But having said that, I think a lot of the building blocks have been put in place over the last couple of years and these last two results in many ways show what can be done with fit players. Coping this well without madders and kulu is impressive - hopefully TF can keep this going!

No coincidence that Sarr & Bentancur are having a good start to the season. No mention in any of the commentariat (or most of the fans tbh) about the great start under Ange and how things eventually fell away by having teenage square pegs in round holes. Feel Frank is showing more flexibility

Looking forward to reading this later. It seems to me that there is a fair bit of similarity with how we're playing - eg: energetic pressing, still a high line. But it's clear it helps when you have the first choice back 4 + goalie and a properly defensively disciplined DM.

Erm, Badly Drawn Boy?

Yeah, but one of you can hear David's Last Summer (or the whole of His n Hers) on repeat and the other can't

Didn't we say that post-conte? "The next mgr is a coming into a multi-season project which will have heartache & frustration along the way but we will ultimately be all the better for the stability"... Rinse & repeat

Having said that, it is nice that we top & tail the season with hone games and don't have to travel outside of London for the 4 games over the Christmas/NY period

Well Frank seems like a decent sort of person tbf, and maybe he (or whoever it turns out to be) looks at the underlying numbers and realises he's onto a good thing. But...Just don't see us not having the same conversation in another 18-24 mths

If levy is unwilling/unable to do that (mostly the outlay part) then we won't be any further forward and unless we get very very lucky, a simple change in manager isn't going to fix things. We'd just have to hope for fewer injuries to key players

Stability is the key - the goons have stood by arteta and are now regarded as being one of the best teams in Europe - ugh. They don't have the silverware (which is obviously funny) but they are genuinely close. Mainly that comes from backing the manager, both in terms of outlay and in terms of trust

My take is that if he was going to sack him, it would have been done by now so that the process of getting a new poor sap in could begin. Levy has never really courted any kind of publicity so why should we expect him to now?

Apologies because I know the original post was more on the ETH/Ange (non-)comparison, but the point that Man U were doing better under ten hag needs to be contextualise as well

Personally would say it's way too early to cast judgement on him, but presumably the underlying numbers aren't looking too crash-hot (in the way that Spurs' numbers look chalk & cheese between first XI and the second/third/fourth choice players we've been forced into playing)

Amorim has also suffered though by coming in November with (obviously) no pre-season or input into the summer's recruitment strategy

Oh be fair. He did say "Injuries have been a factor this season" in the, erm, 10th paragraph of an 11 paragraph piece

"Verging" doing a lot of heavy lifting there