Depends what you want to take from them stats. We had a season of two managers and being a team out of sorts. Saints had their best ever premier league finish by beating teams inferior to them. Should Pochettino be praised as highly as he is for managing to beat the teams he should have beaten? just depends how highly anyone wants to rate him.
Time alone will tell if Pochettino will be a success with us. Or, if indeed, he is given time to be successful. What does impress me about him, however, is the high regard that he is held by the players and staff of both Espanyol and Southampton. In direct contrast to Sherwood, who managed to alienate half of our squad in just a few months.
"Depends what you want to take from them stats." The facts. "We had a season of two managers and being a team out of sorts." The Spurs results split evenly across the managers.
"Do you believe Pochettino is the right man?" Could be another AVB. The stats against all teams that finished above Spurs in the PL : Soton : W2 D2 L6 F9 A20 Spurs : W1 D2 L7 F3 A23
If it matches what Levy views as being realistic then I wouldn't pick up any manager on their promise as when a manager joins they are in the job becaise 1. The chairman views them as being the right man 2. The manager feels they are capable and wanting to make an impact Or in some cases, they are here just for the money! But I've nothing against any manager aiming high in private, as its great to be ambitious, but Pochettino is already speaking about eventually winning the title. First he should worry about keeping his job for the next 12 months.
"That is what I'm thinking but at least the legend that is Pulis isn't too far away!" Pulis is ahead. Purely by virtue of demolishing the final title hopes of a deluded club.
I didn't mean promise in the sense of results, more the way that I would go about the job. For example if AVB said ' You can rely on me to get the best out of senior players like Adebayor' then I'd have sacked him too in mid-season. Similarly if Harry said: 'Spurs are the peak of my ambition - you won't find me touting myself for other jobs' it would explain why he got sacked too. Most people on here (except me) think managers have to be a good judge of players so if Poch said to Levy - "You've get an excellent squad - I'm the man to get it into the top 4 and we can be champions in 3 years" then he deserves to be sacked if he fails. If on the other hand he said "Appoint me and I will do everything necessary to cement your place in the top 4 just like Wenger did at Arsenal, but we are starting from a lower base so the first five years will be a hard slog" then it is entirely a different issue.
But that may well not have been the case if he was given the backing from the club that other managers get.
TBH, I expect that may well have been one of the reasons Levy dumped him at the first opportunity. Whether we like it or not, players carry a lot of weight nowadays. Any manager who alienates half of his dressing room is asking to be sacked.
I think Barry is/ was possibly the most underrated player in the league. He was Villa's star man for a number of seasons and it's no coincidence that he was pivotal in City's rise and league and cups wins and he's also earned himself a 3 year deal with Everton despite being 33 (I think?). Very solid and reliable player to have. Gary Cahill is probably the best English CB right now. Ashley Young... Won a league title but his career has really been shot to s**t in the past couple of seasons, pretty much gone from being England's most exciting winger to one of Utd's forgotten men.
I wouldn't argue. I also wouldn't argue that Sherwood got us playing attractive football. The facts are, though, that he has by far the best record of any Spurs manager, and was winning more as he went along. Two of our last six games were two of our three best efforts of the year. It was AVB who didn't make the right moves with a new squad. Sherwood got them playing together quite effectively in a reasonably short time, not to mention getting the best out of two of our best, if not our two best, players, and bringing along Bentaleb and Kane very successfully. And while AVB showed he was not the right man for Spurs last year, if he had gotten the man he expected to be the key to his team either year he'd managed here it might have been very different. Surely having Moutinho the year before last should have gotten us the couple of extra points we needed for third, at the very least--which would have nipped a long series of unfortunate events in the bud. I would like to see our new manager adequately backed for a change. So I guess if he feels he really wants Schneiderlin I'd reluctantly support him. But I agree: there are a bunch of DMs who seem to me to be around the same level. Aside from Bentaleb and Dembele, who are not necessarily DMs, and Sandro, who unfortunately has injury issues, Capoue has almost always impressed me positively. Like Schneiderlin, he's a capped French international who didn't make the final world cup squad. We paid a small fraction of 27 million for him. So I can't see Schneiderlin as a justified purchase in any way.
