Daniel1980

We don't have a striker on the bench. It means if we aren't doing well, Hazard, Fabregas and Willian will be subbed in.

Andre is definitely going to be sold then.

On redcafe right now United fans aren't exactly happy about their summer signings' impact: LOL £150m. I almost feel sorry for them. Kudos to the board and Jose for our summer transfers--and to our new lads too.

I won't be surprised to see half of our usual XI start.

I have never seen him play, but I have an Ukrainian coworker who says this guy is very inconsistent and much worse than Willian was at Shakhtar. He had a good last season in the domestic league, but he didn't score many goals - he assisted. He never scored more than 5 goals from open play in the Ukrainian league in 5 seasons he played for Shakhtar. Not a good sign.

Don't forget that last season Willian took set pieces, which made his chances created (and key passes) stats look better. But that aside, Willian really kind of regressed this season (I'm not talking about stats here). He seems even more toothless. I often feel like there's a higher chance of something happening when Ivanovic goes forward rather than when Willian does.

I agree that a young fast CB to play the high line effectively is a bigger priority, but RW is important too. We're very predictable because of the lack of threat from RW.

Yeah, and a direct player who's far better defensively than Schurrle (and who can play as a midfielder or even as a RB if needed). I haven't watched Serie A much in the last couple of seasons, but other Milan fans I know who still watch Serie A regularly rate him highly. Some rate him higher than Sanchez(and they obviously have seen Sanchez a lot since he also used to play in Serie A). They say this season Cuadrado just seems a bit demotivated after not having been sold in the summer.

The same happened when we signed Cesc. Other PL fans promoted us to #1 favourite for the title if we sign him, but so many of our fans were complaining and wishing for us to sign someone else.

The only significant Schurrle's stat that is better than Willian and Cuadrado's is goals per minutes played, but when it comes to that, he makes even Hazard look like Eden doesn't have end product. In everything else: chance creation, dribbling and assisting Andre is much worse even stats-wise. I compared their stats only to address lionsden's erroneous statement that "Even stats wise, last season was the only abnormally." That's not true.

These are stats per 90 minutes played, not by appearances or totals, and this season they played about the same amount of minutes anyway.

True, but it goes both ways: Willian plays for a far superior team, with far better players, and racking up assists and goals should be much easier for him.

Last season wasn't the only anomaly. He's been consistently far more productive and creative than Willian. This season isn't exactly Cuadrado's best season, but his stats are still far better than Willian's: In fact, this season Cuadrado made more assists per 90 minutes than even Hazard(0.27 vs 0.19) and scored about the same amount of goals from open play per 90 as Hazard (0.27 non-penalty goals per 90 minutes).

Maybe.

Cuadrado normally doesn't take penalties for Fiorentina and yesterday's penalty was the only one he scored for them at least in official competitions. Costa failed to score quite a few penalties at Atletico. He might take one in a shootout situation, but I don't think he'll be a nailed on choice in a non-shootout situation. And I'm pretty sure either Hazard or Fabregas (or Drogba if he's playing) will take the decisive(4th or 5th) penalty in a shootout situation, not Costa.

He missed a good share of them at Atletico. I wouldn't choose him as a second or even third choice penalty taker and it seems Jose doesn't either.

The one he took yesterday was the only one he took. Agree on our order.

He normally doesn't take penalties(he took only 1 penalty ever for Fiorentina). And Costa isn't an established penalty taker for us. I don't know where people got the idea Costa will take penalties for sure. When Hazard didn't play, Fabregas took the penalty for us.

He has a much better output than Willian. Willian: 71 matches, 7 goals scored: a goal every 10th match Cuadrado at Fiorentina: 105 matches, 25 goals: a goal every 4th match (pretty much the same output Hazard has for us from open play). His assists stats are much better than Willian's too.

Do you know that even Hazard scored only ~30 goals from open play in ~140 games for Chelsea? Considering that Cuadrado played as a wingback early on at Fiorentina(and had to defend more than Hazard), his stats are more than decent.

At Fiorentina he very often played as a right wingback in 3-5-2(at least a couple of seasons ago he did), so he's definitely used to defending and attacking.

Turan isn't exactly a creative mastermind. And his end product is worse than Cuadrado's.

Stats-wise, the guy seems more like Hazard than Willian:

I daresay Di Maria has been much worse for United than Cuadrado. From what I've seen, they're actually pretty similar players in terms of style.

Yeah, this. It wasn't that we had such a bad lineup. It could have worked if our pivot and defenders handled the pressure better. Our poor performance was mostly due to poor individual performance of our players. Against Stoke both Mikel and Matic were fantastic and it worked. This time they both were poor, Iva was poor, Cahill was poor. They all misplaced too many simple passes in our own half and kept giving the ball away. As a result we couldn't keep the ball at all.