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Match Day Thread Tottenham Hotspur v Arsenal

Discussion in 'Tottenham Hotspur' started by PleaseNotPoll, Sep 24, 2021.

  1. redwhiteandermblue

    redwhiteandermblue Well-Known Member

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    The largest issues are higher up. It's clear which clubs are going in the right direction and which aren't. Spurs should be Borussia Dortmund; an even better fit may be Brentford with an academy and resources: moneyball and an attacking style. What they are instead is lurching around from one poorly advised quick fix to the next.
     
    #221
  2. Dier Hard

    Dier Hard G'day mate!

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    I think the tweet was slightly out of context (PNP has just mentioned the full quote too) but I wouldn't be surprised if some are hating it under him.

    I can't imagine Son or Kane are enjoying themselves one bit, the stats of chances created shows they're barely getting the ball let alone a sniff on goal and it's a credit to just how good Son is that he still somehow has three league goals. Reguilon doesn't seem to have the same licence to get forward as he did under Jose too, one of the few times he was up Arsenal's end he got an assist thanks to Gil's work. Mad to think I'm missing the 'freedom' Jose gave to some... Bloody hell we've fallen so far.
     
    #222
  3. remembercolinlee

    remembercolinlee Well-Known Member

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    Take responsibility for wanting to be entertained?
    Seriously?
    If we're being entertaining bit losing and I was moaning then fair enough but this is dross.
    And as for AVB...I went to matches after we sold Bale and we were both boring and shocking bad....he too turned on the fans.

    The people who need to take responsibility are those running and playing for the club not the fans.
     
    #223
  4. The Huddlefro

    The Huddlefro Well-Known Member

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    Yeah the full quote is more informative, he takes responsibility, as he should. Still sounds like some of the players are calling out a poor game plan though too, to me.

    Our stats in and out of possession are a good illustration of how far this team has fallen. Genuinely shocking.
     
    #224
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  5. remembercolinlee

    remembercolinlee Well-Known Member

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    Wanting to watch entertaining football is not the same as expecting us to smash teams 3 or 4 nil each week.
    It is watching us trying to score, creating chances and giving the other team something to worry about.

    You have been extremely critical of Fat Sam, pulis and Co in the past yet they played at "being solid and creating little" ...

    BTW Ndombele ain't entertaining...he is ****
     
    #225
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  6. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    Except that isn't true

    Defoe left for Toronto in January 2014, at which point Dim Sherwood was in charge
    We had plenty of experience upfront with Adebayor
    We signed quality in Eriksen
    Dembele was signed to replace Modric the previous season
    Dempsey was replaced with Chadli...a little too well, as he was a passenger when we didn't have the ball too

    While there were obvious flaws with the squad, both in terms of the bloat that the Baldini 7 caused coupled with the halfassed moneyball approach that concluded that since Soldado and Paulinho score goals that equals creativity while somehow forgetting that creativity is what gets the ball to them in the first place and we were starting games with a guarantee of at least two of Dembele, Eriksen, Sigurdsson, Lamela and Lennon on the bench due to the squad bloat, which is the mistake Man Utd are making this season but (so far, at least) no pundit is daring to say it

    The second problem is that between AVB and Baldini they managed to sign the wrong striker for the system: AVB's system needed a Drogba-type player up front because the system needed somebody who had the physical strength to outmuscle defenders to either force a shot on goal or to hold up the ball and bring in Sigurdsson/Eriksen/Paulinho/Lamela/whoever, and we were strongly linked with Benteke that window who would have done that job (albeit not as well as Drogba) - yet we ended up signing Soldado, who simply wasn't that type of striker at all as they play on the shoulder of the last defender almost exactly the same as Defoe does which, depending on who you ask was either AVB putting his foot down and getting his player over Baldini's recommendation of Soldado (which is the most commonly reported version) or Baldini playing Football Manager in real life so not putting any thought into what he was doing which does explain the rest of the bloat
     
    #226
  7. Billy The Spur

    Billy The Spur Well-Known Member

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    The AJ fight was a bigger deal for the owners than the NLD, which tells us all we need to know about where we are as a club. Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is rapidly losing it`s identity and is slowly having it`s soul ripped out thanks to the owner`s sports entertainment and urban development vanity project. ENIC have slowly destroyed everything that was once good about Spurs, regular silverware was never around but these days even the enjoyment of watching Spurs is in very short supply.
     
    #227
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  8. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    All you have to do is look at the responses online, not just on Twitter or reddit but even on here, after the Watford game kvetching that we only won 1-0, as if Kane and Dele didn't both miss sitters in that game, because people had a preconception that Nuno's football would be exactly like the last couple of Portuguese managers' was, just based on nationality and nothing else - which begs the question why Poch's first few games didn't have people assuming we'd win or lose games 4-3 every week as that's the same logic

    In terms of Allardyce and Pulis, you forget I have also been critical of Mark Hughes because of his track record at rocking up at clubs with reputations for bloody mindedness and having them switch to expansive football overnight, and what happens to those clubs? Their league positions drop like a stone, entirely because he's changing the style of play not based on the personnel involved but because he wants to change it, and that is absolutely the issue best summed up with Ndombele at the moment as he's an "attacking" player, he brings "creativity", when in reality as PNP said after the Wolves game for every example of doing something positive at one end of the pitch he does two or three abysmal things at our end that **** us over, but because we created the Narrative of him being "creative", not the pundits and not the tabloid hacks but WE DID, we're in a cycle of trying to appease people who think he's great because he dribbles down a dead end and nutmegs somebody to pass it 20+ yards backwards, which is ironically less destructive than the ironic ****posting three years ago about Sissoko because at least Sissoko realises a football match goes in two directiosn and not just one
     
    #228
  9. PleaseNotPoll

    PleaseNotPoll Well-Known Member
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    Was it?
     
    #229
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  10. "Thanks for that Brian"

    "Thanks for that Brian" Well-Known Member

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    Well, that was worse than most of us feared.

    I wanted Ndombele to be given a run in the team but I didn't imagine that it would be in a line up without Skippy paired with Hojbjerg behind him. There is no reality in which he can play with Dele Alli in a three without us getting gubbed.

    There are enormous problems with the balance of this squad but Nuno's pouring petrol on the fire with his selections. I'm not going to lay into him, because it's what I expected from the moment of his appointment and the close of the Transfer Window. Anyone expecting him to be the answer to our problems is deluding themselves. He's a mid-table PL manager with an unbalanced squad. He's not going to transform our fortunes...he never was that appointment. He was a cheap and convenient stop-gap...but I'm not going to blame him for that reality.

    This is all on Levy...

    Boooooo!
     
    #230
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  11. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    Paratici is the one who recommended Nuno, not Levy

    Levy made overtures to ten Hag and Fonseca before Paratici was installed, after all
     
    #231
  12. remembercolinlee

    remembercolinlee Well-Known Member

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    I don't give a toss if we win a trophy but I do care about being entertained.

    you have lumped everyone who is bored with our football into a block just like those on extreme end of the Levy out argument lump everyone who disagrees with them.

    To say people like me should take responsibility if an insult mate.

    We are as **** and as boring as we were before lockdown so it ain't exactly like I've been impatient.
     
    #232
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  13. Billy The Spur

    Billy The Spur Well-Known Member

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    I reckon Kane still has hopes of a January move to Mansour FC, his mind is still elsewhere and no way he is 100% focussed. He probably hopes that if his performances drop, Levy will decide to sell him in January, as the money will be more use than an underperforming and unfocussed player. This could be Kane`s one last attempt to get his move, if we are just as shiete with Kane, as without, then we will be better off with the money.
     
    #233
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  14. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    And this is the issue: thinking a team can flip a switch and go from the ubermensch's stodge to (for the sake of argument) football like under Jol simply isn't going to happen, because not only have players had some bad habits drilled into them for a couple of seasons but there's also some personnel who are only capable of playing that way

    And any chance of dragging us from one to the other during pre-season was further hampered by the fact our pre-season was a truncated mess thanks to the Euros and Copa America meaning a chunk of our squad weren't involved in pre-season (and that's before taking into account injuries or the side effects of having an interview with Gary Neville) or weren't even signed during our pre-season, so we were on the back foot basically from the outset - and that's without throwing the managerial search into the equation, which somehow became more of a farce when Paratici came in and we bounced between Conte, Fonseca, Gattuso and Nuno in the space of less than a week (which for some baffling reason people blame Levy for...) when what we really needed was the second Paratici signed on the dotted line was him to say "This is the guy I want to work with, bring him in" - not least because that would've shaved three weeks off the managerial search, meaning the players who were available at the time would be three weeks better attuned to the tactics and fitness regimen, and while that wouldn't bridge the gap with those arriving late for whichever reason (Euros/Copa America, injury, tapping-up campaign) it would've improved the baseline

    I did say a few days ago that I have the sneaking suspicion that our plan for the first half of the season is to battle a reasonable number of points on the board so we're in a decent spot come January, and that's when Paratici springs into life and brings in a key midfielder - and, given the two Non HG spots available in our PL squad that certainly does seem to have at least a whisper of truth in it - but the problem is that on the ground Nuno's gone from the workmanlike getting points on the board to the Mark Hughes approach of getting a team set up to get points one way to play expansive football, and when you consider the sudden flip from Step 1 to Step 3 that happened after the Palace match, and the fact the cottage industry of misleading infographics kicked in immediately after that, there's definitely some bleedthrough into the club, just like there was when Villas-Boas similarly skipped Step 2 of his plan to similar results

    Obviously there's other ways for a manager to approach the same situation when there's widespread calls for a change, be it to doggedly stick with your Really Clever Tactical Plan in spite of the results as has happened more times than I'd like to be reminded of (Santini and the tail end of 2011-12 both spring to mind) or there's picking a player and making them look **** so you can prove your so-called point to the fans as Sven did when sticking Andy Johnson on the wing for one England match or the ubermensch did repeatedly at Man Utd and for us, but the issue is that either way the manager is reacting to demands from outside, yet who is it who eats **** for doing so? The manager, never those loudly making demands in the first place

    Long story short, in the space of six weeks the fanbase have gone from understanding that this season is always going to be a transitional one and that our squad is not only unbalanced in personnel but also fitness and preseason given how late a chunk of them were in getting back into training so realistically the team is probably closer to the start of Step 1 than the start of Step 2 because of the disparity in preparations due to internationals/late signings/injury/whining oil barons, to suddenly demanding we rip up the copybook and start over - and have been doing that since the Palace game, even though that's when Nuno's system was starting to fall apart due to key components getting crocked during the international break
     
    #234
  15. KingHotspur

    KingHotspur Well-Known Member

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    Spurs official Twitter yesterday tweeted about the AJ fight non stop but couldn’t tweet a single thing about a member of the double winning side celebrating their 89th birthday.
     
    #235
  16. KingHotspur

    KingHotspur Well-Known Member

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    Same as Nuno and his pre game press conferences where he hypes up the opponents quality while downplaying his own side.
     
    #236
  17. PleaseNotPoll

    PleaseNotPoll Well-Known Member
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    It didn't, though. It retweeted the result once.
     
    #237
  18. remembercolinlee

    remembercolinlee Well-Known Member

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    Redknapp came to spurs and had an unbalanced squad completely devoid of confidence.
    While he did not always get wins he did get them fighting and attacking.

    We went from being truly appalling in every game (2 uefa, 1 league cup and 8 league games) to playing well against Bolton, fighting back to draw at Arsenal, and coming back to beat Liverpool in the first 7 days.

    That set the tone for his reign. We were sometimes poor but we usually fought and were very often entertaining.

    Playing badly in some games, and being out done tactically are forgivable and playing defensively in some situations is sensible but to do so game in game out for the better part of 2 years is bollocks.
     
    #238
  19. KingHotspur

    KingHotspur Well-Known Member

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    I mean the build up etc. I get it’s a big event for the stadium (personally don’t care) but to mention that but not to mention someone who played a massive part in Spurs greatest ever season is not on.
     
    #239
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  20. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    "It’s a completely different set-up – an away game with away fans against a strong Aston Villa side who play without any pressure. So it’s a very big challenge but we’re up for it," - Thomas Tuchel, ahead of Chelsea's game with Villa back in May
     
    #240

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