How to score against Andre Onana? You just need to hit the goal.
This summer, the last player who won the Premier League title with the club left Manchester United. David de Gea, who managed to play under the leadership of Alex Ferguson, was not needed by the head coach, who decided to bet on another goalkeeper. At the start of the season, such castling turned out to be a failure.
Onana started in the new team with a missed goal after a shot from the center of the field in a friendly game, but in official matches he did not at all have the potential to become a star. The new goalkeeper made another mistake in the most important match against Bayern in the Champions League.
Manchester United got rid of the club legend for the sake of Onana
De Gea has played for Manchester since the 2011/12 season, and this summer he hoped to extend his contract with the main club of his career. But Erik Ten Hag didn’t really need the 32-year-old Spaniard, even despite 17 clean sheets in the Premier League last season. For the second time in his career, De Gea won the Golden Glove in the English championship, but his performance still did not make much of an impression on the head coach.
David de Gea Photo: © Ash Donelon / Contributor / Manchester United / Gettyimages.ru
Ten Hag and the management of Manchester United had their own logic. The Spanish goalkeeper was not only one of the highest paid players in the team, but also in the entire league, with a salary of under 20 million pounds a year. For the opportunity to stay at the club, de Gea was ready to take a significant salary reduction, but the main issue here was not money. The Dutch coach simply needed a goalkeeper with a modern style of play, capable of not only hitting goals consistently, but also starting the team’s attacks efficiently.
It cannot be said that Manchester United threw out De Gea, but the club was certainly not eager to keep him. The parties conducted long, tedious negotiations on a new contract, but came to nothing. Ten Hag did not hide the fact that he could not guarantee David a place in the lineup after signing Onana. The club legend was asked to fight for a place in goal with a younger competitor. Such an attitude towards the Spaniard looked like an insult.
Re-signing the contract with the Old Trafford favorite would cost the club around 20-30 million euros, depending on the term of the agreement. As a result, at the instigation of Ten Hag, Manchester United spent more than 50 million on the transfer of Onana, who was given a five-year contract. True, the newcomer’s salary was 3.5 times less than De Gea’s.
Why did Manchester United need Onana?
Almost all modern coaches pay special attention to goalkeepers’ kicking. Previously, it was enough for the goalkeeper to catch the balls and then kick them away. According to research, over the past eight years the percentage of goalkeepers passing long balls in the Premier League has dropped from 77 to 56 – a significant difference. Onana, in terms of footwork, is perhaps the strongest among the top goalkeepers; outside the penalty area he acts even more confidently than Neuer in his best years.
New generation goalkeepers must play good passing in order not to get lost under pressure and take an active part in the first stage of attack development. Guardiola has Ederson, Klopp has Alisson, Karpin has Pesyakov. Ten Hag also needed a goalkeeper of a new formation. “The goalkeeper should turn into another field player at the back, so that it is more difficult for the opponent to put pressure,” noted the Dutch specialist.
Andre Onana / Photo: © James Gill – Danehouse / Contributor / Getty Images Sport / Gettyimages.ru
Ten Hag and Onana knew each other very well from their work at Ajax, which managed to make a big splash in the Champions League four years ago. Last summer, the goalkeeper ended up at Inter as a free agent. Onana spent a good season in Serie A, the club was happy with him, but it was difficult to resist the €52 million offer. As a result, the Milanese sold the goalkeeper they got for free at a profit and quickly found a budget option: they took the experienced Jan Sommer from Bayern for 5.7 million.
In pursuit of modern trends, there is a risk of forgetting what a goalkeeper was originally required for. If he is good at kicking, but also catches butterflies in the frame, such a goalkeeper will be of little use. Onana, at the start of the season, put the production of scoring errors on stream.
Maguire is no longer the main scapegoat at Manchester United
The first concerns about the newcomer appeared even before the start of the season. In a friendly match with Lens, Onana managed to miss from the center of the field. Every goalkeeper’s nightmare came true before the eyes of Manchester United fans, as the game took place at Old Trafford.
Andre Onana / Photo: © picture alliance / Contributor / picture alliance / Gettyimages.ru
From the first games in the new team, Onana tried to position himself as the new leader, and did not hesitate to yell at the defenders, including the unfortunate Harry Maguire. This behavior outraged the Liverpool legend, and now one of the main English experts, Jamie Carragher:
— Onana behaves demonstratively in all her clubs. I like the fact that he communicates with his teammates, but to do that in a pre-season game when you are in the club for two minutes is a bit too much for the club captain. Any self-respecting player (Keane, Vidic, Rio, Stam and me!) would have told Andre where to go and advised him to return to his goal,” Carragher said.
After such a failure with Lens, the goalkeeper’s authority and confidence in his own abilities noticeably weakened. The missed goal from the center of the field in the “freight train” could have been attributed to an accident, but the start of the season showed that Onana was clearly not okay. In a situation where the team was hit by an epidemic of injuries, special hopes were placed on the goalkeeper. The Cameroonian not only did not help the team, but did not even carry “his” balls. Only the game against Wolverhampton (1:0) in the first round can be included in Onana’s score; in the next four Premier League matches he conceded 10 goals.
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The first game for Manchester United in the Champions League also ended in failure. At the beginning of the meeting with Bayern, there was an equal fight on the field, in which the factor of the first goal became decisive. As a result, Onana launched a simple ball into the goal after Sane’s shot: the goalkeeper somehow awkwardly folded, managed to touch the ball, but still allowed it to fly over him.
Another mistake gave rise to a lot of mocking memes on social networks dedicated to Onana. One public page published simple instructions explaining what needs to be done to break through this goalkeeper: you just need to shoot at the goal. It is ironic that Onana himself is now the object of ridicule. Previously, Harry Maguire was considered the scapegoat at Manchester United, on whom the new goalkeeper snapped in a friendly game.
Andre Onana / Photo: © James Gill – Danehouse / Contributor / Getty Images Sport / Gettyimages.ru
Onana must be given credit for her behavior after the game with Bayern (3:4). Unlike one Russian star, after awkward questions he did not threaten to put the journalists’ phones in various places, but calmly answered everything. The goalkeeper had the courage not to run past the microphones and take the blame for the unsuccessful result:
“It’s my responsibility, it’s because of me that we didn’t win, and I have to learn from it.” I will have a lot to prove because, to be honest, my start at Manchester United was not that good. It was me who let the team down,” Onana noted.
Even the most stellar goalkeepers have bad periods in their careers. The ability to react correctly to failures is no less important for goalkeepers than jumping ability and reaction. After the first month of the new season, Onana’s transfer seems to be the biggest failure in all of Europe, but the Cameroonian still has time to change his opinion about himself. He has already demonstrated his ability to take responsibility for mistakes, now it’s time to remember his goalkeeper skills.
2023-09-21 11:12:24
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