Maybe they had easier fixtures once he joined. I don’t know. Either way to go to PSG and not manage to win the league isn’t a good look for any manager.
He lost at home to eventual champions, Lille, so that one in particular was very costly. Had they won that and maintained their results afterwards, the league would’ve been theirs.
Its PSG though, they really should be winning the league every year. I like Poch but the fact he couldn’t win the league with them is not a good look for him.
Getting over the line seems to be a real problem for him. I remember when we had the best GF and GA record and still managed to come 2nd by 7 points because he didn't have a Plan B to break down teams that parked the bus.
I don't really count Charity Shields and their equivalents, but yeah, he won that, too. Beat Villas-Boas, so that was an inevitable ex-Spurs result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Trophée_des_Champions
If Plan B is worse than Plan A then why would you ever switch to it when you are drawing a match? Plan A won't result in you winning or even scoring in every game but that is no reason to ditch it within games. It's worth taking more risk if you are losing with 30 mins left but that's the only Plan B a sensible manager would have.
Yes and if they had got an extra point in any match they drew or lost against weaker opposition they would have won the League. So all their dropped points were equally costly.
They had the chance to stop their rivals gaining points whilst gaining points of their own. That match proved pivotal in deciding who won the league and who finished runners up.
You may start the game thinking that Plan A is the best plan, then find out that it's not working. A good manager should be able to work out that an opposition team is very well set up to deal with Plan A and it's unlikely to be effective. He should also have something workable from the bench for that eventuality. A lot of teams seem to have moved away from having a tall targetman in the squad recently, for some reason. Arsenal moved on Giroud, City moved on Dzeko and we let Llorente go, just for a few examples. Not sure why, as they all seemed like they added punch to that risk you mentioned.
It's finding out that it's not working is where my problem is. Even Man City don't score in every game. Even if you were scoring 100 goals a season there would be 5 matches when you wouldn't score in the first hour entirely by chance. You can't distinguish that from not scoring for other reasons. Plan A should be to be patient, keep the ball, run into space and move the opposition around. If they are good enough or lucky enough to resist then keep on trying. If you have better players on the bench because you've rested them then bring them on earlier. If the players on the bench are worse then they won't add value until the better players are tiring.
Every match they didn't win was equally pivotal because they would have won the league if any of those results had been better. They just needed one extra point....it could have come from the Lille match and also from many others. Look in my signature for an example of a really pivotal match. Arsenal v Crystal Palace was literally the only match where a different result (unfeasibly different in practice...i think they would have had to lose 6-0 instead of winning 3-0) would have relegated Arsenal.
You can distinguish it from not scoring for other reasons. That's good management. When Mourinho was at the top of his game he was capable of seeing it very quickly and reacting appropriately. Sometimes you're not going to be able to pick the lock, so you just blow the bloody doors off. I think that Steve Bruce is largely a **** manager, but he spent a lot of last season starting the game with one set of tactics and nicking points late on. He recognised that his squad weren't capable of going toe-to-toe with a lot of sides, so he sat back, stayed in the match, then switched it up. If he's capable of doing that, then I'm sure that supposedly superior managers should be able to do something similar. It was as predictable as Guardiola trying to be clever with City in a Champions League match and ****ing it up, but it still worked.
There is no way of proving that statement about Mourinho as no-one will ever know what would have happened if he hadn't changed things. I can't prove it wrong either but I think making Plan A as good as possible is likely to lead to more success than confusing the players with other options.
I don't think that players are quite that stupid. They'll have played thousands of matches at various levels before hitting the Premier League. They should be able to handle doing things a little differently. Pochettino did it in the Ajax semi-final. We were getting well beaten, so he changed things and we won. Llorente came on for Wanyama at half-time and it gave us the option of being more direct, which their defence didn't handle very well. They had a plan to deal with our attack and it didn't work when one thing changed.
If you are in the situation where you need to score several times to survive then you need to deploy the riskiest plan you have. But it was three moments of genius from Lucas Moura that won it. Usually we have to wait 5 matches to see one of those. Poch could easily have taken Lucas or Dele off to bring Llorente on though. Not sure that would have had the same outcome.
