CL - What's the point

Yup.

Personally I'd take the glory of winning the FA Cup and seeing Lloris lift the trophy than seeing Spurs make it to the CL group stage but players and the money men would rather see the latter happen.

 

That season was just plain greedy

 

Seems a long time ago

 

It's a tournament I have zero interest if we are not in it . I have no support for any British teams as
it will only increase their buying power the more successful they are at our expense .
Saying that we were dreadful and deserved to be out . The squad was far to weak in depth to make any impact .
I wouldn't want us to even bother with the Ropey cup . It will only suffocate any small chance we have of top 4.
A team at our level , the advantage of being in it , is to retain players and in theory buy better players .
One we bullsed up .

 

I don't care what competition we are in, I want us to go all out and win it. The attitude shown by Pochettino to cup competitions is disgraceful.

 

I think we would all love to win a cup. We all are a bit negative and not very optimistic because it is wasted emotion knowing the team are not blowing a gasket in trying to win a trophy.

We know the score, we been there before.

 

I guess that Poch must be on board with Levy . Cups hold little financial gain , forget glory,
that's a dated concept at board level . He must have their backing to take them lightly .

 

Depending on how the league goes in the next couple of months we might well take the EL seriously..........if we get into it.

 

I think we do but the squad isnt good enough to win it.

 

That's right. Does taking it seriously mean we play the same 11 in every game? Obviously not with the travelling involved often. Does it mean playing a weaker team in the league - not while we are close to the top 4, and risk losing any hope of attracting better players.

 

I take your point vimhawk and it would be good to see the rules of the game properly applied. If you read the account of Spurs in Europe in the 1960's it was if anything worse than it is now. That's not to say it's ok because it isn't but professionals will go with the culture of the game and if that includes diving and feigning injury that's what they will do.
I think there has been some attempt to address the problem in the PL in recent seasons but just look at the amount of shirt pulling that goes on. How do you detect the really injured player from the faker it's very difficult.
The culture of the game has to change and fans can take a part in that by not tolerating cheats but even that is difficult. Sadly it has always been a part of football, Corinthian Casuals still stand out as the ONLY team to have taken a really strong stand against it. Who? ........... Exactly!

 

That's not his fault, blame the football authorities for too many competitions. The PL is all important and quite rightly Pochettino gives that priority.

 

No, blame UEFA.
For they have tried to raise their tournaments above domestic leagues, inflating the
number of fixtures needed to win them etc, all in the name of corporate greed.

In the days before the CL, English clubs managed UEFA tournaments well
(which were then an interesting BONUS and NOT the be-all and end-all) .
And that was in the days of 42 game seasons etc.

With the cash torrent in the PL, I would love the usual suspects to take a stand
and state they are not participating while the current joke fixture rounds /
schedules are in effect.

 

So you probably wouldn't like to be reminded of the fact that we've appeared in as many cup finals under Poch as we did under Harry then?

 

But also the League Cup which is a cup too far. Exclude the PL from it and make a place in the PL a prize for winning it. That would cause some fun.

 

I said a while back that, of all the nations in this season's Champions League, England and Scotland are the only ones dumb enough to have two full cup competitions during a season: Spain, Italy, Germany, Holland, Russia, Ukraine, Switzerland, Turkey, Belgium, Denmark, Bulgaria and Poland only have one cup competition, while France and Portugal have a second cup competition but the top flight clubs get a bye into the later rounds - which is played when the league is having its winter break.

While a tiny minority of Premier League clubs are capable of competing on all fronts as they have the squads to do so, for the vast majority a cup run carries the risk of knackering your players or affecting the league form, as best exemplified by the season Middlesbrough were in two cup finals yet also got relegated from the Premier League.

 

Clubs competing in Europe get byes in the league cup and prem teams get a couple of byes in the FA cup.

Having said that, i actually think it's wise to de-prioritize the league cup. If you make it into the later rounds then take it seriously. FA cup you can assess at the midway point in the season. Still in the hunt for top 4 with a small/shallow squad? De-prioritize that too.
The EL is different now though, it's a trophy like the others but also comes with CL qualification. So if we're adrift in 5th (or worse) come mid-Feb then we have to go for that with everything we've got.

 

It's a consequence of the perennial ego waving of the FA and the Football League. They have always been at each others throats and it's always football that suffers IMO. We never needed a League Cup the FL just couldn't stand the success of the FA Cup. The PL was as much about the FA gaining power, and money, as anything else. Like all these governing bodies they become stuffed with people in suits who use their old boy networks to get their seats. How many actually have connections to the game? It's not what you know etc. It's how the UK works sadly.

 

Celtic are the intriguing spanner in your theory. They've just won a cup, are comfortably in control of the league, and walked away from their CL group with their heads held high after a better than expected showing. And Brenda has used more or less the same 14-15 players all the way through. The big deciding factor is the league. No one in the SPL is remotely close to Celtic's level of ability, so they can waltz their way through most games without getting out of 2nd gear. The PL is a far more punishing contest that has claimed the pride of many a big club.

 

The byes that clubs get aren't that helpful: in the League Cup the clubs playing in Europe skip just one match, yet they have a bunch of midweek games added to their fixture list (including a two-legged semi final) and the mid-season final leads to fixtures being rearranged, while the FA Cup having replays not only adds the potential for additional midweek fixtures, but once again the probability of fixtures being rearranged.