It’s Diego, mate. He’s obsessed with us. He could’ve been about to have a threesome with Maya Jama and Gal Gadot and he’d have bolted just to watch Spurs in the ECL.
Actually thought Sess - and Gil - were the only players to come out of that game with any dignity. Gil showed real nice touches in the first half and Sess was the only one trying to make something happen in the second. Baring in mind he only returned to full training last week it’s pretty damning most of the of others on the pitch looked like they were playing football for the first time in their life.
Those players were not passengers. Your memory is quite selective. Yesterday's performance was awful but this competition before it began was seen as an opportunity to give some youngsters some experience and bring others up to speed. That is what happened and the result was poor but not terminal. There is more than enough opportunity to still win the tie. From the comments here at best you would think we are already out, or at worst that we have just been relegated. I'd point out that we beat the champions only last Sunday, but I would be wasting me time wouldn't I.
Toby wasn't on the pitch having been injured before we took the lead. Neither were Son or Dembele as it happens. On paper it looked a bonkers selection. Those players have not become bad. We've just lost the ability to play as a team. Until we regain it new signings won't improve us much because they won't actually be better than the players we have.
They have become bad. We’ve regressed in each of the last 4 seasons, they’ve certainly not gotten better and a number have never been good enough. When you have multiple top players in a team you can carry one or two dross players but now we’re lacking quality in a number of areas it highlights just how incredible **** players like Winks and co are.
At least when we used the Europa League as an excuse to bed in a few youngsters in 2011-12 we were blatant about us sacking off the competition to focus on the league Also, at least we qualified for it first...
The only two players in that team people would call dross were the CBs. At a push, three with Dele. Every player can play well in one particular game, it’s consistency that’s an issue.
Yes. Titus Bramble for example was one of the worst CBs I’ve seen in the Prem yet he put in an occasional monster of a performance. It was the other 30+ games in a season that was his issue.
3 players featured from the city game, playing 5-17 minutes, inclusive of injury time. I think it’d be a stretch to say that any of those 3 played a massive part in “beating” them.
I think the best way to sum up last night is to say that, if we say Pacos are a Championship standard team, the mistake we made was treating them like a League One team * Carter Vickers should not have started considering we've been trying to offload him for two years * Or, if CCV "had" to start, it should have been in a back four * Romero, Gil, Sessegnon and Lo Celso had no pre-season with us, so having all four start in a scratch xi was a potential risk * The fact we reverted to using Winks as an ersatz DM in spite three years of evidence we shouldn't went as well as expected And that's before the individual performances, such as Doherty's reluctance to pass to Gil at any point in the match, Winks reverted to backwards passing as soon as he doesn't have Skipp behind him, and a general malaise as if the players knew that we'd be starting the return leg with Sonny, Hojbjerg and Lucas to wrap things up no matter what - and we probably will be now, that's for sure...
Consistency is an outcome of teamwork not individual skill levels. Good teamworking can cover up weaknesses in individuals. Bad teamworking amplifies the weaknesses. We can currently field an XI which has better individuals than the one that beat Real Madrid.
Well that simply isn’t true seeing as most of our team were poor last season yet Kane and Son still consistently flourished. Bad players amplify the weaknesses. Good players amplify the strengths. If you have a number of good players they can carry one or two of the bad ones, when you have more of the bad ones, the really bad ones stick out like a sore thumb and the team suffers.
