And yet taking it too seriously and investing too much in it greatly decreases the likelihood of us qualifying. It's a catch 22 and the rewards - financial and practical - are vastly outweighed by the costs.
I really don't think it's a good idea to change the whole team AND the formation from match to match. If we were set up throughout the club to play the same way and in training we had an obvious first XI then playing a reserve team who had trained together a lot ought to make sense. But that wasn't what happened tonight. Just changing 4 outfield players would have been a better plan I think. Scarlett for Son, Gil for Lucas, Lo Celso for Dele and Romero for Dier.
Losing the playoff gives us a terrible outcome though. We can better afford to take risks in the group matches, by which time we can get an experimental team playing together in training more than so far.
Wonder if there’s any chance Nuno told Doherty, CCV and Winks that the flight home was tomorrow night?
I think it's fairly easy to defend the players that he's struggling to, to be honest. Doherty wants to cut inside from wingback, so we started a central midfielder in front of him on the wing. Winks was playing as a holding player of sorts with nobody in front of him at all. Did either of them play well? No. Am I remotely surprised by that, given the selection? Hell no.
Winning it? Spurs don’t win trophies, and especially this mid table Spurs side with a mid table manager won’t be winning anything. Might pull off a couple of decent results throughout the season but not happening on a consistent basis.
We have watched Winks and Doherty deployed in any number of systems with every variation of team mates around them, the outcome is almost always the same. Two utterly crap players.
Once he’s around a better set of players and the ante is up regarding the game, I expect the boy to shine You need a Spliff Diego…such panicky thoughts tonight
One big difference between tonight and Sunday was that on Sunday we did the simple things well whereas tonight we tried too many difficult passes. Need to be more patient. In a parallel universe we could easily have lost on Sunday and won tonight (City dominated the first few minutes Sunday and we did the same tonight).
