I was reminded last night why I intensely dislike City and hope we as a club and a fanbase never turn out like them. The outside of the Etihad Stadium is an ugly monstrosity of a structure. Inside is not a great improvement and the locals now have a sneering sense of entitlement about them. Pep is right about last night, the City fans were appalling in their lack of vocal support. As for Pep himself, the guy gets more obnoxious by the day. I can see why Arteta behaves like a jerk, he’s been well trained by Pep. There was one point last night where I swear he was closer to the corner flag than his technical area and his exaggerated histrionics let him and his club down. At the end of the game, they seemed more interested in taunting us Spurs fans than cheering their own players off the pitch. A chavvy club, full of charlatans with an awful fan base. Such a pity we couldn’t have held onto our lead.
I hate what they have created, it is a blight on football and the media fawning over them just shows how they care nothing for football only the money it generates.
I like Perisic. He's clearly a very good player. Probably the best deliverer of a ball at the club. I think that his engine is fine despite his age and he has a lot of positive aspects to his game. He's just not a left wingback, though. I think he could play a number of other roles. Conte's changes as the match went on were disastrous, in my opinion. We sat back at the start of the second half, went behind, then lost our shape entirely. Kulusevski as a wingback is weird. Richarlison on the right doesn't work. Subbing off Davies made no sense. Not using Sarr was a wasted opportunity. We're conceding goals at an astonishing rate, regardless of the team selection. I don't see how that's not on the manager.
It is on the manager, but this anti-ENIC thing is giving him a free ride. If Conte is a world class manger he should be able to do better with the players he has. Believe it or not (and sometimes it's hard to) there are several good players in there. Yet this "not appearing in the first half" thing went on for a ludicrously long time (to be replaced against Citeh by sort of not appearing in the second half). This is a Conte thing, not an ENIC thing. You could add a couple of really expensive players in there and would it definitely be any different? We already have good players that aren't playing. It seems the only qualification for someone to be a good player for some people is that they play for someone else. There are no guarantees. In fact I'd argue that the best way to get points is to get your existing team to play as a team, perhaps with a few well scouted but additions, rather than really expensive ones. The Juve additions last January really helped and weren't hugely expensive. Oh, and I think ENIC were in charge back then too. Or maybe we should be spending hundreds of millions and threaten our long term financial security because that's guaranteed to work???
Perisic is a WB for some games, but not all games - as demonstrated by how he's been catastrophic against both Manc clubs this season Also, Hojbjerg surely needed to come off and yet he didn't - partly because he was on a booking, but it has to be said he's been a little below par post-WC
I thought Conte was a "defensive" manager. What went wrong?.......and do we actually have a "team" amongst our collection of players or just 11 names on the team list for the day?
He's making the exact same mistake that the ubermensch did by not addressing the fact our midfield has been unable to sit on games since the midpoint of the 2017-18 season (aka, when Dembele started to physically break down) and yet is setting us up as if it can And that's the irony of it: under an attack-minded manager we had a midfield pairing which could sit on games from the 60th minute if the game was already home and dry so all our defence needed was a pack of cards, but a succession of defence-minded managers can't see we've been crying out for a Kante-type player for years
Okay, it took some digging, but I finally found a passmap that can be used...albeit it's only for the first half please log in to view this image Bloody typical my request for 45-specific passmaps was answered for this match, eh? Anyway, while there's a whole 50% of the match (with 66.666% of the scoring...) we're not seeing, but even though this was our good half you can see issues, and guess where those issues are? That's right, the left flank is a bit of a mess, as Son is playing well too deep but Perisic's positioning is odd, because while Emerson was occupying that space last night the fact is that Emerson and Doherty are the sort of WBs who should be occupying that space - but Perisic is really a flank-hugging WB, but instead he seems determined to occupy the space Son is operating in Compare that to our right flank: Emerson and Deki are linking up reasonably well, and it has to be said Emerson being available for passes from Hojbjerg and Romero is something we clearly want to see. More than that it does demonstrate the thing about Contest current setup, with the right flank similar to his setup at Chelsea and H pulling right is also a sign of that, as Diego Costa did the exact same thing at Chelsea What else sticks out is how deep Bentancur is, which has me wondering if the ploy was to have him drop deep and pass from a deeper position with Hojbjerg screening him, or if this is evidence of how opponents can shut us down by pressing our midfield - and I'm leaning towards the latter given his passes are to Romero and Davies and not Emerson, Perisic, Son or Kane Honestly I wish the second half was available to compare it to, as I do think you can see the seeds of our second half collapse in that map because our midfield just aren't working the ball to the attacking players, hence you can see Romero playing through balls from the back to Son as an attempt to compensate for Hojbjerg and Bentancur being closed down even in the first half so our patterns were already getting predictable, especially down the left which was cut off from our midfield entirely
