Have you seen the SpursWeb readership lately? Their site's been after the Lunatic Fringe clicks ever since they lost significant amounts of traffic to Alasdair Gold, and their Twitter is similar after Lilywhite Rose and Hotspur Related left them in the dust (let alone the accounts of Gold and Dan KP, as well as Romano and Di Marzio come transfer season) so they're basing their business model around rage clicks at this point
Remember the batshittery from David Lammy about how we were planning to move to Wembley so we could sell up to Qataris and put Leyton Orient out of business? Thankfully nobody made him Shadow Foreign Secre...oh ****, somebody did
He's pissed. The Fail have taken this opportunity to claim that the club have banned him from speaking to the Italian media. Being intentionally misleading about a man complaining about the media being intentionally misleading.
If only somebody had Levinson II on their election manifesto, and for good reason Oh wait, somebody did...
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CaP4pVWD_Ek/?utm_medium=copy_link Conte responding to Guardiola's post-match interviews.
IMHO the word "counter-attack" loses meaning unless you wanna be precise in your terms : When does an attack by X on Y begin ?? Does an attack by Y end when the ball goes out of play ?? If so, then a counter-attack by definition is whenever X takes the ball from Y and away from their own goal. If not, then where on the pitch is an attack deemed to start ?? Your third of the pitch ?? Middle third ?? The likes of Pep seem to be labouring under the fallacy that % possession or attempts on goal is what defines a team as "attacking" . Having most of your possession in the first two thirds, or most of your attempts on goal being "hit and hope" with ow likelihood of scoring, does not an "attacking" team make.
I think you’re right, though I wouldn’t say it’s something Pep labours on, more that the noise from the punditry and commentariat focus on it. Pep sees possession as much about defence and denying opponents the ball and territory as he sees it as an attacking weapon. Sure he often gripes about teams coming and playing deep against him, usually with an element of sour grapes when they don’t win, but I think he sees it as a split between a team that wants to have the ball and a team that is comfortable without it, rather than a specific attack vs. defence thing.
I think he sees it as the right and wrong way of playing. It's easy to play attractive football when you can outspend the rest of the world, though.
Yeah he’s definitely highly attached to his philosophy of football. Nothing wrong with that and he’s been phenomenally successful and is clearly an excellent coach, albeit one who has always had a lot to work with.
The "KPI" stats for the game do not lie. Spurs had more/better scoring opportunities, and were more effective in taking them. The nature of all those attacks, well Pep is free to post-mortem them as often as he wants in an attempt to make Citeh even better.
I completely agree. I guess what I’m saying is that the conflation between attack/defence and possession stats is a media and broad fandom thing, not a necessarily a Pep thing. Pep’s teams deny the opposition possession, because he sees doing so as the best form of defence (as well as attack, obviously). Conte denied City space, for the same reasons.
Better stattery is needed. Those who do it in the day job, and are supporters, need to publicly ridicule the progenitors of such stats, and be telling the match reporters what stats they should be gathering and presenting. "Pep’s teams deny the opposition possession, because he sees doing so as the best form of defence (as well as attack, obviously). Conte denied City space, for the same reasons." If you have the ball, the opposition cannot score. If you have the ball mostly anywhere but the final quarter of the pitch, you in turn are highly unlikely to score. Within those two extremes of the spectrum, a team must find the "sweet spot" that yields the most/best scoring opportunities. For this game, Citeh did not.
It’s always a sweet spot though, it’s always about executing the game plan perfectly, no matter what that plan is. As long as the tactics make sense, of course. We’ve seen time and time again that possession does not always equal a win. We had this under Poch a bit, when teams would sit off us and know we’d struggle to break them down. Pep’s City usually succeed because the quality of players and coaching is so high. We played a blinder on Saturday though, denied them space consistently and executed enough of our fast, vertical play to score the required goals.
He’s got a point, but he still needs to look at his own choices. Too many instances of being too passive tactically.
