Match Day Thread Tottenham Hotspur v Brentford

As someone said the other day, things currently have the feeling of AVB 2013-14.

Wins, but not emphatic.
A nervousness on-pitch when the score does not offer
breathing space (which too often leads to Portu-ball) .
and the feeling that collapse in defence is never more
than a couple of games away.

The manager will have to work hard to get the squad
feeling anywhere near that of the first 10 games
of his tenure.

 

Villas-Boas in 2013-14 absolutely had emphatic wins

Not for us, but...

 

Just saw some of the highlights on YouTube.

Vicario is a bomb scare, 2 massive errors in that game. I really hope the club are looking at getting him some proper competition or a replacement for him in January.

Good for Solanke to get off the mark, he needed that goal and it was a typical strikers goal.

 

Vicario is starting to give me Gomes vibes.

Superb shot stopper but capable of the most inexplicable brain farts at a moment's notice.

 

Yeah he’s a wonderful shot stopper and plays the ball well (most of the time) but I wouldn’t be surprised if we look for another keeper in January or next summer.

 

The decision to choose him over Raya is nearly as bad as choosing to sign Werner twice.

Both poor decisions by Ange

 

Just seen MOTD. It’s always difficult to come to a conclusion from highlights, but it does look like we tried to actually play forwards rather than sideways, so that’s a bonus. And no surprises that it resulted in more clear cut chances. Funny that.
Nice to see Johnson doing what we’d all hoped he’d do, and Maddison seemingly having a very good game.
Hopefully this is the start of a run we can put together and it’ll build some confidence.

Despite the missed opportunities in front of goal where we could’ve probably had 6, the highlights seemed to make Vicario the “star” of the show.
On the one hand we have a brilliant shot stopper, but on the other, we have a GK who is seemingly lacking confidence in other parts of his game.
I don’t remember seeing this from him before the opposition were “bullying” him on set pieces. It’s received a lot of focus in recent months, and personally, I think it’s got into his head. One minute he’s saving our arse, the next he’s morphed into Gomes, as others have pointed out.
if he can sort it out and get back to the Vicario we had for a large part of last season, he’s got the potential to be a brilliant goalkeeper. He’s got all the attributes to be so, but he’s gonna need to deal with the deficiencies quickly. Too many heart in the mouth moments that inevitably lead to mistakes and goals conceded won’t end well for him. The PL is too ruthless.

Anyway, much better performance which we need to learn from. Maybe it’s just a case of being a bit more brave and taking some more attacking risks. COYS

 

As someone who was there from on high in the stands it was indeed a big improvement on the last game. Yes, with better finishing it could, and should have been a much bigger scoreline. Maddison vastly improved and Kulosveski had a good game I thought.

Downsides? For me Sonny looked out of sorts, one or two chances in years gone by he would have buried. The goalkeeper is an interesting one. Great shot stopper but simply not commanding enough for me...

 

I think Vicario was a Paratici push, not sure how much say Ange had in the matter, he'd barely been in the job for a few weeks.

But definitely, Raya is the better of the two keepers. I personally think we opted for Gigi because he was much cheaper.

 

Didn't get to watch the game live as my two best mates have been down since Thursday for a long weekend.

Just got done watching the match on fullreplays.com though, easily our best performance in a long, long while barring the first 25 secs!

Bentancur and especially Maddison were brilliant whilst Kulu was typically impressive again too.

Front three were also effective, albeit every one of them could've had at least +1 more goal to their name.

Vicario had a jekyll & hyde performance. Some great saves, one being superb but his lack of technical ability and his handball outside the box made him a lucky boy on the day.

I liked that we finally had variety in our play though. So often we've passed, passed passed and then looked for a low cross. This match alone we set Son through the middle three times; one of them he should've scored but tried rounding Flekken. The second one he should've had another assist as he laid in Johnson who shot wide and the third one was part of my favourite goal of the game with Bissouma winning the ball, Romero playing a great through ball and then Son equally playing a great one through to Maddison for the chipped finish. We've not done that anywhere enough going back as far as last season yet it's where Son is often so effective with his speed and instinctive finishing. We also just had more purposeful shots at goal in general, stats in recent weeks may say it's probably similar amounts but the eye test shows you that Flekken actually had to make some sound saves to keep Brentford in the game.

Hope this is a platform to build on and not a one off. We'll win and score a lot more by having that variety, we've been far too easy to read for months.

 

Vicario was signed because he was cheap (vintage Levy), he is now proving to be a liability and has no quality competition for his place, so we are stuck with him, probably until the summer. It was gross negligence not to sign another GK of the required quality to challenge and maybe even take the place of Vicario, Forster and the others are not that man. Penited away next and we really should be picking up a result at Old Toilet, which probably means a Spursy defeat.

 

In fairness, our system invites huge chances by design. The keeper is constantly having to measure and judge distances of up to 40 yards between himself and the nearest defender, and that often plays into decision making.

For me, Vicario's only major weakness is his ability to command the box at set pieces.

But it isn't entirely fair to compare him to Raya. Arsenal are superb defensively and as much as it pains me to say it, Gabriel and Saliba are the best CB pairing in the league right now.

 

Vicario is better for playing out from the back, while Raya is better for the Brexit Ball that Arteta has the Bottlers unironically playing

 

There must be a point when a keeper just punts the ball upfield rather than fanny about in the box drawing on pressure from the opposition like Vicario did yesterday, that's common sense not coaching surly

 

This 100%
Which makes you wonder WTAF had going through his head yesterday !!

 

I remember at the time that Ange said he liked Vicario’s journey and he related to it. Also the fact Vicario could already speak English. 2 reasons that personally I don’t think should be a big factor but obviously the club and Ange disagreed.

 

Agree Raya is definitely in a better side who can defend but overall I just think he’s a much better keeper than Vicario and Spurs messed up by not going for him.

 

I was very happy with yesterday's performance overall.
It was a good win against a decent side and we should've won by more.
Nice to see Moore get a few minutes at the end too, even though I felt we could've done it earlier.

Maddison had an excellent game. Easily his best since his injury last season.
He really looked like a weight had been lifted, for some reason. Shame they were allowed to foul him so often.
Son's mixed performance saw some very impressive passing, but he looks tired and his finishing was off.
We need to find some way to rest him, as his national team won't and he'll be travelling a lot, too.

Brentford showed exactly why disruptive tactics, like timewasting and feigning injury, need to be punished more.
They struggled to deal with Postecoglou's tactics, both when we had the ball and when we didn't.
A number of dangerous turnovers came from the high press and they didn't really have an answer to it.
Flekken tried to kill the pace and slow it right down as a result, even when they were losing.
Adding on minutes at the end does nothing to prevent this and isn't the answer. Getting the cards out does.

 

IMHO the punishment should be after the fact.
Go thru the game and note the incident durations and perpetrators.
Once someone accumulates a certain amount of time + incidents,
then match ban punishments akin to those for cards.