feltmonkey

i believe Mourinho already has the bus warming up ready to come on for the second half.

Ronaldo's just scored a bit of a screamer.

Giggs in?

i think we're suffering the same thing. David Gil was obviously someone who at least understood football to an extent. he seemed to know who the players he was negotiating for were, and didn't go into things thinking he knew better than the man managing the team. Ed Woodward seemed quite different. the crazily low bids for Baines and Febragas could only have come from someone who either had no idea how football transfers worked and the value of particular players, or had decided we didn't need to sign anyone (he said as much in the press, i believe) and was sabotaging the efforts. if only there was some link that someone could post explaining the positive side of a DOF. perhaps some European journalist might have written a piece. we'll never know.

there's nothing wrong with having an assistant manager who does a lot of the day-to-day coaching. but that's very different to a DOF situation, where you have one person who signs players and another who picks the team, makes match-day substitutions, etc.

If the manager is any good, he will get the reserve and youth coaches playing the same way as the first team anyway, you don't need DOF for that. There's another problem with the system - this guy who's supposed to be dictating the football philosophy of the club generally isn't a top manager,or someone who actually has a really deep understanding of tactics. You're putting someone who doesn't have as much of a clue above your manager and giving them a license to meddle. Even if it works properly, all you've really got is the equivalent of one of those office managers we've all worked with who tells everyone they want profits to rise and outgoings to fall and then leaves the job of actually working out how to do this to everyone else, while congratulating themselves on their vision. It's a worthless position.

i think it's a load of crap. directors of football are a bad thing in my opinion. they have two effects - managers get players signed for them that they haven't chosen themselves, and managers get sacked more frequently.

you always do this, Fox - anyone outside of Arsenal with a decent reputation is "overrated" and yet you claim that Arteta is a great leader on the field, and Koscielny is a world-class centre-back.

i'd take that, to be honest.

i feel sorry for Moyes. i still don't think he's a bad manager by any means, it just didn't happen for him. he wasn't quite the right fit for the club, and every shortcoming in his ability has been magnified. we all knew following SAF was an impossible job, so he's failed at an impossible job - we shouldn't be surprised. i hope he goes on to great success in his next job. so what next? i don't buy the reports of it being impossible to get Klopp. it would be a good move for him, as he would be taking control of a huge club, but with lowered expectations. i don't know a great deal about Van Gaal, he's a total football guy isn't he? that would be awesome. however, Liamness has a point that he'll be distracted by the World Cup and we might miss yet another transfer window. i don't think Giggsy would be great. i don't subscribe to the opinion that he's thick - he comes across as quite funny in the Class of 92 film. he's completely inexperienced though, and he just strikes me as yet another on the Old Trafford "he's a great player, he'll definitely be a great manager" production line, following Bryan Robson, Mark Hughes, Steve Bruce, Paul Ince, Ole Solskjaer and others. Diego Simeone would be terrifying for the players, which might be funny. he's done well this season, but does he have a track record? also, are his methods likely to work in the ego-filled environs of a huge club like United?

the weird shifts in style point to him having no idea of the best way of playing, either. United were a "crossing club" so we put 82 of them in against Fulham. then we had some success against weaker teams with one up front and Mata and Kagawa playing clever triangles around behind them, so we went overboard against Everton playing, as Gary Neville put it, meaningless football. we fannied around thirty yards from their goal until inevitably trying one pass to many, losing it, and getting hit on the break. other times we've been obsessed with playing counter-attacking football (quite badly) or ultra-defensive destructive football (also quite badly.) there's no clear ideas or philosophy. it's indicative of a guy who doesn't really know what he was doing, and is out of his depth. i feel sort of sad for the guy. i really wanted him to succeed - the appointment was made for the right reasons, and he seems a decent, principled man. he's been beaten by a mixture of bad luck and his own ineptness. he was handed a bad situation with that first transfer window, when Woodward faffed about contradicting him (Moyes was saying there needed to be a bit of an overhaul, Woodward was saying the squad was fine as it was) and making a complete pig's ear of signing anyone useful. injuries have come at the wrong times, we've had previously excellent players playing like league one reserves, with half the team out of form at once quite often. players who've never known anything but Ferguson have been too slow to adapt to the new regime, others such as RVP seem to have taken SAF's retirement personally and held it against Moyes for some reason. once the players got it into their heads that he wasn't going to be able to lead them to win things, he was doomed. but he's cocked up a lot all on his own. his tactics never seem to be particularly well-thought-out, and rarely work. he can't make a substitution. he has a knack of draining the belief out of his players. he always managed to say the wrong thing in any situation, whether it be saying the squad needed a lot of work - effectively telling the players he had just become manager of that he needed to replace half of them, describing Liverpool as favorites when they came to Old Trafford, or just coming out with clangers like "i don't know what we have to do to win." he took forever to realise that a lumpen 4-4-2 with the likes of Mata on the wing was rubbish (and it seems to be only RVP's injury that has prompted the change.) he's alienated half the squad, even managing to wipe the smile of Hernandez' face. as for a successor, and i know it's a bit vulgar to speculate while Moyes is still in a job, i hope it's Klopp. it seems unlikely in a way, as he'd be leaving his beloved Dortmund to join the 7th-best team in a very competitive league. also, Barcelona seem to want him.

it looks like the Moyes era really is drawing to a close then. if we're talking successors, i think we should pull out all the stops to get Klopp, personally.

Ooh yes please!

christ, can you imagine the damage Harry Redknapp could do with a £100m transfer kitty? thanks Angel, you've cheered me up a bit there. authentic frontier gibberish.

yeah, Everton were much more superior than 2-0 suggests, despite our possession. more superior? is that the right phrase? anyway, i agree the lack of fight was disappointing. it was noticable that when Hernandez came on he provided more drive and determination on his own than the rest of the team had done for the whole 90 minutes. his endeavor created a sitter for Rooney which he missed. any one of us would have put that away, surely? if i'd missed that in sunday league, or even a kick about in the park, i'd be furious with myself for days.

make Jon manager now. Jon in.

fair play to Everton, they were the better team all over the pitch. Martinez out-thought Moyes completely as well.

i just broke off from watching the match to change my son's nappy, into which he had done a particularly large, odorous shit. i don't feel like i missed anything. in fact, it was difficult to see much difference between the shit-filled nappy and United, apart from the fact that at the end of the nappy changing, the shit was gone.

i might just end it all.

interesting substitution. Carrick into defence, Rooney into midfield? is Evans injured again? that would be a shame. i love the guy, but Kagawa has been in completely ineffective mode today. him and Mata seem more interested in flicking the ball to each other than actually creating anything. poor Nani has looked out of sorts, as you'd expect. he's looked unsure of what to do every time he's had the ball.

i thought i gave a fair enough assessment - Liverpool were great going forward, and superb in the first twenty minutes or so, but Norwich in the second half particularly gave it a real go, and caused a lot of problems despite not really having any idea beyond lumping it in the box. Liverpool's defending looked unconvincing, and a better opposition might have scored more on the day. i don't think you passed some sort of test, i think you survived a bit of a wobble, mainly down to the quality of your forwards. overall, do you really think Liverpool played well in that match? there's no shame in riding your luck sometimes - as a United fan, i should know. we did it all last season. perhaps you guys need to be able to take a little criticism without assuming it's some sort of trolling. anyway good luck to you, as also as a United fan, i've got other things to worry about right now.

Gary Neville has a point - our football has been "nice" rather than effective. we can't seem to carve out a chance.

the set-up is fine, and the way we're playing isn't bad, but Rooney is undermining everything. we're trying to play good possession football, and he keeps giving the ball away with attempted crossfield balls. this is making us vulnerable on the counter attack. Hernandez would be a better choice here - he'd actually play as a centre-forward and occupy the defence, rather than dropping back and having to get so involved in the build-up.

i don't think he dropped a clanger anyway. if you look at the slow-motion, Johnson definitely catches him just as he's lining up the punch. edit - that Berbatov goal is absolutely sublime.

lucky Liverpool there. Sky are going to claim they've passed some test of nerve, but they really haven't. they faltered badly, and ended up winning simply because they rode their luck. Norwich showed great spirit, but pretty much no quality, but a series of high balls into the box were nearly enough. having said that, the first Norwich goal was a foul - Johnson's boot catches Mignolet's thigh, causing him to fluff his punch. the defence is comically bad, Skrtel commits a foul of one sort or another from every corner and always seems to have half an eye on how he can score an own goal, and Sakho at times appears never to have played the game before, but the attack is terrific. Sterling was fantastic today, a bit lucky with his goals, but he made his own luck with his intelligent running with the ball, and the pass for Saurez' goal was inch-perfect.