What he does well, we don't as a club. What the club does well, he's not suited to. It was a ****ing weird appointment from the off, even if his style of football wasn't over the hill. It is. He'll be gone before next Christmas and it'll cost us a fortune that we need to spend on the pitch. Apart from the stadium, he might come close to being our biggest ever expenditure.
In the FA Cup game against Southampton it was clear to all that Vertonghen's legs had gone. So 2 weeks later in a crucial match v Chelsea what does the master tactical genius do? Yep .... starts the broken Vertonghen Anyone with eyes and a slight passing knowledge of football can see that Dier should not be starting games but yet again he does. Is anyone seriously suprised that we have no midfield authority with him starting? He moves less nimbly than a wardrobe and refuses to pass to anyone other than the opposition. We are being over run yet no changes are made until until we are losing...this happens week in week out. Yes, we do have injuries and yes we have had to play a lot of games but Wolves have played 5 or 6 games more than us and played AWAY in Europe less than 72 hours before kick off but they looked determined, energic and fought as a team...that can not be said of us. EVERYTHING I feared about Maureen becoming our manager is happening... the idea that he is a tactical genius who will instill a winning mentality is farcical. He has been out thought by OGS and Lampard ... both of whom have struggled against the likes of Bournemouth etc. I get why Pochettino was got rid of...I still disagree with that choice ... but that does not excuse making a broken man our manager. That is exactly what we did with AVB and to repeat the same mistake is rank stupidity and for that Levy is to blame...but Maureen and Maureen alone is to blame for the stupid team selections and tactics.
He’s definitely failed to impress (massive understatement) but it’s apparent to me 80% of this team/ squad needs to **** off. As I just said on another thread, I’d rather we lose every game from now on by playing the academy than see: Toby Jan Aurier Dier Davies Rose Wanyama Dier Winks Lucas Alli Lamela Play for us again. Some aren’t for the want of trying, some are just either not good enough or too injury prone but Jose is dealing with a load of **** and whilst I’d have expected at least a bit of organisation, in general you can’t polish a turd and these lot are big ****ing diarrhoea turds.
Realistically, how many of those do you think are going to leave? I make it 5, possibly 6. The others will still be here and someone has to manage performances out of them. Mourinho's not getting a whole new squad or even team. We might buy 6 players, maybe 7 at a stretch. Most of them will be young players. I doubt that any of them will be players who he'd go for, if he was still at United or Chelsea. The rest of the squad will be the familiar faces who he's not getting a tune out of now. He's just not a Tottenham manager. .
Probably not many judging by how terrible the club has been recently in the transfer market. For sure, he probably won’t get his own squad but this is why we’re getting turd performances and results. We had Poch - a progressive, press-minded attack favouring manager. Failed. We have Jose - a pragmatic, defensive, counter attack favouring manager. Failing. Two managers with completely different styles and tactics are failing with the same players. There’s a common denominator and whilst we could sack Jose tomorrow if we liked, it wouldn’t make one iota of difference whilst the majority of these players remain at the club/ in the team. We’re now suffering the results of the 18/19 failure to strengthen plus stagnation of “excessive loyalty” to declining or mediocre players from both the previous manager and the board. I won’t pretend to be Jose’s biggest fan and whilst he’s made some god awful decisions, he’s dealing with far too much ****. Kane and Son may have been able to paper over some of the results if they were fit, they’re not, and this is the result of it.
We are crap.....but good luck to Wolves. Maybe a season out of Europe might wake our people up!? Fat chance!!
It'll wake up the club cos of the loss of income. But if we somehow get Europa league the wake up will be watching the gsmes being played in a half empty stadium. On the up side ... at least me and the teenbeast will be able to afford to go !
Five at the back, again. Why? It doesn't work. Giving Parrott about 2 seconds to do something was utterly stupid, too. Stuart Attwell is from the West Midlands. He's not allowed to do Villa or Coventry games. He's done our last 3 games against Wolves. **** that blind ****.
Just add them to the list of inexplicable decisions. I'm at a complete loss as to what can have caused him to pick Dier again? Why does Tanganga have to play in a different position each week? What's changed with Parrott in the space of a week, so that he can get a whole 4 minutes on the pitch? Why are we playing Dele Alli's cousin? It's ****ing **** and he needs to accept that and start doing it properly.
If you look back at the goals conceded since Mourinho's been at the club I reckon 75% of those are down to bad defending / individual errors The demise of Toby and Jan at the same time as the loss of Kane ,Son and sissoko and the injuries to GLC Davis Coco and Lloris have compounded the mess that this season has become We can only hope that the board can also see what has happened to the squad and back Jose or if not show him the door admit that they got it wrong and get the man from Leipzig in pdq
Can somebody remind me of something: a dozen years ago, was there a section of the Spurs fanbase happy that we hired Juande Ramos because he had a "winner's mentality" while Martin Jol didn't?
The way Tanganga bounced off Traore was a thing to behold the man is a beast I wonder if we can arrange for Ndombele to train with him in the close season
Are you trying to kill Ndombele? Seriously speaking it is very frustrating how fragile he is. The amount of times against Chelsea last week where he took a shoulder barge or slight kick and I sat there thinking "that's him done again!". Immense talent but made of glass. I sincerely hope this individual regime will pay dividends in time.
And then he seemed to wreck his shoulder in a nothing challenge, for some reason. Hope he's ok, but he had to go off injured.
This article is a pretty good assessment of where we are... https://www.football365.com/news/jose-mourinho-tottenham-2-wolves-3-broken-opinion "It shows a laudable spirit, also that these players are willing to extend themselves beyond their comfort zones, but it’s not conducive to any sort of rhythm. Nor any order. It’s the opposite, in fact. It creates this overwhelming sense that catastrophe lurks around every corner. While properly structured teams need to be broken down over time, Mourinho’s Spurs can concede from any situation at any moment. From attacking corners, from phases of possession deep in the opposition half; they’re never safe. It doesn’t mean that they don’t play well in patches. Tottenham did here, probably offering more of a threat than at any other point during the last month. It just means that those moves don’t result in any sort of momentum. It doesn’t matter how many runs are made or shots are taken, because there’s no way of containing that pressure, storing it up, and then using it any productive way. Even the goals Spurs scored on Sunday seemed to be random acts of chance, the results of little more than ten seconds of briefly connected play which somehow just fell into place. But the goals they conceded were descriptive, with each of them betraying a different type of incompetence. A missed clearance here, a missed tackle there. They were all well-taken and nicely constructed, but they faced so little resistance that that hardly seems the point. They weren’t scored against a team, rather a collection of players who only vaguely understand their roles and play as if they’re aware of their own glaring weaknesses. Mourinho will pretend to think something or other, of course. He’ll profess himself happy with this, delighted with that, and enthused by something that – secretly – reflects well on him. On and on we go. Whatever, though. The only real conclusion to reach is that nothing about Tottenham will matter until the season ends. We're not a team anymore. Not under Pochettino and now, not under Mourinho. I doubt that a change of season will make that much of a difference, either. It's time for a full rebuild under a manager who is going to apply himself to the task over a period of years. As yet, we haven't found him.
**RANT INCOMING** "Really, Mourinho is trying to construct something without any foundations, and with a known design flaw. They’re a car with square wheels, a tent without any pegs; an idea which is so compromised as to not require any further testing." This is the part that worries me most. Looking back at Maureen's time in charge and there is mounting evidence that he doesn't really know the way forward for the team. I know I argued passionately in exactly the opposite direction after the Chelsea defeat, but today's performance - how we started so, so well but then totally collapsed when subjected to even the slightest bit of pressure - has knocked that argument for six. This, more than anything, is what I want to see from players and manager right now. Couldn't give a toss if we lost every game between now and the end of the season if only I could sit back at the end of a game and say 'not only did the lads give their all, but the roots of a long-term strategy are clearly being laid in preparation for next season'. Right now, I can say neither. Our match day squad is a worrying mixture of players who don't care and players who do but don't seem to have even the smallest semblance of a plan, tactics or strategy to adhere to for the 90 mins. Our approach is literally hope for the best. There is no contingency plan for when the opposition is in possession, no variation to compensate for players struggling against their opponents, no changes of shape or personnel to keep the opposition guessing. It is all, well, predictably unpredictable. As others have said above, like it or not Maureen will be going into next season with the vast majority of the current squad still employees of THFC. To think we'll be able to clear out many more beyond the obvious candidates (Wanyama, Rose, KWP, Foyth etc.) stretches the boundaries of credulity. Maybe we'll add the likes of Dier and Dele to that list. But those who are under the impression we'll then also sell and improve on Aurier, Lamela, Lucas, Winks, Sissoko and Toby are dreaming. Simple as. And so Maureen should by now have a rapidly solidifying picture of who he'd like to build the nucleus of next year's team around, and start implementing a plan which will help take them there. It isn't hard to imagine Kane and Son into any given system. Anyone who has followed football even casually for the past 5 years will know all about them and their styles of play. What is difficult to imagine is how the likes of Dier, Toby, Jan, Dele are regarded as being a part of that nucleus. So the article claims that Maureen is trying to construct something but lacks the foundations to do so. I'm wondering what it is he is trying to construct, as aside from 20 mins against Leipzig and 20mins again today, I have seen scant evidence of that construction. Compare us to Liverpool 4 years ago. Klopp had already settled on a system and, even though he lacked the attackers, CBs, CMs, and FBs to do that system justice, he stuck by it, made sure every single seemingly 'not good enough' player in his squad was fluent in that system, and then across 3 seasons added to it Mane, Salah, Robertson, VVD, Fabinho, Allison and TAA. Back then, we mocked them for not having a clear plan or strategy. But they did. We just couldn't see it because we don't watch every single Liverpool game. And so we failed to see last and this season coming. But the truth is it has been as inevitable as Thanos, ever since we beat them 4-1 in 2017. What is our strategy? What is our system? What is our identity? If the answer to all of those questions cannot be suggested until Kane and Son are back and fully fit, we might as well pack it all in and support another club as it means we will always be a couple of injuries away from disaster. So the answer cannot be that. We can't allow it to be that. Under AVB, the system/strategy/identity was to use lesser players to create enough space for Bale to wreak havoc. And so when Bale left, the whole edifice collapsed under its own weight. Our demise was as inevitable as the expectation we'd be able to construct an entirely new squad and system over a single summer was naive. And we are in grave danger of repeating the exact same mistake. Fans calling for a complete overhaul of the squad are playing a high-risk game. Firstly, because it won't happen. Not under ENIC. And secondly (more importantly), because it isn't possible. We've seen it fail miserably before. Right now, fans need to be calling for a clearly defined identity and approach. And even if we lose more than we win trying to implement it, so be it. Maureen should stop focusing on the edifice and start concentrating on the foundations.
