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Boxing Talking Football With....Paul Parker: Simeone to Man Utd Not A Bad Idea
After a week with Champions League and Premier League back on the menu, we caught up with Paul Parker. He discussed why the Diego Simeone to Manchester United rumour perhaps isn’t such a bad idea, how Swedish wonderkid Anthony Elanga could be repurposed as a forward to help with the attacking struggles at the club, and how there’s no club looking to cement that all important 4th position in the league.
Roy Keane has suggested that Man Utd should look to hire Diego Simeone as their next manager. Do you agree with your former teammate? Is Simeone the right profile for Manchester United?
“I like Diego Simeone. I like the way he manages. I like what he gets out of his players. I think he got to the point where you can still see the back bone of what he used to do at Atlético Madrid, but he can’t get the same anymore. The mentality of the players he’s got now is not the same as what he had back in the day.”
“It’s a different breed of players now. You can’t scream and shout so much at them, because they’ll tell their agent and the agent will go cry to the owner, saying they have been mistreated and verbally abused. When someone says you gotta work hard, that’s verbal abuse nowadays. You can’t ask anybody to work hard. You got to ask them just maybe if they can try a bit harder. “
“I get that (the Simeone rumour), and I think what Roy is looking at, is looking at the discipline-side of it. He would take no rubbish and I get that. I agree on that point.”
“His demands would be too much for the club, because he wants to win things. He doesn’t want to go to Manchester United and just go through a process of what everyone else is. His people and himself would ask: ‘What are you going to do to help him trying to win this league? What are you going to do differently from the previous five or six managers with this one?’ And Manchester United are either going to come up and stick to what they have been doing or they are going to lie and kid into what he’s going to do.”
“I can’t see that happening. If that happens, that means there has been a big shift in what Manchester United are trying to do and what they want to do. But the one thing that the club needs now is discipline. Because the players aren’t disciplined in what they are doing. You can just see it by the way they are playing. You see the way every time something is going wrong the way the players are waving their arms at each other. In other words, they are disrespecting each other in front of seventy-odd thousand people at Old Trafford. Hoping that the fans will have a go at that player rather than have a go at them if they make a mistake. I always thought football was a team game. It used to be back in my day. And whatever you thought of anybody, you would never show it in front of people just to protect yourself.
Are you not afraid Diego Simeone will be too defensive as a coach considering how Manchester United should be playing, with their traditions of dominating and controlling the games?
“Yes I get that, but I think he might be more modern than that in how he does it. We look at (Antonio) Conte, and he is very much like that in his own way – very structured, all about not conceding goals, but he also scores goals. We saw what he did with Chelsea. Turned them around.”
“He (Antonio Conte) wants the teams to defend and attack together. I think (Diego) Simeone is exactly the same. He brings in the right players, who knows what is expected. The same as Conte will try to if he stays at Spurs. In the summer he will try to bring in players that he knows that he can communicate with, and he will be hoping that those players will influence the dressing room to understand what Conte is about.”
United definitely seem to have a striker problem right now with Ronaldo out of form and Cavani injured. Do you think they could repurpose one of their wingers (Rashford, Elanga, Sancho) as a striker or false 9? Is the Manchester Derby a good opportunity to try something as radical as that?
“I think (Anthony) Elanga is the only one you can do it (playing as a striker or false 9) with. You don’t want to put too much on his shoulders, he’s still trying to build a career. You try not to put him in the limelight too much, you don’t want the media to put him up too high – ‘he’s gonna be the next this, he’s gonna be the next that’ – for all of a sudden, for too much going and it all falls apart, before he’s even evolved. A bit like what’s happened to (Marcus) Rashford.”
“It does need a change. I’m trying to think of someone but Elanga out of all the wide players is the one who’s done really well.”
“Elanga, you think to yourself, it’s okay but you don’t want to put the onus on him, you don’t want him suddenly for his game to collapse cause all of a sudden he’s out of position and if it isn’t going right, he might think ‘oh, I’m better off out wide, I was playing good out there.’
“The other two, Sancho and Rashford, just haven’t been good enough so far.”
“We’ve seen already, they (Man Utd) haven’t got a focal point, they haven’t got a centre-forward.
“They’ve gone through that mode and as much as Ronaldo, you have to be a team that plays with the ball in the final third to get anything from him. You virtually have to get him facing the goal, give him a clear shot, give him somewhere where he can shift the ball out of his feet and get a shot off.”
“If he has to try and beat somebody, he’s just not beating people is he?”
“So, it’s really really difficult. But just about now, getting into the process of getting into the final third, there’s nothing there at all. Nothing.”
“Nothing guaranteed defensively, still, not right, no balance. Doesn’t know which full-backs to play. End up playing Lindelof at full back, which was madness. Keep Lindelof where he’s doing okay, in the middle, you know.”
“You got two right backs and all of a sudden both of them are sitting on the bench. What’s going on there?”
“You look in the midfield, you just have a lot of energy. You’ve got (Bruno) Fernandes, who keeps wanting to throw his dummy out of the pram all the time.”
“So, what do you do? You really haven’t got any guarantees when you look at somebody and go, I know what he’s gonna give me. You haven’t got that.”
“I think the one defender you know a hundred percent what you’re gonna get is Victor Lindelof. You know what you’re gonna get from him.”
“You look in the midfield, you got Scott McTominay, you don’t know if he’s gonna get sent off or not because he’s trying too hard to impress all the time, pumping the badge, kissing the badge. It’s no guarantee that you’re a good player. It means you’re showing that you want to be committed but might end up getting sent off or injured because you’re trying too hard.”
“Fred, the loveable Fred who’ll run all day for people. He’s honest about his strengths and weaknesses.”
“Fernandes, at the moment things aren’t going right for him when he plays the game for himself, not for the team, so that’s a problem.”
“And up front, where is the guarantee? There is no guarantee.”
“Manchester United is in my heart, and all I want them to do, at worst, is compete. Fight for first and second, that’s all everyone is looking for, where the club should be. A club like that.”
“First, second and third, compete there with Man City and Liverpool. Be there, be there with Chelsea as well. You can’t put Chelsea in there, they’re above United both in terms of playing and points. Compete with them at the top four.”
Among Man Utd, Arsenal and Tottenham, who’s your pick to make it to the top 4 and what does each club need to do to get that precious Champions League spot?
“You got Arsenal, so inconsistent, with that grand stand finish when they scored late on against Wolves on Thursday night.”
“Then you got Tottenham, who go to Man City, Harry Kane decides to come out and play and gets all the headlines. Then they go and get beaten by Burnley, which you expect. It’s cold, it’s wet in Burnley – that’s not Tottenham.”
“And then they go and beat Leeds. Everyone’s saying it could have been 10. Leeds are rubbish, their form is inconsistent. It is ground level or sky high. It was kind of alright against Man Utd but Liverpool and Tottenham killed all of that.”
“Conte is suddenly in one breath saying, which he’s trying to deny, that it’s not good enough, wherever he was misinterpreted or whatever.”
“It’s very difficult to call who’s gonna finish in that fourth spot. I really can’t nail it down.”
“It’s not going to be West Ham, as much as I would like it to be West Ham because that bothers the Premier League because the Premier League don’t want West Ham finishing fourth, not in a million years. They want Arsenal and Tottenham.”
“They don’t want Wolverhampton Wanderers being there either, it doesn’t suit them. It doesn’t suit their narrative to have that.”
“It’s between three of them (Arsenal, Man Utd and Tottenham) really, who’s gonna fumble their way through it. There’s nothing about them to suggest that any of them deserve to be in there.”
“In fact, we should as a country and maybe the Premier League, take that spot away for the fact that no one deserves to be there.”
“Don’t humiliate us in Europe.”
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