transferred regularly. And if he is one of the greats, then it might be Real that comes for him and pays 200m or something. Not bad either.


Therefore I think 70-80 million would not be a bad price. Especially considering that Dortmund already sold Pulisic to Chelsea for a similar amount.

We will never know whether Dalot is good enough, if Young is the starter in most of the games :(

Yeah. That has been strange. Young hasn't been too bad, but hasn't shined either.

I think the problem with Dalot is, that he's a Joao Cancelo clone. He's called a back, but really he's like a winger who can't dribble too much.

Aka: Lacks defensive capabilities but can run for days and do a decent cross.

young has been weak today

chuksi написав:

Yeah. That has been strange. Young hasn't been too bad, but hasn't shined either.

I think Young was pretty poor today. Too many mistakes on both side of the pitch.
Now that he's lost some of his speed and agility, there's not much left, as all the rest is average or below.

Either Ole, Phelan and the staff rate Young too high, or they rate Dalot too low.
I don't know what else to think, because if Dalot is behind a 34 years old Young, then they don't have much faith in him. That would be strange, as when he plays he usually does well.

Apart from Young, we didn't play well as a team today. It is unacceptable to give Watford so much space, so many shots on goal, so much ball possession.

Our team today looked very much like the one under Mourinho.

I also don't understand why did Ole pull Pogba back, practically to the same position he played under Mourinho. He should have played on Mata's position imo, as that's where he gives most for the team.

Good for the 3 points, but this game should be a signal for Ole to make some changes, as we're not going to win games like this very often.

On the positive side, Shaw was great today, as well as Smalling and Jones.

I generally agree.

Today the whole team was poor. We seemed too slow for most things - the intensity was not there. Thankfully we managed to score a few and defend just about well enough. The good thing about this team is that even when we don't have the ball and defend with our backs against the wall, we can still be dangerous. Under the previous managers the focus has been too much on other things that we forgot to attack on the break and that meant we had to break teams down with slow attacks and that didn't happen anywhere near enough. Now we at least tried to counter.

But the way we played on the ball was still pretty poor. The passing wasn't sharp, the movement wasn't good enough. In the attacking third there were a few combinations, but there wasn't any consistency in what we did. Mata in the whole worked until Watford figured out how to nullify him. Martial and Rashford didn't impose themselves on the game, neither did Pogba, who seems to struggle if someone pays special attention to him. Matic was overwhelmed when pressured and didn't handle things well at all. Maybe we missed Lindelöf a bit - his passing from the back is quite important getting our attacks going. I don't know if he would've improved us a lot, but he would've created some space in midfield because Watford couldn't have let him have time on the ball. Today they just stepped off Jones and Smalling as they were not a threat to anyone.

I agree on Jones, Smalling and Shaw. They were very good. Especially Shaw. I feel it's not too long until he is considered the best in the league or even the world. Jones and Smalling were good defensively, but I feel that on the ball our buildup lacked composure and the ability to play the ball out from the back because we had them there. Maybe I'm being harsh on them and Watford pressed well and our midfielders and attackers didn't do enough, but I feel like we should expect more from our CBs.

As for bringing Pogba back - I think it was a choice of introducing Fred as a CM or Lingard as AM. I'd guess that Ole wanted us to continue countering and seeing how Pogba didn't do THAT much when he played ahead of Matic and Herrera while still seeing that he could play the pass to create our winning goal, it made sense. In the end I think Pogba wouldn't have been influential either way. In the number 10 role he would not have got the ball often enough, in the number 6/8 role he was far from goal.

I think it would've been a good game for McTominay. Slightly surprised he wasn't on the bench.

We must improve from this and just.. do the simple things better.