I think the success of a team is often as impacted by the strength of the opposition at any given time as it is the quality in the team itself. Lets be honest Leicester's year literally everyone else was in either free fall or rebuild - the fact that the foxes were the winners was ultimately down to that in the end - the jokes on MOTD were that nobody wanted to win it with 8 games to go.
If you compare the team to the truly great prem teams, there's always been three ingredients - depth, workrate and flair. Ferguson had two players for each position, a mindset programming which meant the whole team worked and ran harder than the opposition, and then Cantona, or Ronaldo, or Beckham, or Van Persie, the list can and does go on.
We now have a squad which on paper at least have minimal gaps. Bar centre half where we are a little exposed to a possible "made it" lapse from Tanganga, followed by a chasm in class to Carter-Vickers, we have a squad of 22 for the main task at hand which is to be compact, well organised and if the Utd game is anything to go by, work bloody hard.
The flair bit is the bit that excites me. I've noticed that a lot of people's references to the poch era miss what made his best team so good - Eriksen and co were great but the reason for our dominance in games was the complete unplayability of Rose and Walker down the flanks. They had great engines, were not scared to get stuck in and do the dirty work and created chance after chance for the forwards. Now with Reguillon and Doherty, or even Aurier, we've got the scope to do that again - indeed with Reguillon it will be impossible to curb - its his natural game. In order to do that you need someone better than Dier at sitting in front of the defence, and in PEH we have that. Also in the flair camp are the obvious, Bale, Kane, Son and Bergwijn but increasingly also Ndombélé who can turn a moment in a game. If you compare the list of players who could turn a dour 0-0 into a gritty 0-1 in January in Burnley, to what we had 12 months ago, we've lost Eriksen, and gained Reguillon, Doherty, Bale, Bergwijn and Vinicius.
I'm looking forward to this season, based on that last bit.
If you compare the team to the truly great prem teams, there's always been three ingredients - depth, workrate and flair. Ferguson had two players for each position, a mindset programming which meant the whole team worked and ran harder than the opposition, and then Cantona, or Ronaldo, or Beckham, or Van Persie, the list can and does go on.
We now have a squad which on paper at least have minimal gaps. Bar centre half where we are a little exposed to a possible "made it" lapse from Tanganga, followed by a chasm in class to Carter-Vickers, we have a squad of 22 for the main task at hand which is to be compact, well organised and if the Utd game is anything to go by, work bloody hard.
The flair bit is the bit that excites me. I've noticed that a lot of people's references to the poch era miss what made his best team so good - Eriksen and co were great but the reason for our dominance in games was the complete unplayability of Rose and Walker down the flanks. They had great engines, were not scared to get stuck in and do the dirty work and created chance after chance for the forwards. Now with Reguillon and Doherty, or even Aurier, we've got the scope to do that again - indeed with Reguillon it will be impossible to curb - its his natural game. In order to do that you need someone better than Dier at sitting in front of the defence, and in PEH we have that. Also in the flair camp are the obvious, Bale, Kane, Son and Bergwijn but increasingly also Ndombélé who can turn a moment in a game. If you compare the list of players who could turn a dour 0-0 into a gritty 0-1 in January in Burnley, to what we had 12 months ago, we've lost Eriksen, and gained Reguillon, Doherty, Bale, Bergwijn and Vinicius.
I'm looking forward to this season, based on that last bit.
