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The reason why Liverpool and City are the favourites is because there is maximum harmony between the managers and players at both clubs and both have top quality squads now, City obviously having the better strength. Also, whoever is going to compete with (or even beat) City needs to also match their very strong attack because this further increases the odds of you winning games (assuming the defence is also strong, which again was proven and backed up in the stats on MNF last night showing Liverpool had very strong (and champion level) defensive stats in the last 6 months, which if extrapolated to a full season, showed them conceding just 28 goals I think it was). They’ve also added and further strengthened their squad throughout the team over summer, and certainly look to have had the best window out of the top clubs by addressing many of their weaknesses. (They may however be more susceptible to injuries than other teams it should be said).
In comparison, Arsenal are very much under construction this year with a new manager who has to coach new ideas and sort his squad out. Mourinho still doesn’t have the team and squad he wants imo, and I just don’t think he trusts or has faith in them to deliver what he fully wants or expects. He’ll obviously only do so badly because he’s still a top coach but only doing so badly ain’t enough to compete with the high bar Guardiola has set. Spurs will always be a very solid and effective side but for me lack the top quality attacking play and goals of Liverpool and City (but we’ll see). Chelsea may also do very well but they still have a new manger there who will take time to instil his philosophy.
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The problem is that Mourinho was the reluctant choice taken by the Man Utd board at the time he was appointed. I don’t think he was ever brought in with the long term in mind, rather he was seen as someone who could bring a title even if it wasn’t quite in the way the club wanted. But since his appointment, the club’s transfer strategy hasn’t changed to suit Jose. There’s the problem, and sooner or later, something will have to give. The board has to decide what direction it wants to go in – at the moment, it is working counter to Jose. The problem is the club has invested heavily in players that aren’t quite suited to Jose, and is it not the cheaper option to find a manger better suited to them than to spend another fortune bringing in more of Jose’s type of players??
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If there was more decorum shown by the top brass at these clubs, perhaps they’d be less traffic generated by these reactions. I seem
to remember Fergie brandishing City a small club some years ago (whilst attacking Benitez for referring to Everton in the same terms). Even when City got taken over, I think Fergie remarked that “there they are (City), still languishing in mid table”. Fans don’t forget these things._____________________________
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Man Utd have basically panic bought several big name players over recent years to try to keep in touch of the challengers, whilst at the same time chopping and changing managers, so there’s no harmony between the manager and transfer strategy. Mourinho still needs his kinds of players and this idea that he can just use what he has whilst also supposedly trying to play more like the Man Utd way is just idealistic flawed thinking.
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Understand the points you raise Nine, and you may well be right. I think KDB is one of those players who goes more under the radar compared to Salah in terms of the noticeable contribution and impact he has on getting City’s attack ticking and flowing. And you can never beat the proven reliability of star players. The point I would add from my last post is that although he would undoubtedly be a loss to City, Guardiola is such a clever manager (with big resources) that he has better redundancy options not just in terms of quality but innovation. He could find a way to make up more for his loss (though it may take a few games) more than could Klopp could without Salah imo. Now over a run of games, that might not be immediately obvious, but over a season I think it would be, i.e. City’s effectiveness without KDB would perhaps drop 10 to 15%, whereas Liverpool without Salah would drop more (assuming none of our new players or Sturridge has a blinding season). That last point is the unknown – if Keita and VVD fulfil expectations and say Sturridge stays fit and banged goals in, then a loss of Salah wouldn’t be quite as bad.
Either way, this season will be a close and absolutely fascinating battle between the two clubs. Guardiola is the more innovative and balanced out the two, but Klopp has such a strong connection and bond to his players that they fight so hard for him and so Klopp claws back somewhat here – enough to beat Guardiola? That’s the $64 million dollar question.
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Gjblues, saw it advertised the other day and will definitely give it a watch. The thing that strikes me about Guardiola is that, like Klopp, he acts like a father figure to the players at the club – it’s not just about respect and putting an arm round you, there’s something much deeper there with him. He’s also a stickler for fine details which helps makes him one of the most balanced and complete managers around. I was concerned for him at first when he came to the PL because I thought his philosophy might be too overcomplicated when translating it through to the players with regard to the nature of our league but because he has that aura about him, the players listen and deliver. Unique and special talent.
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Key word for me Nine is balance. City are more of a balanced side even though they still play on the front foot. To me, they just defend more naturally or robustly than Liverpool do. I’m maybe getting over picky here but we have to explore things in the fine margins when you’re close to your rivals – and Guardiola is a stickler for fine details. With Liverpool, their game is somewhat more about brute force and having a quick and ruthless attack (and albeit a hard working hungry team that works to win the ball back) whereas City has a more robust overall team strategy. Put simply, you could take any player out that City team and they’d cope and adapt. With a player like Salah, his movement and goals are so integral to our winning formula – and this also eases the pressure on our defenders (who I think are more exposed at times than our rivals defenders).
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This is still the difference for me between City and Liverpool. Whilst of course Liverpool should be less dependent on some players this season, Salah would still be a much bigger loss to Liverpool than KDB is to City. There’s far too much balance and quality at City for it to be a significant problem for them. The biggest opportunity for Liverpool this year will be if City go far in the CL, and thus struggle somewhat to juggle the two at the business end of the season. That said , Liverpool should still be looking for nothing less than maximum points in the coming months to put the pressure on.
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Agree completely Ed, Rashford should have been on even earlier. I think that some of the star players in the team generally believe their own hype whereas players like Rashford strike me as quite a humble lad who just gets on with it.
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Not to detract from the positivity tonight but if Germany delivered that performance, it would just have been deemed a professional job. England do it, and the media goes rather giddy. Let’s just keep our feet on the ground.
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Completely agree Nine, I don’t actually blame Karius tonight, I blame Klopp for ever believing he was good enough. He already had to drop him last season, but still kept persisting with him, even when Mignolet was still performing.
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Track looks far too narrow for cars like that. Disaster waiting to happen.
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The kids have looked a lot more passionate and up for it than the senior team. I’d almost be tempted to just take most of these kids to the world cup and let the senior members have to prove their passion. I do wonder whether a lot of the senior team believe too much of their own hype and hence feel too comfortable – we’ve got to stop putting some players on pedestals and making them feel untouchable – if they have some poor games throw them out and replace them with more passionate kids to teach them a lesson and some humility. With Rooney retiring it marked the welcome end to the ‘golden generation’ – we’ve got to ensure we don’t make the same mistake with our new generation of talented kids.
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If you do Jim, you’d might as well get the engravers out. Arsenal must be in a quandary over what to do; on one hand they don’t want to lose two big players (including Özil), of whom they’d struggle to replace, on the other, both players at times look like they’d rather be elsewhere.
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If I could see evidence of a ‘sea change’ under Southgate, I’d be more optimistic. Granted we’ve got some better players coming through now, we will still have a glass ceiling under him imo.
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I agree Nine but I think a lot more of the club fans would be more sympathetic if England actually performed well on a regular basis. But it’s the same old story every time and as much as Gareth Southgate is a lovely chap and it’s relatively early days in his tenure, I just don’t see us doing very much under him. He completely lacks any charisma, which in my opinion is an absolute necessity for the England job because the players need a figure they can warm to if the going gets tough, and he needs to galvanize spirit into the team. So to most club fans, the quicker this charade is over, the better.
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I think Moyes has been quite naive in his attitude in all of his jobs since leaving Everton and has clearly underestimated all of them.
At Man Utd, I think undoubtedly the six year contract gave him a false sense of security whereby he thought he could take his time and there’d be no consequences. The Sociedad move was always a strange one for me and again I think he naïvely thought he could do a job without speaking a word of the language. And again at Sunderland I don’t think it ever seemed to strike him about the size and urgency of the job there – rather than maintaining the foundation and siege mentality Allardyce had installed, Moyes seemed to act as though he was taking charge of a mid table side whom he could coach some nice football to. If he underestimates the West Ham job, he ain’t going to last long.
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Jim, yeah as I say, I’m just partly playing devils advocate in a way just to look at the other side of the debate which I think is worthy of examination and does raise some important points.
If you’ve not seen it yet – a very good recent film (that as often happens goes under the radar of the main blockbusters) is one called “Miss Sloane”. Very much pertinent to this debate, especially the issue of lobbying which is basically an industry over there and the effect on democracy.
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Yeah fellas, I should stress I certainly wouldn’t want to see such lax gun laws in this country, particularly the automatic arms that can fire huge numbers of rounds rapidly. I was just trying to take somewhat of a neutral position to examine everything.
Jim, as for my last paragraph – I agree on the surface it seems ridiculous that the modern state would take over, though in 1929 many in what was a liberal democracy in Weimar Germany laughed off what they deemed a ridiculous idea that Hitler would ever gain power. As I say above, I wouldn’t want to see the same lax gun laws here, but we should always be wary of an ever more powerful state which we have been seeing in many nations in the West – I’m not saying they’re necessarily going to go rogue but I’m simply stating that a nation in which only the state (and criminals for that matter who get them by smuggling) have guns where the citizens are not allowed them is one that, in many ways, seems troubling.
The root problem here is trust – in the US, there is less and less trust in the citizens because there is less community, more drugs, more mental health problems, as well as other societal problems that help give rise to such massacres. Giving the state more power can work to an extent, but thinking the state will solve the root problem is not the answer either. If western civilisation is ever to solve its problems they need to come from within – the state can only do so much, and if you get the balance wrong and give it too much power, then that too can be dangerous because you can’t always trust the state either.
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I hear what everyone is saying and we all obviously want to see an end to these massacres, but these would be some thoughts. Firstly, I am always surprised when these stories appear that less attention seems to be paid as to why the incident happened as opposed to the means by which it happened. The root causes of these massacres are ultimately people, with the availability of guns obviously exacerbating the problem, and they are usually caused by people who are completely deranged from reality who are often taking powerful mind altering drugs. Having gun control may well reduce some of it, but it will not solve the problem – and bear in mind that some of these people will still be determined to kill others regardless of whether guns are available and so they’ll just find another way – either by way of explosives or other means. China for example have had several knife massacres in recent years. Should we ban the sale of all types of knives? Will that solve the problem?
As for the UK, look at the alarming rate of increase of acid attacks we have, and of knife crime which is now a daily occurrence in many of our cities. Whilst they may not all cause deaths, they cause terrible life changing debilitating injuries.
Calling for the ban of such weapons (which in these cases is impractical anyway) will not solve the root causes. I wish there were more news reports that investigated what the actual causes of these crimes are. But this you hardly hear of, you just hear the usual lone wolf reason or simply gang criminal activity in the case of incidents here – but that isn’t good enough for me. We need to find out *why* more and more people are doing this as opposed to just examining *the means* by which people are doing it. Before people say it – I know a lot more die in the US from such massacres but any death from a massacre anywhere in the world is obviously one death too many and we can’t just shrug our shoulders and put them all down to ‘lone wolves’. There’s clearly more to it than that.
Take the Las Vegas shooter – the bulk of the media reports and discussion since have been about gun control. But I doubt many will have heard that the shooter had been prescribed diazepam in the year before the massacre, which can apparently lead to aggressive behavior. Now this drug may or may not be a cause here – but wouldn’t it be sensible to put the same effort investigating these potential causes as we do when investigating/revising the gun laws? Another problem I would point to is the increasingly individualist nature of society where everyone keeps themselves to themselves with nobody looking out for each other – again society has to take some responsiblity by looking out for strange behaviour in their close family/friends/neighbours etc. This recent Texas shooter posted a picture of his gun the week before on social media with the caption “She’s a bad bitch.” Nobody close to him think that was rather odd when coupled with other behaviour?? If you are to have guns in a society you have to have an extremely vigilant one or else you’re asking for trouble.
Obviously to many citizens, it’s all still a price worth paying for because it would make it a lot harder for a hard-line government to seize control if large parts of the population were heavily armed. So it’s not so much guns they love, but the ability to keep the government from ever becoming all powerful. When you consider the tens of millions of citizens killed by despots over the 20th century, they will see it as a justifiable and essential liberty to have. Interestingly the UK law on guns a century ago was pretty lax – and indeed the reason why gun controls were brought in by the UK state was because they feared popular uprisings by their citizens after the Russian revolution of 1917. See the link below.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7056245.stm
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