I know you have other things on your mind General, but surely a moment's consideration would tell you that Spurs are NOT "reaping results quickly". They have been building their team and squad for years, slowly improving year by year, much as NCFC did in the 80s and 90s culminating in the Walker years. The team AVB took over from 'Arry was already pressing regularly for a top four place, and the squad was described by 'Arry himself as far stronger than, e.g. Arsenal's, with whom they were competing. In contrast, the team and squad CH took over ONLY A LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR AGO from Lambert was in desperate need of complete overhaul if we were to have any chance of achieving the club's aim of establishing ourselves in the PL and not dropping back immediately into the Championship. Furthermore, Spurs have spent considerable sums year on year, in contrast to the near melt down we faced and severe shortage of funds for team strengthening in consequence. Any comparison between the positions of the two managers and their scope for doing what each team needed in the transfer window is frankly ludicrous. Fine tuning an already excellent and established group of players is completely different from the task facing CH, especially since CH hasn't got either the finances or the lure of European competition to secure the quality of player we are looking for for this or that specific position. CH has said time and again, the best he can do in the circumstances is bring better players in when they are available and willing to come, even if it means not being able to strengthen in a particular position where it is unquestionably needed.
thing is, i can see exactly what he has been trying to do. we've been in transition ever since he took over and we will still be at this stage next season too. i'm more than happy to accept that we won't be playing a stylish brand of football (not that it bothers me anyway, though everyone prefers it of course) - i want the club to grow and the only way to do that is to rebuild and that means doing whatever it takes to stay up this season and next so that the ludicrous tv money comes rolling in so we can improve the whole infrastructure both on and off the field. once that is done THEN i will want to see us try and get some attractive substance to what we see on the pitch. i'm patient because i understand where we are as a club within the football pyramid. there's no quick fix here. our amazing climb through the leagues meant we had more work to do than the likes of swansea - they've had years to get a formula, we haven't. its a long term project so if people don't buy into it then fine, they won't like it and will probably demand heads to roll but i bet if it all comes together they'll want to be a part of it! everything from the beginning of 2012-13 will be slow and gradual. there's no way around it unless you have an oligarch.
I agree about Villa and being prepared to hit them on the break but, that almost conceeds that they are going to be coming forward and in the accendancy. I want us to actually press an, as you say 'defensively suspect' and not very good one man team. Not just feed off their attacking mistakes! Bah!
there's two ways to play them. press, similar to against saints, as high up the pitch as we can, or, what i ultimately think works best against them is soak up the pressure and hit them with pace on the break (teams who beat them last year tended to do this). they push the full backs on and leave gaping holes everywhere. if villa attack us it could play into our hands so long as we defend well. people might not like that approach but tough - football is about different styles and choosing which one of those two will work best on the day will be key to getting a result. there's no guarantees with either approach, especially if the players don't play well or pass the ball as well as we know they can.
And you think 'Arry actually meant that do you? Nothing to do with trying to put pressure on AVB after he had been replaced by him at all? I saw the MOTD when he made those comments, about how Spurs were "definitely good enough for a top four spot" and you could almost physically see his nose growing a la Pinnocchio And sorry, but I personally don't buy this rhetoric about how the team Hootun inherited "was in desperate need of complete overhaul if we were to have any chance of achieving the club's aim of establishing ourselves in the PL and not dropping back immediately into the Championship. It's all very easy to say that now and use it in an argument because there is no way of proving is one way or another. What I will say is that we finished 12th under Lambert, nowhere near being relegated so what makes you think that Lambert (or another manager, or even Hootun himself) couldn't have spent the money we did last summer and lead us to another mid-table position without the need to revert to such negative and **** to watch football? Swansea's manager got poached as well you know, and look what they did - top ten finish and they won a cup whilst deservedly receiving plaudits from all and sundry for the way they play football
Going back to the original article, I think it's basically right. It's hard for an ordinary fan to have dreams any more. There is a ceiling and we know it, and the most a promoted team can dream of is becoming Stoke or Sunderland, which makes the fans fractious. Only six teams have any chance at all of winning this league, or doing anything other than getting into a Europa League which the big six basically treat with disdain. This isn't just happening in individual leagues, either. Look at last night's CL results. Teams who used to be strong competition, at least at home, like Turkish and Greek teams, simply swept aside.
i agree with you about 'arry (who had ulterior motives) but the stuff about norwich is miles off. you need only look at our squad listing for the start of last season (before bassong, garrido came in) to see that we would have been light years behind where we are now. lambert did incredibly well with the team he brought up but it would have struggled massively the following year without the additions which were made because they were vital. everyone else around us improved greatly and defensively we were a shambles. would this squad survive now? John Ruddy Declan Rudd Jed Steer Russell Martin Adam Drury Zak Whitbread Leon Barnett Elliott Ward Marc Tierney Kyle Naughton (on loan from Tottenham Hotspur) Daniel Ayala Bradley Johnson Andrew Crofts Andrew Surman Anthony Pilkington Wes Hoolahan David Fox Elliott Bennett Simon Lappin Jonny Howson Matt Ball Steve Morison James Vaughan Grant Holt Simeon Jackson Aaron Wilbraham if you don't believe urgent and massive restructuring was required of the whole playing staff then you're barking mad! its no surprise there are only a few survivors and even they are not regulars. we also know that the midfield is in urgent need of restructuring next summer. look at the position where we have maintained most of the lambert-era players... from this, we can easily see what hughton is trying to do by developing areas of the squad in a particular order. defence first, attack second, midfield third. i'm not dissing the players who have left - they did brilliantly for us and many of those kept have proven they are good premier league players but how many of those who left still play there? swansea are also a poor example to compare with because they have had years of continuity in terms of style whereas we mashed together a side every summer and moved up so rapidly we couldn't really cope. we've only just started out on the road they started on six years ago.
Of the lot not in bold, only Aaron Wilbraham(!) is still plying his trade in the Prem, and that was only after he dropped down to the Championship... James Vaughan is doing well - I'm still not happy we let him go, but it sounds like he wanted to leave. Other than that, I wouldn't really want any of the full contract players back in the squad. I guess the question of "need" is an interesting one. If Lambert had stayed, would we have needed an overhaul? Difficult to say, because Lambert appears to have great faith in his players, but I would argue he still would have ruthlessly jettisoned many of them and, with the new cash, would have overhauled the squad. As it was, with Hughton coming in and "needing" to create his own squad, I would say we definitely "needed" to overhaul in order to stay in the Prem.
I've commented myself several times about the sour grapes in that interview, but what he said about the relative strengths of the two squads was absolutely true, and exactly that was said last season by several other commentators and pundits. The fact that 'Arry used the strength of the squad he left AVB to put pressure on his successor doesn't mean what he said was false. It was indeed a stronger squad than Arsenal's, and I would even guess that when I was on here last season saying Arsenal would be in the top four, supers came along and pointed out what a weak squad Arsenal had (along with commenting about the last minute "panic buying" of Giroud, Podolski, and Arteta ). The rest of your post has been answered by Superman so I'll leave it at that.
@Supers Mate, not being funny, but I really didn't expect you to be so naive as to think I was suggesting we started last season with exactly the same squad as the year before Of course whoever was in charge would have had to make additions, nobody is disputing that so I'm not sure why it is I who is "miles off". I'm certainly not "barking mad" anyway, just to clear that one up Hootun spent what, £12/15m last summer strengthening our squad, quite obviously Lambert/AN Other would have spent somewhere in the same region so you are putting together a somewhat nonsense argument. Amongst others Hootun bought in Bassong, Turner and Snodgrass - how on earth do you know that another manager wouldn't have done the same? Snoddy was certainly on Lambert's radar for some time before we signed him, as was Ryan Bennett - heck we might have even had Benteke in our squad rather than making do with Kai Kamara and invisible man Becchio
No it hasn't, he naively made the assumption that we would start the season with the same squad as the year before, without spending what Hootun did last summer to strengthen in areas that needed it
Ordinary fans having those sorts of dreams (winning the PL, getting into the CL) is a recent phenomenon. For most fans of most clubs times haven't really changed that much. Do Crewe fans dream of getting to the PL? I doubt it, not in any sense that makes them throw their toys out their prams when they lose to Stockport or whoever. Back in the 50s and 60s did any of us dream about getting into the First Division? Not in any sense that made us restless or drove us to make dire threats about boycotting this or that, or throwing our season tickets at the manager of the time. What we dreamt about was a good Cup run, and putting one over one of the big boys in the course of it; and that dream is still alive for any fan of any league or even non-league club. You don't HAVE to develop the attitude of spoilt children simply because you have tasted the excitement of relative success.
of course not, but my point is that that squad DID need a major overhaul, something you said wasn't necessary based on the previous years exploits! fast forward 24 months and its doubtful ANY of those players will still be at the club, through either being not good enough or too good!! the squad is constantly having to be reshaped but once hughton has the main squad in place that he wants, one good enough to sustain premier league football for years to come, THEN the recruitment process will be more defined each summer. sometimes a player will be snapped up by a bigger club and we will have a replacement lined up. at the moment we need seven or eight players each summer or a whole part of the team changed! that's no good for the long term - mistakes are more likely to occur when changing huge swathes of your team. your words were: "And sorry, but I personally don't buy this rhetoric about how the team Hootun inherited 'was in desperate need of complete overhaul if we were to have any chance of achieving the club's aim of establishing ourselves in the PL and not dropping back immediately into the Championship'"
I think this argument is utterly pointless because the words: (1) overhaul; and (2) necessary, are so ambiguous that everyone is essentially right, depending on how they wish to look at it.
yes, but the word 'major' is important in this. had we only tinkered and say kept half the players we've ejected in the last twelve months, therefore only signing half the players we have done, then i'm not convinced we'd still be a premier league club today. the changes have all been required to make us as good as we can be as quickly as we can be in a manner that hasn't bankrupted the club. i think in the circumstances we've done remarkably well.
replacing almost every single player in the squad with a better one within 24 months! we're half way there as i type you can simply overhaul one area of the team, as hughton did last summer with the defence but his job is to overhaul the whole squad during his reign. of course all managers make changes - i'm not arguing with that - but his job has been mammoth when you look at how much change there has been in so little time and the upgrade in quality, at least on paper is pretty darn good and hopefully, given more time will get even better. our main area of concern is the midfield - i think most people would agree with that. we struggle to keep the ball and we struggle to create clear cut chances on a regular basis. this is why it is so bizarre that people would want to replace the manager before he has completed his assignment - we are in transition and it probably won't be until the end of next season (2014-15) that we can truly say whether hughton has been a success or a failure.
Actually they were mostly robbie's words that I directly quoted and as a result I think I might have come across a bit blurred as I used his words literally and debunked them rather than paraphrase him and make my point more eloquently at that juncture. I've never suggested we didn't need to make additions and strengthen, particularly in defence, and in the part you chose not to quote I put forward the notion that whoever was in charge last summer would have done this. However I don't accept this black and white notion that (to paraphrase robbie) if we hadn't had a complete overhaul we would have had no possible chance of staying up, simply because there is absolutely no way of proving this now after the event. Lots of assumptions are being made by people that what we are doing at the moment is the only way to stay up and it is going to secure our safety until a point when we can suddenly start expressing ourselves and playing in a more entertaining style. Anyone who disagrees with this is castagated and labelled naive, whereas I personally think it's a bit naive to think that playing the same style of football as last season, albeit with better players, is an automatic recipe for the relative success of PL security for another year. Surely clubs know what to expect now, particularly on our travels, and it's the lack of invention and attempts to do something "a bit different" could be the undoing of us. I'm not saying that this will happen, just that some people seem to think the current way of going about it will be enough this season without really convincing me
