Honestly, I think we should ditch both domestic cups and launch a British cup. It would be far more interesting and the prize money could be big enough that teams take it more seriously. Plus if the PL and SPL sides enter later then there's less games so you can shuffle a few league fixtures around early on and have a couple of weeks winter break. One of the problems is that the FA Cup and League Cups don't meant anything. Win the league and you're champion of England, win the CL you're champion of Europe, win the British Cup and you're champion of Britain. No one gives a **** about being the champion of the third biggest competition in England so there's no reason for clubs to take it seriously and risk their performances in other comps.
A very (very very) minor plus of Kane being out is that Jose might not park the bus and their defence won't concentrate as sharply. Really not ideal at all but if I think back to the performance and result against their noisy neighbours last season we are capable of playing superbly even without our talisman.
I remember travelling to games home and away when we beat Villa and Norwich in the FL Cup in years past. Wonderful experiences!.......and a recent triumph against Chelsea in the same comp.Wouldn't exchange those experiences for anything What can I say. This Spurs fan wants Tottenham's name on everything......and why not? This is 2017.Our players today should be fitter than players of yesterday(?). I remember in the past we would play 3 games in a matter of days over Christmas and Easter with virtually the same teams......players just got on with it. Nobody mentioned hamstrings and tiredness like they do today......AND.....the players travelled in coaches a lot....remember Henry Coaches? Was concusion mentioned in the past? No.They used to head the ball and not each other! ......and they would play on rock hard pitches in the past not watered down grass to make playing areas nice for the telly.
Add to that the obvious problem with the FA and Season Killer Cups: what's the difference? Both have finals played at Wembley, and the incentive for either trophy is a place in the Europa League - unless the winners qualified for the Champions League, of course. The only real difference is how the Europa League places are distributed: if Southampton reached last season's FA Cup final they'd have been given a Europa League place, but as they reached the Season Killer Cup final their reward for finishing as runners-up was to see the Europa League place allocated to the trophy given to Everton in spite of the fact they were eliminated in the third round of the cup. So where's the incentive for teams to bust a gut to win the tournament if reaching the final doesn't necessarily guarantee them the prize of European football for the next season? It's hardly unique in England for the secondary cup competition to be seen as exactly that: secondary. Case in point, in France the Coupe de la Ligue is seen as little more than a way for Ligue 1 clubs to keep their squads match fit during the winter break, and given the fact that the Ligue 1 clubs playing in European competitions don't even enter the tournament until the last sixteen it's hard to argue with that - and the only exception to that are PSG, as in recent years they have tried to paint themselves as the most successful club in all of France based on the number of trophies won, a figure which by complete coincidence is grossly inflated by PSG's CdlL wins compared to teams that have several more Ligue 1 trophies such as Lyon, Monaco, Marseilles, Saint-Etienne and Nantes. None of this makes PSG look like a club riddled with insecurities, of course...
Yeah but you see that's why he played so poor the other night, he knew he had a shift on his hands for tomorrow. He's got this
We haven't won the league in 56 years. 56 bloody years! So the cups were essential. Ask Bill Nick.....
So the fact we were challenging for the title for the past two seasons means nothing if we don't win the Season Killer Cup? Come on.
Challenging is one thing.Winning it is another.....and Spurs were always a cup team. Perhaps someone can point out what we lack EVERY SEASON while we give the league championship to someone else!
Based on the past two seasons, referees willing to turn a blind eye or twelve per match and fans with a mentality of making do with a cup once in a while regardless of the fact that cups only matter to teams that otherwise won't qualify for Europe or teams that have made such a bollocks of their season they need something to distract their easily-distracted fanbases with. The former is us in the George Graham era, the latter is Arsenal for the past few years. Do you want Spurs to be either of those clubs? Because I ****ing don't.
Leicester didn't have unlimited funds so what's wrong with us (as usual!) Spurs are like that beautiful girl who leads you on,takes you to her place......and slams the door in your face!
Leicester are a one off. I won't call it luck because they won by enough to make that a non issue but there was certainly no formula there for anyone else to learn from.
Astro on the Liverpool board likes to calm himself with the money excuse, he can never explain why you have spent so much less than them but are consistently so much better though. I suppose lots of people just need some sort of excuse to keep them calm.
They had two obvious advantages i.) A lack of any other competitions to distract them (no European football, out of the FA and Season Killer Cups early) ii.) Referees turning a blind eye to Huth elbowing opponents in Leicester's penalty area while Vardy and Mahrez kept diving in the opponent's The fact there was such a public outcry after that match where Vardy was sent off after picking up a second yellow for a clear dive, and how pundits and hacks alike were haranguing the referee for booking Vardy for committing a bookable offence, demonstrates how off-kilter perspectives got with The Leicester City Fairytale™ - and that's hardly unique, either, considering just how much leeway Liverpool got from referees a couple of seasons earlier.
When you have money, winning the PL is far more repeatable than awaiting the "perfect storm" that gave Leicester their PL win. Spurs obviously now have a repeatable method for being a PL challenger right up to the end. Correspondingly the question has now become whether a change in the method allows the final step to be made, or is it sadly going to require loads more money to be spent.
If we assume that our squad remains slightly inferior to the rest of the big six due to smaller expenditure then that suggests the following explanation of our current performance and lack of trophies. Pochettino is an excellent manager whose teams beat weaker sides more often than you would expect. But we still tend to lose to stronger sides and that makes all the difference to the trophy haul. This can be solved by continual incremental improvements which means we need more time and money which is best bought by top four finishes and CL involvement.
Our problem is not a lack of a great team, it's a lack of a great squad. We can't fill our allotted 25 and when we've got a number of injuries, like yesterday, we struggle late on in games. We're not United or Citeh. We can't afford to pay more than Harry Kane's wages to keep players like Zlatan or Carrick hanging around just in case. Summer 2016 really screwed us. We bought Vinnie, Sissoko and GKN. They can amass less than half a dozen decent performances between them and we're short those 3 players. If we had some top talent on the bench, Harry Kane doesn't pick up a hamstring injury late on against Liverpool and we probably get something out of yesterday's game......and the semi-final against Chelsea.......The recruitment side of things was in meltdown and we ballsed it up. Unlike the clubs above us, we can't afford to buy Luke Shaw, Angel Di Maria, Mangala, Claudio Bravo and the just let them hang around in case they shape up. Ideally, Josh Onomah would be ready now.......but he isn't. We need to buy Barkley this January and work at integrating Llorente. He's a very good player but expecting him to play like Harry Kane is wholly unrealistic. He needs the likes of Dele Alli and Christian Eriksen to get closer to him, run beyond him and we need to be getting the ball to him in the box more. I fear that he didn't play much yesterday as Harry Kane's not playing Wednesday and Llorente can't be expected to play in 2 big games in 4 days. Playing Son on his own against Madrid fills me full of dread.
