Spot on. My only worry (which I am shoving to the back of my mind, behind the "witty retorts to Pinkie and Fosse on the war thread" section) is that winning the EL will lead to Ange staying on next season, which would be a total disaster which - dare I say it - might even make winning the EL not worth the bother. With Ange trying to juggle PL and CL I would genuinely fear relegation. Then Harry can come back after his contract at Bayern expires and win the Championship play-offs 2026/27 to get his first medal at Spurs.
The main reason Spurs are still in the Europa is because the quality of the competition is weaker than usual. To win would be nice but it’s significantly weaker without the CL dropouts.
That's a very good point. The new formatting is also why I fear the CL so much more if Ange is navigating it. The group stage with 8 games against 8 different opponents such that you can't learn from one leg and take lessons into the next is much more brutal than the old format.
That doesn’t demean the prestige of the trophy for me at all I thought the CL dropouts coming in demeaned it though, what a farce This is a major trophy to win for us and if we have got lucky in achieving it about time I say anyway we won’t win it **** our pants in the final as usual or turn up in the semi like we are already through and get turned over
If he gets hired again then that surely confirms for those who may have any doubt that Levy has zero clue regarding running a football club and making good decisions for the club regarding personnel
We've known that for quite some time. It's a conundrum. Would you take winning the EL if it 100% meant Ange is here to stay? I'd probably say yes but I'm torn on it. I think we'd still be just about too good to go down next season (even with a stronger crop coming up from the championship) but it would be another long and humiliating year.
I’d still love to see Spurs win it but I mean it doesn’t mean that we can just ignore the awful league form.
Not often I agree with Carragher but he’s right here. Why can everyone see it except those in charge?
Because nobody above Ange has any meaningful football experience. Levy's record of appointing awful and unsuitable coaches is astounding. He picked Santini, against the wishes of his DoF, Frank Arnesen, over BMJ......and van Gaal over Poch. That's who employed Ange...aided by a bloke who had worked as an administrator in China and Australia. Taking all that into consideration, it's surprising they haven't relegated us.
Yeah I would. He’d only be sacked a couple months into the following season anyway because we’d likely be losing at a similar rate as we are now in the Prem but also in the CL too. But that’s worth taking if it meant we got to lift the Europa. I’ll be on a high for about 6+ months anyway so probably won’t even be too arsed about the first half of next season’s results.
I'm with you. As much as it should be obvious to anyone that Ange is well out of his depth, the strong likelihood is that the next chump will be little better, if better at all. All the same mistakes will be made, leading to exactly the same outcome. Having this turkey win a trophy, following on from Ramos and the 'Bloke in the Coat', would be about right. We are a shameful, ****ing mess.
Changing the subject back to last night's game... Apart from the initial defense/GK errors, one of the reasons that Forest largely bossed the first half was the weak MF and in particular that Kulu was almost anonymous, leaving Sarr and Bentancur exposed. He can be an exceptional player, but I very much doubt whether he is anywhere near the level of fitness required to start in the EL semi. My fear is that Ange thinks he's an automatic starter, ignoring the evidence of his eyes. It's got whiffs of Poch & Kane in the CL final all over again.
The midfield is by far and has always been the biggest problem with the team. Individual errors such as Vicario flapping and Romero losing his man are inevitable in a team devoid of confidence. But we simply never have control of a game beyond patches here and there, and that will lead to situations where mistakes are likely to be far more costly. It is astounding that Ange persists with this midfield setup, one that immediately ruins whoever plays at LM as they are on their weaker foot and naturally want to come inside to traffic. Then the other two are a complete mess. Ally Gold was full of praise for Bentancur last night but I have no idea why. His performance was symptomatic of everything that is wrong with our set up in the middle. Running around like a headless chicken looks impressive as it is damn hard work but it doesn't translate into control and wins. Bentancur was trying to cover the entire third on his own. In the second half he was overlapping Porro on one side to little effect and on the other side was popping up further left and deeper than Spence, his only contribution there was giving away a few free kicks for Forest to run down the clock. Kulusevski or whoever starts at RW really shouldn't need to do much defending or tracking back. We only criticise it because what's behind them is organised chaos.
Protection behaviour (from the continent that gave you the EU) . In days of yore, the UEFA cup (ancestor of the EL) would have those who finished 2-3 in their leagues. Which meant the likelihood of drawing quality opponents sooner rather than later + more often was much higher than in the Champions cup.
Slight change of tack I don't think Forest are that good. Of course I'm happy that they might keep Chelsea out of the CL, and other usual suspects. But they've had a lot of matches that they've only 'just won', where other outcomes were very much available. For example, whether we deserved it or not, we could still have won last night. However the 'all knowing' pundits tend to make their judgment based on results rather than how those results were achieved. Therefore next season you might find Forest losing a lot more games than this season, even by playing in exactly the same way. The pundits will then discuss 'how it all went wrong' and then cough up the usual suspects like not having enough depth for Europe as well, and that other teams have 'worked them out'. And all this could happen with nothing changing about Forest.
