Ronaldo

I'm divided. I do feel ETH is showing him a lot of disrespect highlighted by the situation where he tried to bring him on for a couple of minutes the other week. There are 2 reasons you bring people on for the last few minutes. First, you are under the cosh and you have an experienced defensive player on the bench, you bring them on to shore things up. Or you want to give a young player a few minutes as part of gaining them the experience as part of the process of making them ready for the first team. Ronaldo isn't a defensive player and isn't a youngster, doing that to arguably the greatest footballer ever is massively disrespectful.

Strangely when Ole kept Henderson and Lingard last season there were many talking about how disrespectful Ole was being when in both of those cases there were valid reasons yet people are refusing to see it with ETH. With Henderson, he went into the season going to be number 1 and then he got COVID, and not just the 5 days feeling a tiny but under the weather COVID, he got long COVID and wasn't able to train let alone play. By the timehe was over it DDG had been in amazing form, infact it's arguable that DDG and Ronaldo were the only players who turned up last season. It's not like he was so good at the end of the season before, he played fewer games that season yet had more errors that led to shots and errors that led to goals that DDG so thinking he deserved to displace a keeper in really good form as soon as he got over his long COVID was ridiculous.

And with Lingard, United wanted to sell Lingard, Ole wanted to sell Lingard. The only team in for him was West Ham. Man Utd wanted around £30mill which in today's market was fair. West Ham plead poverty and bid £18mill and wouldn't budge. Then they proceeded to spend over £30mill on Zouma, a player who was always injured at Chelsea and when fit would have 1 good game and then a run of poor games. For too long United fans have complained that we pay a United tax to buy players meaning we overpay while we end up selling players for way under the market value yet. When WH were willing to overpay for a player from Chelsea and wouldn't pay a fairish fee in the current market for a player they already knew was a great fit that's not being disrespectful to Lingard, that's WH being disrespectful to him.

I also feel ETH has hung him out to dry, for example he may not have been able to reveal exactly why Ronaldo missed pre-season for privacy reasons, which is why the club only said it was for Family reasons but the way he answered questions just fostered the idea Ronaldo was effectively on strike. And when he left at half-time in the pre-season match he did play he didn't put to bed the idea that it was just Ronaldo, every player who wasn't involved in the second half left, maybe ETH didn't authorise that but don't give validation to the press that it was just Ronaldo.

And his criticism of Ralf is correct, everyone suddenly started acting like they knew who he was but hardly anyone did outside of German Coaching circles. And even then he is known more as someone who revamps things behind the scenes, not as a successful coach. Many of the clubs he has been at have had more success when he has left than when he has been their manager. United should have brought him in to help Ole as a Director of Football and then if Ole still wasn't working to find a manager that was fitting what was going on behind the scenes. As it was because he was manager he wasn't really able to revamp things behind the scenes and then a manager who was very single-minded about his way of doing things was brought in rendering it pointless following up with the plans to have him working in the background as it wouldn't gel.

However, I'm not sure Ronaldo has really done this the right way and some of his criticism of the facilities is unfair. The problem with the turnover of managers is each one has had their own ideas so a lot of money has been spent on changing the facilities, especially the setup of the training pitches to meet these requirements. So that makes a full-on long-term redevelopment of them tough as they have to get what the manager needs right now in place not the stuff that would be useful longer term. Also the medical facilities have had a massive upgrade, including now having a mini-hospital which means players don't have to go out to a local hospital for many things, including the signing medicals

There seems to be this myth though that Ronaldo can't press, you see often for Portugal and even times since he came back to United that he will and can happily track back and then break forward. If he can do that there is no reason he can't press, after all, its not like Rashford and Martial are natural pressers either, in fact if ETH can get Rashford who has to have one of the worst Football IQ's out there to be effective (Rashford can be great when he doesn't have to think, he just does but as is consistently shown when he tries to beat defenders with the ball at his feet or in front of goal when he has to think about what he is doing he fails over and over again). It seems more that Managers are telling him not to press as there have been games he has pressed and done so fairly well. And there is no reason any team cant carry one player, especially United right now where they have enough high-energy, quick players where you could go to Ronaldo 'occupy the CB's' and then have the others close down, the problem is more that in reality the rest of the players really aren't doing full press, its one player pressing and the others not or a player pressing at the wrong time.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen ETH try Ronaldo in the 10 role with Bruno dropping into midfield. A big thing with United this season is we simply haven't been clinical enough. Bruno is being targeted so he goes wandering to find space to do what he is great at doing but that means when we break we don't have someone arriving late in the space so the wide players don't have the pull-back option so its fairly easy to deal with the predictable ball. With a faster striker using that pace to draw defenders to create space and Ronaldo arriving later it would give more options and Ronaldo finding space in that 10-18 yard range would be fairly lethal. The only problem with that is we would most likely have to drop Eriksen who has been really good although you could do what has been happening at times and play Bruno out wider, especially seeing as Dalot is better going forward than he is defending so you could leave him to hug the line while Bruno is slightly tucked in