The list is not perfect but idk, it's been worse other seasons, I find this one tolerable.
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2015/16 Football/Soccer thread
- Thread starter tml
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The problem with this kind of selection is it is determined by the number of votes by the Internet. I'd argue that about half of these voters are teenagers who lied about their age and just voted for "names", "looks" and "amount of goals scored". This is how you ended up with teams filled with 10 players from the "Big Three" and only 1 from the losing finalist. I'd be tempted to say some of those names needed replacements as well.
the toty should've been, imo:
neuer
-could also make a case for claudio bravo since he won everything with club and country except for spanish supercup... but neuer is always a fine choice
dani alves, pique, CHIELLINI, alaba
-ramos is a fine footballer but he didn't achieve anything noteworthy in 2015, meanwhile chiellini was outstanding and played a key role in all the trophies juve won. shame he missed out on the UCL final though...
iniesta, VIDAL, DE BRUYNE
-vidal played key roles en route to winning trophies with both juve and chile. earned a big money move to bayern and has been killing it there too. de bruyne broke the assists record for a season in the bundesliga, and played very well with belgium to qualify for euros. has also been one of the best players for man city since his move to england.
-pogba is arguable, and i don't think he is undeserving of being part of the ideal XI. james, however, should not be there imo. he had some spectacular goals and was very important for madrid but didn't play well in big games (a general theme among real madrid last season) and underwhelmed with colombia in the copa america.
the only forward that should be an absolute lock is messi. cristiano had a fantastic goalscoring year individually, but generally flopped in important matches (0 goals against barca, psg, atletico to name a few). suarez had the year of his life, scoring as many goals as messi and providing assists all around, also scoring in many important matches (ucl final, EuSC, club world cup, dismantling real madrid). neymar and lewandowski were also tremendous..
messi, SUAREZ, neymar
neuer
-could also make a case for claudio bravo since he won everything with club and country except for spanish supercup... but neuer is always a fine choice
dani alves, pique, CHIELLINI, alaba
-ramos is a fine footballer but he didn't achieve anything noteworthy in 2015, meanwhile chiellini was outstanding and played a key role in all the trophies juve won. shame he missed out on the UCL final though...
iniesta, VIDAL, DE BRUYNE
-vidal played key roles en route to winning trophies with both juve and chile. earned a big money move to bayern and has been killing it there too. de bruyne broke the assists record for a season in the bundesliga, and played very well with belgium to qualify for euros. has also been one of the best players for man city since his move to england.
-pogba is arguable, and i don't think he is undeserving of being part of the ideal XI. james, however, should not be there imo. he had some spectacular goals and was very important for madrid but didn't play well in big games (a general theme among real madrid last season) and underwhelmed with colombia in the copa america.
the only forward that should be an absolute lock is messi. cristiano had a fantastic goalscoring year individually, but generally flopped in important matches (0 goals against barca, psg, atletico to name a few). suarez had the year of his life, scoring as many goals as messi and providing assists all around, also scoring in many important matches (ucl final, EuSC, club world cup, dismantling real madrid). neymar and lewandowski were also tremendous..
messi, SUAREZ, neymar
At least you guys didn't draw 2-2 with Exeter like we did. Having said that, we did put together a team that just met each other 3 days ago and only had 45 appearances for Liverpool in total (Benteke had 21 of those) so the result and performance is acceptable. We also played a bad GK in goal so...
As for ToTY, my pick will be
1) GK: Buffon
It would have been game over in the first half against Barcelona if he didn't produce a fine performance in the final. Also produced a string of impressive performances en route to the final against Olympiakos, Dortmund, Monaco and Real Madrid. Neuer is in with a shout too. Ter Stegen won the Champions League but is too inconsistent.
2) DEF: Alves Pique Boateng Alaba
Alves and Pique played their way back to form in 2015 so hard to exclude them. Chiellini and Godin are also good picks for the other CB slot ahead of lol Ramos. Hard to overlook Alaba at LB.
3) MID: Busquets Marchisio Vidal
Busquets, always underappreciated and underrated. Keeps the Barcelona team ticking in the middle of the pitch.
Marchisio is deployed as a utility player, and helped fill in gaps whenever players like Pogba and Pirlo are not available and he was very good in what he offers to the team. Much better than Pogba who sulked and disappears when things didn't go his way. Only game he was bad was the final but even then he stuns the entire Barca team with his backheel. Not bad.
Great run of form since February with a string of impressive performances means Vidal is good for this.
Rakitic, Iniesta and Verratti are difficult to exclude though.
4) FW: MSN
- Separating MSN of 2015 is a crime. Those three tore teams to shreds and breaks all kinds of records along the way. Lewandowski and Muller misses out due to how well each of the MSN complement each other. CR7? lol. 25 of his 57 goals come against Granada, Espanyol, Malmo and Racing Santandor. He also flops in big games.
EDIT: Forgot about Muller but it's hard to pick his position. I'll categorize him as FW
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Just a hypothetical question, suppose that Man Utd sack LvG, who do you guys see as the man to take over you guys mid-season? I don't think you guys would appreciate Mourinho's style either since you guys already complained about LvG being boring and Mourinho's teams have the tendency to park the bus. Giggs doesn't seem ready to take over yet unless you guys want to do a Real Madrid.
I can see what Van Gaal is trying to do. At the start of the season he said he preferred a fluid forward and a striker in no. 10 instead of a midfielder (the reason he gave for not playing Herrera). What he tried to do was to have a 'false 9' i.e. Rooney who is comfortable dropping back to create space for a 'false 10' i.e. Depay who will take advantage of the space left by a hopefully out of position centre back distracted by Rooney. He'd have a ball recycler in front of the defence and they'd basically keep passing sideways until the false 9 + false 10 trick creates an opening. He basically wanted Utd to play like Barcelona under Guardiola.
Unfortunately everybody knows this trick now and the way to defend against it is to tell the centre backs not to mark the no. 9 too tight and for the defensive mids to sit extremely tight to the defence i.e. park the bus but deeper than usual with two banks of 4. So you had these extremely boring 0-0 matches where Van Gaal discovered Rooney isn't Messi and Depay isn't Iniesta so they really didn't have the silky skillz to just waltz through a packed defence. What's the solution? Bypass the deep defensive line entirely with a good header of the ball which is why he kept sending on Fellaini at the end of matches. Long balls are always a gamble though but at least you level the playing field against a 10 man defence and he got extremely lucky because it kept working! Fellaini was scoring and setting up goals match after match for a while.
But even he realised it wasn't gonna work in the long run so he ditched Depay and tried the same tactic except with inverted wingers instead i.e. Martial and Mata. So Rooney still is the false 9 dropping off occasionally while Martial or Mata will run inside to fill the space and become the 'false' striker. So he basically wanted Utd to play like Barca under Vilanova. Again it didn't work because, again, everybody knows how to play against it now which is to sit deep while telling your wingers to man mark their 'inverted' wingers instead of passing them on to the defensive mid. Combined with the full back this tactic nullifies them. Again another run of 0-0 draws and this time the 50/50 long balls to Fellaini weren't dropping in Van Gaal's favour.
So now it looks like Van Gaal has slightly given up, he dropped Rooney for once, he even played Ashley Young one game as a conventional winger, he started playing Herrera occasionally and the biggest clue he changed his "filoshofee" is he stopped sending Fellaini on. I really don't know what kind of system he wants to play now, I think he's still going for the inverted winger thing with Martial starting wide but I think Rooney looks like he can get in the box more too as a conventional 9 but it's all a bit up in the air at the moment until he settles on an XI that we can see.
This is where I think Wenger has been a bit clever because instead of sticking strictly to any well known system, he has coached a fluidity into his long term players. He's using Giroud as a false 9 to create space but he's also a target man so teams can't sit deep against him. That's really been his success because teams stopped sitting deep against us but that just allows the inverted wingers like Sanchez to thrive in the space. Ozil is a bit of a false 10 too because he keeps going to the wing and it's in this moment of transition that a space opens up that Sanchez can move into while the defenders sort their feet out. Cazorla being the playmaker from deep nullifies the opposing team's defensive mid who can't track him and physically intimidate him. So Wenger has taken everything he has seen and learned from around Europe and moulded it into his team. He's not the only one though: Guardiola is doing this at Bayern which is why they bought Lewandowski and Barca are doing it now too which is why they bought Suarez. I know I'm a big Wenger fan and this is kinda a plug but if Wenger had a £80m striker instead of £12m Giroud he'd be on to something. Not forking out £50m for Suarez was the biggest missed opportunity in his time imo.
Unfortunately everybody knows this trick now and the way to defend against it is to tell the centre backs not to mark the no. 9 too tight and for the defensive mids to sit extremely tight to the defence i.e. park the bus but deeper than usual with two banks of 4. So you had these extremely boring 0-0 matches where Van Gaal discovered Rooney isn't Messi and Depay isn't Iniesta so they really didn't have the silky skillz to just waltz through a packed defence. What's the solution? Bypass the deep defensive line entirely with a good header of the ball which is why he kept sending on Fellaini at the end of matches. Long balls are always a gamble though but at least you level the playing field against a 10 man defence and he got extremely lucky because it kept working! Fellaini was scoring and setting up goals match after match for a while.
But even he realised it wasn't gonna work in the long run so he ditched Depay and tried the same tactic except with inverted wingers instead i.e. Martial and Mata. So Rooney still is the false 9 dropping off occasionally while Martial or Mata will run inside to fill the space and become the 'false' striker. So he basically wanted Utd to play like Barca under Vilanova. Again it didn't work because, again, everybody knows how to play against it now which is to sit deep while telling your wingers to man mark their 'inverted' wingers instead of passing them on to the defensive mid. Combined with the full back this tactic nullifies them. Again another run of 0-0 draws and this time the 50/50 long balls to Fellaini weren't dropping in Van Gaal's favour.
So now it looks like Van Gaal has slightly given up, he dropped Rooney for once, he even played Ashley Young one game as a conventional winger, he started playing Herrera occasionally and the biggest clue he changed his "filoshofee" is he stopped sending Fellaini on. I really don't know what kind of system he wants to play now, I think he's still going for the inverted winger thing with Martial starting wide but I think Rooney looks like he can get in the box more too as a conventional 9 but it's all a bit up in the air at the moment until he settles on an XI that we can see.
This is where I think Wenger has been a bit clever because instead of sticking strictly to any well known system, he has coached a fluidity into his long term players. He's using Giroud as a false 9 to create space but he's also a target man so teams can't sit deep against him. That's really been his success because teams stopped sitting deep against us but that just allows the inverted wingers like Sanchez to thrive in the space. Ozil is a bit of a false 10 too because he keeps going to the wing and it's in this moment of transition that a space opens up that Sanchez can move into while the defenders sort their feet out. Cazorla being the playmaker from deep nullifies the opposing team's defensive mid who can't track him and physically intimidate him. So Wenger has taken everything he has seen and learned from around Europe and moulded it into his team. He's not the only one though: Guardiola is doing this at Bayern which is why they bought Lewandowski and Barca are doing it now too which is why they bought Suarez. I know I'm a big Wenger fan and this is kinda a plug but if Wenger had a £80m striker instead of £12m Giroud he'd be on to something. Not forking out £50m for Suarez was the biggest missed opportunity in his time imo.
Nice to see the players playing with more freedom, and edge, though it's a shame we almost fielded our strongest eleven against a team like Scunthorpe, Loftus-Cheek was refreshing to watch though, took his goal really well, the kid has a bright future. United's last gasp victory last night made me appreciate this comfortable result more than I otherwise would have lol...Seriously though, we need to stop focusing on bringing in established stars and work on developing the talent we have coming through or there's no point in even having a youth academy, people blamed Mourinho for neglecting the youth but I always held that it was more of a Chelsea thing, just as Senior Technical Director (whatever the fuck that means) Michael Emanelo has always had final say on all the ins and outs of the first team, not the manager in charge.
http://metro.co.uk/2016/01/10/louis...eds-tactics-against-sheffield-united-5613307/
really
We needed to play with wingers to make the pitch as big as possible. So we improved by restoring the shape,’ said Van Gaal.
THEN PLAY WITH FREAKING WINGERS IN THE FIRST PLACE
really
We needed to play with wingers to make the pitch as big as possible. So we improved by restoring the shape,’ said Van Gaal.
THEN PLAY WITH FREAKING WINGERS IN THE FIRST PLACE
Problem is Man U doesn't have like any wingers at the moment. Martial is basically our only very good winger and he's better playing narrow than wide. Mata doesn't have the pace to spread the pitch and Young is decent but not great.
At diving? Even Sturridge dives better than him.
Jokes aside, Man Utd doesn't seem to use wingers well though. Di Maria and Depay looked lost in the team.
Di Maria's problem was basically that he did something to get on Van Gaal's bad side, which is essentially a death sentence. Memphis needs a good, aggressive fullback behind him to be dangerous, and nobody currently on our healthy roster fits that description (RIP Shaw).
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/louis-van-gaals-attacking-football-3886382
"He's got incredible energy and very importantly he likes attacking football," said Woodward. (on Van Gaal)
What was he smoking? This is just as bad as Gerrard's "Joe Cole is as good as if not better than Messi" quote.
"He's got incredible energy and very importantly he likes attacking football," said Woodward. (on Van Gaal)
What was he smoking? This is just as bad as Gerrard's "Joe Cole is as good as if not better than Messi" quote.
There will be riots if Messi didn't win it this time lol. Most of the people who voted for Ronaldo and Neymar are Real Madrid fans or Messi haters.
Having said that, hopefully Neymar and Alaba will be strong contenders next time since it is starting to get boring when the award is shared by them 8 seasons in a row.
Messi got robbed on the Puskas award, I think at least 50 players in the top leagues could pull that winning scissor kick off against a mediocre Brazilian league team.
How many can run from pretty much the halfway line, cut through 4 players of a very decent Bilbao team and in a cup final; probably no one else.
How many can run from pretty much the halfway line, cut through 4 players of a very decent Bilbao team and in a cup final; probably no one else.
That is what happens when you allow the public to vote for it.
Seems like the Journalist and bloggers in Brazil voted for Lira.
Anyways found these tweets about him so...
https://twitter.com/lucasammr/status/686626150743949313
https://twitter.com/lucasammr/status/686626368780648448
https://twitter.com/lucasammr/status/686626580139999236
https://twitter.com/lucasammr/status/686626801163091968
Plus it kind of doesnt matter. we will always remember this goal like Messi's 2nd against Madrid in 2011, which didnt make the top 3 lol.
It was kind of sad that Messi only got 40% though.
Plus the team of the year just proved that the majority of footballers don't actually watch it...for example- Thiago Silva making it. Rooney got more votes than Tevez for goodness sake.
Seems like the Journalist and bloggers in Brazil voted for Lira.
Anyways found these tweets about him so...
https://twitter.com/lucasammr/status/686626150743949313
https://twitter.com/lucasammr/status/686626368780648448
https://twitter.com/lucasammr/status/686626580139999236
https://twitter.com/lucasammr/status/686626801163091968
Plus it kind of doesnt matter. we will always remember this goal like Messi's 2nd against Madrid in 2011, which didnt make the top 3 lol.
It was kind of sad that Messi only got 40% though.
Plus the team of the year just proved that the majority of footballers don't actually watch it...for example- Thiago Silva making it. Rooney got more votes than Tevez for goodness sake.
The problem when you are good for an extended period of time like Messi is the extraordinary becomes "same old, same old" to the public. We will remember his performances against Arsenal, Man Utd, Madrid, Bayern and Bilbao (for example), though.
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