Home. Not going to trawl through. Just going to say for the umpteenth time: LLORIS OUT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Except I don't accept the premise of your argument. Is the confusion in fact or just in fans minds? There are lots of good teams in the PL and it's quite usual to struggle against them. For example Newcastle who are riding high struggled against Fulham at St James today and were some would say lucky to come away with a win. Liverpool and Chelsea are struggling and Brentford and Brighton are thriving. Things are getting more difficult as all PL teams have more financial clout.
You're right in that we fans don't know what goes on in training but I think it's fair to say that what goes on in training is reflected as to what happens on the pitch and what's happening on the pitch this season is abysmal. We see a defensive set up at the start of every game that only changes once we go 2-0 down. We know that week in, week out, players like Doherty and Emerson let us down but Spence won't be given the chance to show differently. We know similarly with Sessegnon, he gets hauled off in almost every game he plays but will find himself back in the side on a regular basis. We've seen that Richarlison can't play on the right wing and when Lucas has been fit he also does very little too yet Bryan Gil doesn't get a look-in unless those two plus Kulusevski are all injured - and when he has had a look-in he's impressed but as we saw today, the moment Richarlison is back fit, Gil then gets scraps. I'd love to know what he does, as well as these players do in training for him to persist with it all in matches. He does mention about this being a project for x amount of years, yet he only committed to 18 months, so something doesn't add up there
TBH it's a bit of guesswork suggesting Emerson based on a few factors i.) £27m = €30m, and if we work on the basis that we're paying "above" the release clause with the loan that likely rules out Spence ii.) Doherty has eighteen months on his contract and is 30, so I doubt that we could argue he's worth €15m iii.) The other day there were headlines suggesting we'd be willing to sell Emerson for less than the £26m we paid for him iv.) It's highly unlikely we would want four RBs on the books at once, so one would have to make way (putting aside talk of a Spence loan) v.) Sanchez and Doherty have eighteen months on their deals, so the odds of them being loaned for eighteen months is 0% vi.) Looking at our RBs' wages, the £60k we pay Emerson is more likely to fit into Sporting's finances than the £75k we pay Doherty, even if they pay 50% or 2/3 of his wages
As much as a servant over the years he's been I am inclined to agree. He is club captain and he has served us well but he is also a huge liability at this stage. People say for all the howlers he makes he keeps us in games etc but that's not good enough, we need him making the amazing saves without the howlers.... even at this point in his career his distribution is still atrocious and he hasn't trained on... as for the howlers they are getting worse by the week.
I don't care about winning trophies or even top 4 (don't get me wrong, they'd be great) but plenty of clubs ain't won trophies for a lot longer than us. But I can not abide boring football and, with a few exceptions, this season has been as tedious as the games dished up by Nuno and JM.
I am not going to argue on each player. I accept that you have shown yourself, as a fan to be a pretty decent judge of individual players. You were proved right on Winks before a lot on here (including me) had given up on him. The same may be true on Sessegnon when I rmember you arguing to keep Reguilon instead, so I wouldn't doubt your observational powers on players. I think the difference is that Conte has to use what he has and there I think I would have to trust his judgement over a fans. Who plays also effects the team as a whole. Managers are always criticised for playing players out of position and always have been as long as I have been watching football, but I always come back to the fact that football is a team game played by individuals.
Most fans I know and probably most members of our board are in full agreement that our team isn't nearly as bad as it can be made out to be. That is precisely the cause of the frustration aimed at Conte. He has somehow managed to take the best group of players (on paper) we've had since probably 2017 and has failed to coax a single good 90min performances out of them all season, in all competitions. But I agree, the club is firmly at a crossroads now. They either back Conte fully, which means £150-200m spent on players with little sell-on value, or they part company and appoint a progressive manager in the mould of Poch. We are caught between a rock and a hard place entirely of our own making.
I see hope RCL . We have seen a lot of boring frustrating football but we have also football that have made us say why didn't we play like that in the first half. I think Conte does not fully trust the squad and is trying to play accordingly. Look at the difference Kulu and Bentancur made. We have Sarr emerging and Gil starting to get some time. I have hope RCL
I'm more inclined to believe Sporting will simply demand his release clause, just about every reliable journalist has said as much. There's little benefit in it for Sporting to accept a reduced fee and one of our cast offs for one of their star players that their system is heavily suited for and reliant upon.
For sure we have too many player out on loan that need to be sold but we can't force clubs to biy them.
In terms of players with little or no resale value, look at our latest (in a long line of...) links to Zaniolo Roma fans have been on his case for a good eighteen months, regularly booing him this season because his various ACL injuries have cost him his first touch and at least half a yard of pace, and he's overcompensated by packing on mass at the gym so he is literally battering his way through defenders yet the extra mass has cost him another half yard of pace on top of what he's lost While he is reportedly available for a perfectly affordable £25m this month, I can't be alone in thinking his value would tank further and we'd wind up using him as a makeweight in a deal eighteen months down the line
I think if you watch todays game over again you will see that we started quite positively and with some determination but that was all too easily dashed by Lloris mistake and from there until the 2nd half Spurs looked scared.
A Bola and O Jogo have both reported Sporting's stance has softened, as it was mainly a ruse to try and get him to play in this evening's Lisbon derby
I genuinely hope you're right Spurf. If Conte goes the only person I see coming in is Pochettino The reason I have very little hope about us playing great football is because we have no identity as a club. To go from Pochettino to JM was the equivalent of a hand break turn in terms of football philosophy. And three and a half years on I do not see or understand what we are trying to do. I agree that we can't keep sacking managers but equally we need a clear identity as a team. A way of playing football that runs through the team.
I think we all have pretty good observational views on players on here, I'm just a lot more brutal and open with my assessments of what I perceive to be a poor player, I think that's partly because I've ran out of patience, I just simply don't like watching bad footballers and I can't be the type of person to want to get behind them, I'd just rather the club sell them and save us the misery. I wish Conte would use what he has. He has Spence, White (who can play LB despite being a natural CM), Gil etc. None of these play unless there's an injury crisis and he even says how they're not ready to play because they're young which I believe is bollocks. But then he'll persist with the likes of Sessegnon, Emerson, Doherty, Lucas (when fit), Richarlison as a RW when he clearly can't play there and gets no results from these selections. It's so frustrating seeing the same faces let us down whilst others don't get a look-in. Then the actual tactics and style of play is just painful, the majority of this group of players aren't anywhere near as bad as he's making us play.
The main issue with the ubermensch ...hang on, I got that wrong... ...one of the main issue(s) with the ubermensch is that his career does show a pattern of being somebody who could get a club across the line after they had fallen short, which is exactly what his first Chelsea stint was and his time at Los Ladrones certainly bore that out as well, but that also means that somebody else has built up the framework and he identifies the last couple of tweaks to make it work. And realistically wee were not a team which fits that description at the time, especially as we were partway into a rebuild - and finding the foundation of that rebuild could only play 60 minutes before puking his guts out The irony is that, if there was a time to bring in the ubermensch, the summer of 2017 would have been ideal as that was when we needed to make a couple of tweaks while also potentially preventing Kyle Walker's head getting turned and definitely would've stopped Danny Rose running his mouth to The Sun. Not that I'm saying we should've binned off Poch at that time, as that would've been madness akin to spending £15m on David Bentley as if Aaron Lennon hadn't been a fixture of the squad for the best part of three years at that point, but there was a time he could have made sense - and it was not anytime after December 2018
The craziest thing with Jose for me was that his assessment of our squad was practically perfectly spot on, not just in the Amazon doc but in reports by journalists and the occasional post match interview he highlighted certain personnel weren't good enough, it was just that his methods on proving it were pretty poor. If Pochettino perhaps had Jose's way of assessing the squad, he'd possibly still be Spurs manager - having said that, I think in about 6 months time he may well be Spurs manager again and I'm no longer against it, it could end terribly but I'm now open to the risk, he gave us 4-5 great years, I owe him to trust he could maybe do similar without the final year drop off, I'm just so tired of what I'm currently watching and I don't think it's going to change, there's not a ton of managers I'd be overly confident in outside of Pochettino too.
