The stats suggest there has been a marked upturn in Spurs output since Mourinho took over - although goals conceded doesn't look too clever. Alli is a big plus. Alderweireld is back in the fold. Tonight suggested Eriksen is coming round. There's a lot more running around than in Poch's final games. What more do you want?
The defence to look better than a mid table championship side and not to make 2-3 individual errors every game
Early days or not, he needs to take responsibility for the poor performances, this team doesn’t look any better under Jose than it did under Poch.
It might look like this from the outside Lidls, but I don't think you'd be saying or asking that if you'd watched all of our games this season. We've been atrocious for 5 games running now (Bayern, Wolves, Chelsea, Brighton and Norwich) and it is no coincidence that the formations/selections and tactics in each of those games has left us baffled and - worse - expecting a poor performance before a ball has even been kicked. Truth is, we have only played a solid 90 mins under Maureen once this season and that was against Burnley. That result masked the fact that in the wins against Spam and B'mouth we were appalling in the last 20-30mins, and against Olympiakos we were abysmal for the entire first half. It doesn't matter how you slice and dice it, under an experienced manager who knows the league inside out and supposedly did his homework before agreeing to take the job, that is unacceptable and worryingly a possible harbinger of worse things to come predicted by a number of posters (myself included) who were against his appointment from day 1. As for Toby, a lot of us see the bumper new contract as a massive mistake. I wouldn't have minded giving him another 12-18 months, even on the inflated wages he is now earning, but 3.5 years for a player who is already clearly past his best was the latest in a string of totally irrational decisions made by the club in a chain stretching all the way back to the moment we sold Dembele without replacing him a year ago. As for Erisken, tonight's performance suggests little more than the January window opening on Wednesday and him wanting out asap. It is clear that he isn't signing a new contract any time soon. The biggest frustration for me, as it is for a number of fans, is that Maureen - like Poch - just isn't making the best or more sensible use of the tools at his disposal. Poch was guilty of persisting with clearly disinterested 'favourites' while ignoring youth and new signings. Maureen is guilty of setting us up unbalanced and so, so easy to outmaneuver by either attacking the center or the right flank. Dona is 100% correct to say that as soon as the window opens, all eyes should be on Levy, but the fact remains we are still seriously under-performing and what worries me is that it'll be typical of Levy to turn around and say 'you should be doing much better than this with the current group, especially as the summer signings settle in. Let's see how things turn out and reassess the situation in June. My gut feeling is that unless we lose the next 3 games on the trot and find ourselves on the brink of irrelevance vis-a-vis the top 4, Levy won't get the wallet out next month.
Some decent football...that first half was beyond appalling...and it was dished up in the first half v Olympiakos and Brighton, the second half v Bournemouth and West Ham and all of thd Bayern, United and Chelsea games...that's 3 complete games and 6 half games of near unwatchable football...out of just 10 games 60% have been complete dross.
Coz the players are **** Why should he take responsibility? The whole defence is limited and Poch built it. Unless we win Jose gets a roasting Blame Poch and blame the best stadium builder in the world for having barren transfer windows.
Poch used 12 of the 38 games available this season He got 14 points Jose has got 16 in 8 People seem to under estimate how having 12 games less and no pre season has an affect. Yet...if a player doesn’t have a pre season then the player will make excuses and the fans will make excuses for him
The simple fact is that the club should have foreseen that Toby, Jan, and Rose we’re getting older and would be slowing down. Combine that with the **** up of buying that clown, Aurier, as a replacement for Trippier and except for some obvious mistakes in team selection ( although a lot of that can be put down to not knowing the players and trying them out in different combos) I don’t see what more Mourinho could have done. None of those players are his and yet he’s expected to make a title challenging team out of them somehow. It ain’t gonna happen. Virtually the whole defense needs replacing.
Denied a goal because of a rather arbitrary VAR offside call? Yeah, join the club. I don't remember all of this outcry and sympathy when it happened to us, though. Funny that. The major mistake from the officials was failing to send off Lewis for his handball. Kane was clear through on goal. That incident doesn't even make the highlights: We got a free-kick for nothing, apparently.
The "season compass" says no different in terms of PL pts being dropped, but the Jose teams are conceding one more goal per game. So measurably worse.
Not really defending Foyth, but looking at the highlights the challenge that robs the ball is not a lot different to the one Lucas got booked for in the 2nd half, I am not saying its a foul but you see them given and I just want consistency from the ref, either both are fouls or neither.
There are s lot of valid criticisms of Pochettino. A) Saying he would leave seemed to unsettled some of the squad. B) Picking out of form players for the previous 18 months seemed to kill a path way into the first team. C) rushing players back from injury D) play the wrong players in the wrong positions. E) Not making it clear to Rose, Wanyama, Aurier or Eriksen that they either find another club or they would be unpersoned but he was willing to do thst with others such as Townsend, Janssen etc. This left us with 4 unwanted players (one refusing to sign a contract). The other 3 all had offers but they refused to go ... meaning others could not be bought. A clear go or rot with no football would have got rid of Rose and Aurier. F) Continually playing Sissoko with Winks which clearly does not work. However Maureen has continued with some of this. A) Refuses to give Skipp and Parrott game time even in a dead rubber in Bayern. B) Continually starts Aurier C) Plays Sissoko with Winks or Dier (even though even I, with NO coaching experience, can see it is s stupid idea) while Skipp sits on the bench. D) has produced some awful football in keeping with the last 10 months of Pochettino's reign. The second half v West Ham, Bournemouth, the first half v Olympiakos, Brighton and Norwich along with the full games v Chelsea, United and Bayern were beyond a joke. We have only play one good 90 mins under him v Burnley. E) For a tactical genius yesterday's line up was a disgrace ... ffs even I said it was gonna be a car crash...if I can see it why can't he? I fear Levy has messed up big time with this appointment...I felt exactly the same way when we appointed AVB. I have seen nothing to show me he is now a good manager let alone the right one. I understood getting rid of Pochettino just as I understood getting rid of Redknapp but we have repeated the mistake of replacing him with the emperors new clothes imho.
As I mentioned elsewhere a day or two ago, there's one key difference Poch played Winkssoko because there was literally no other choice, as Dier was alternating between illness and injury, Wanyama was (and is) finished, Dembele was fading before he was sold, leaving Skipp as the only other CM with first team experience in the latter half of last season...and by "first team experience" I mean he'd started a whole two matches in the first half of the season Steptonho, on the other hand, has options available but continues to pick pivots made out of two of Winks, Dier or Sissoko as if Ndombele and Lo Celso don't exist
I have a degree of sympathy for him because he has barely played all season and was thrown in at the deep end in an away game against a team desperate for the points. It was a similar story last season when we threw him in at Molineux and he was widely trounced for letting them back in the game even though his only failure was not anticipating Trippier's various cock-ups. He was superb in our next game which was at Palace, helping us keep a rare clean sheet and scoring the only goal of the game. We seem to be the only club in world football who expect young players to develop via osmosis. There is no question he has talent but his style as a ball-playing defender means he needs as much game time as possible to learn how to make decisions quicker and more effectively. He won't pick that up in non-competitive, less intense training sessions - least of all surrounded by a mixture of has-beens and never-was defenders. Look at how error-prone Walker was in his early years. He had a fantastic breakthrough season where Lennon's protection gave him space to flourish, but then as the latter faded the mistakes floated to the surface. I'd even argue that Walker's form in 13/14 trumps anything we've seen from Aurier this season, he really was that bad. But we knew he had potential, persisted with him and he developed into arguably the best RB in the league at one point. Same thing is happening at the scousers right now. TAA was shaky as anything in 2017/18 but they persisted with him and he is now without question the best attacking RB in the country. Why we think young players will automatically develop with barely any actual playing time is beyond me. Our policy Re youth has been a muddled mess for going on 5 years now and has seen us make a train wreck out of the careers of KWP and Skipp with Parrott, Tanganga and Foyth heading in the same direction.
Except the Lucas ''foul'' was off the pitch. The Norwich player ( Max Aarons?) had already run the ball out of play. It also wasn't much different from the barge on Aurier to rob him of the ball that led to the Norwich 'second' goal that wasn't.
