He was in an ad for some German beer last year which pretty much nagged people how to drink it And I though Hyundai ads were bad for lecturing
That's what the relegation comment acknowledged...but (at best) we're just playing for a more elevated (mid-table) placing. We ain't gonna win nuthin' (natch)...and given that Ange is gone in the summer, we're just playing out the season. I know that you're very supportive of the status quo, having told me how well Mourinho, Nuno. Conte and now, Ange are doing (when collapse of their spells was clearly coming)...and I support your right to be as wrong as you want to be...but we're done this season. DONE. The only positive to come out of it, at all, is that Levy's starting to feel a modicum of the heat he righteously deserves. That's our end of season aim...get him out of the club and get Paul Barber in.
Luck's got nothing to do with it. Brighton use a variant of Moneyball. Their owner, Tony Bloom, runs a sports analytics company that primarily focuses on betting. The club supposedly uses the data that they accumulate as part of their scouting system.
To be honest there’s no bad luck involved when you spend £60m on Richarlison or re-sign Werner twice on loan. It’s just stupidity.
Fantastic goal by Mitoma. I'd love to know the difference between Chelsea's disallowed goal and Arsenal's goal at our place.
I think that is a misrepresentation of my position. I was happy to see Mourinho, Nuno and Conte go. I was ,mistakenly, happy to see Redknapp go. My position now is that I hope Ange can turn the season around. I hope that will start tomorrow, when we see a team with some players back and also rested. Ange turning it around would be best for Spurs because constant changing of managers has produced nothing for Spurs fans but false hopes. This is not so much Ange's project as Johan Lange. Lange has clearly identified a new way forward for Spurs i.e. buying high quality young players BEFORE they develop out of reach of Spurs. He is putting together a potentially great team for Spurs near future IMO. These are all very young and it was not intended that they would be so exposed to the PL before our injury crisis. Teams have literally spotted our situation and set out to bully the team through sheer force. Ange was Lange's carefully considered choice to carry out the team managerial side of his plan, as far as I can tell. I suspect this is why Levy has not sacked Ange so far. Hopefully Lange's project will be allowed to develop and in the short term it will be best for the plan if Ange turns around team performances when he has a more complete squad to use. The alternative is stop start back and forth, getting nowhere.
We are half way through. You are just looking at the NOW when I think you have to look at the near future. League position matters on the last day of the season when you have 14 games still to play it's not a known thing. Tomorrow will be interesting.
I'm not sure what winning end of season games against teams that have already 'clocked off', and have their eyes set on a summer break, is going to tell us. Our coach sets us up to be so open that our midfield is a mirage in most games. You think you can see them, but they're not real...whilst both of our fullbacks are regularly AWOL, on instruction. Any decently coached team will have us on toast, unless we replace the majority of the squad with the best of breed. As we're never going to do any such thing, Ange's departure is inevitable...and why the hell we appointed him, is a very prescient question.
@The RDBD corrected me on the word I was using. Random is better than luck. But I've always conceded that Brighton and Brentford, who use a lot of data in recruitment have outperformed in recruitment for quite a while. However when they sell players on, very few of them turn into the top players that we need to compete, they mostly turn out to be quite average. If you look back over ENIC's reign I think we've been generally average on recruitment with some periods where most things went well and some when a lot went badly. The period before 2016 is an example of the former, the period from 2019 to 2023 an example of the latter. That's what I mean by luck or randomness...it's simply impossible to have a long-term edge in recruitment. I think everyone will be learning from Brighton and Brentford so any edge they have will disappear. The first club to properly use AI will likely get a short-term edge but as in all works of life the richer clubs will tend to get the benefits.
I assume that this is because those clubs also play Moneyball football. Statistically effective systems over an aesthetically pleasing, attacking game. They're generally not the most technical players and focus more on athleticism and physicality. Both clubs are sensible enough to see the value in exceptions though, like Mitoma and Mbeumo. A lot of these players will struggle when they're put in a possession-based, attacking system. Bissouma often looks ****e for us, for example.
It's not random. There are forces at play in our recruitment that place us at a distinct disadvantage to pretty much any equivalent club. We don't pay the wages to attract players of the required quality. We overspend on transfer fees for players who will accept our wage structure. The squad's full of them...and they're murder to get rid of. We won't pay significant agent's fees. The best established players have agents who want to be paid with real money. We buy players who don't have such agents. Our reliance on CAA Base is excessive. We love 'a bargain'. Levy can't help himself. It's why we've got a plethora of left wingers and goalkeepers..and only had 3 centre backs to start the season. He's regularly nipping out to buy players that the coach doesn't want (Sissoko, llorente, Lucas Moura, Joe Rodon, Reguillon, Bale the 2nd time, Spence). The majority of them aren't a bargain at all. Our recruitment team was **** for years with COYS Daniel making technical, footballing assessments and having final say. We're run like Trotters Independent Traders. Levy's not at Mr Byrite anymore. We need better...it won't be difficult. Villa got in Monchi and their recruitment is massively improved. If we were a progressive club, we could have got him and a decent coach years ago... We are amateur.
If that was all true then you would expect us to finish well below 6th on average. But we don't. The data suggests our football performance is exactly where it should be based on our wealth.
