You can argue this point with just about every manager and his star player(s) on the planet though, Luke. Teams that generally do well tend to have one, two or three key players that stand out above the rest, that's the reason they are the "go to" players. Take the best players out of every team and the team as whole will look considerably weaker. If you took Rooney and van Persie from Utd, chances are LVG would be facing similar pressure to what Moyes faced with fans calling for his head as I highly doubt you'd be top 6 let alone top 4 without them. Take Costa, Hazard and Fabregas from Chelsea and I'm sure they wouldn't be top. This can go on forever with the likes of Sanchez, Aguero, Ronaldo, Messi, Zlatan etc all being removed from their respective clubs.
Just shows that you know SFA about why Judas is hated by Spurs fans. It wasn't just that he left to join The Goons, it was the way he did it. Promising to sign a new contract when all the time he had no intention of doing so, and was busy negotiating more money for his own greedy self with Whinger. The club that nurtured him and brought him through the system didn't deserve to be treated like that. He showed no respect for the club, or its fans. He's scum, and he always will be.
As others have said, not racially abused and there is a special place in hell for him for the way he treated us. But had their been a thread at the time from Arsenal fans about whether he should be sold instantly, I wouldn't have gone on to say yes. It would have been none of my business . Also - again as said above - you haven't suffered by losing MP, so why not let it go. You are playing good football, getting good results. Just chill, enjoy and STFU about Spurs internal business.
We've been playing constantly all season. When we faced Utd we'd played 50% more games than them, with 30 to their 20. We've also had plenty of injuries, but it's been glossed over, as usual.
You can say it for many clubs, but Pochettino hasn't experienced it before. You're in four competitions - one of which is the notoriously elongated EL. It's notable that other English clubs who've had this kind of burden in recent seasons have seen their league form dip. Playing twice a week having already played far more games than your opponents is increasingly difficult to manage as the season progresses. Yes, it's also true that most clubs rely on star players. But many of those you mention play for teams which perform consistently well over the course of a game and over the course of a season. It's not often that Chelsea are relying on Costa or Hazard to take chances regularly in the last few minutes to win games. It's not a bad thing that Spurs have players who can do this - like Eriksen's cool finish on Saturday when many would have blasted it into row Z - but, in terms of commenting on Pochettino, how much credit does the manager deserve for that? My view is that he's been bailed out by these players.
Yet when Utd used to do it all the time it was because of Ferguson's genius and the players' will to win. Funny that.
Utd were winning the vast majority of games under SAF. In games where the winning goal was late, it usually followed Utd dominating possession and having countless attempts at goal. Somewhat different to a team whose form is up and down, with a record of W11 D4 L7 which could easily have been the other way round but for these late contributions. It says a lot about the skill and resolve of certain players - as I've already said in previous posts - but what credit does the manager deserve? Many Spurs were willing to criticise the flaws not so long ago - defensive frailties, the problems with inverse wingers etc. Have those issues been resolved because Eriksen or Kane had finished coolly under pressure against the likes of Villa or Hull or Sunderland? Surely Pochettino still has a lot to prove? Utd are in the same boat in many ways. LvG doesn't know his best formation yet; defensive weaknesses are papered over by De Gea's consistent brilliance; star players chip in with moments of quality to rescue games as you'd expect they should given their price tags. Most significantly, Utd don't bombard teams late on and break them down like in the past. I'm not pretending it's any better at Utd.
Pochettino's not proven anything yet, but people simply don't apply the same logic to really similar situations with football teams. It's not hard to see a correlation between the improved fitness in the squad and finishing strongly. Doing it once or twice leads to an expectation of it happening in the future and other clubs fearing it, which was one of Ferguson's weapons. How often did you see teams ****ting themselves in close games against Utd late on and crumbling? Our defensive issues are still there, for a variety of reasons, and I don't expect they'll go away. The inverted winger issue seems to have been addressed via training though, as Chadli and Townsend are going down the line far more often.
If Spurs continue to win games in the last minutes of games perhaps 'Fergie time' will become known as 'Poch' time. What Pochettino doesn't have that Fergie did have, however, is the continual assistance of referees. Quite the contrary in fact, as Sunday showed.
What a load of crap. "In games where the winning goal was late, it usually followed Utd dominating possession and having countless attempts at goal." - This season's late wins under Pochettino: Sunderland 65% possession, 25 shots; Hull 73%, 23 shots; Villa 60%, 18 shots; even against West Ham we saw more of the ball despite playing with 1 less player for a third of the game. Of course I've missed Leicester and Swansea off that list, I guess they'd be considered lucky by your standards but then we'd also be considered unlucky not to have beaten Newcastle, Stoke and Sunderland(away) too. 2 lucky wins over the course of half a season, what a lucky bunch we are. I thought we'd moved away from this idea that stats somehow tell you who should've won the game. If that was the case we'd have won the league with AVB last season as we dominated possession and shots in nearly every game. What credit does the manager deserve? Well he's found us a way to win consistently in the league. Clearly it hasn't been all easy going, in our first 11 we lost 5 and won 4 but in the 11 following we've won 7 and lost 2. You can call it luck if you want but that's just willful ignorance. It's unlucky if you hit the bar but if you hit the bar regularly it's poor. The same with scoring late, it's lucky if you do it once or twice but if you do it on a regular basis it's a skill. When Bale scored incredible goals late on in games it wasn't luck, it was a case of grinding the opposition down, it's easy to stop Bale getting a shot off once but if he keeps coming at you all game he's going to find space and hit the target. The samething is happneing to us now, it's easier to stop Eriksen, Kane and the rest when you've got 8 behind the ball and closing those players down but as the game wears on the opposition tire and we don't. Yes, Pochettino is getting the benefit of using better players but he's also getting more out of players that didn't look so good last season. Maybe it's all coincidence and these players would've improved anyway but as it is the players are happy with the manager and the team's progressing well so there's really no indication that Pochettino is simply lucky. With regards to fatigue, we've been rotating a lot, throughout the seson, especially in the cups. Even just looking at the mintues played in this league(they're easier to find) and compare us to Chelsea who have only played 1 less game than us across competitions you'll see and obvious difference. Players who've played over 1,800 minutes(out of 1980)? Us 2 Chelsea 6. Over 1,500? Us 3 Over 1,000 minutes? Us 9, Chelsea 11. Over 500? Us 18, Chelsea 12. If you take out Lloris and Courtois, as keepers don't tire as the season goes on, then every figure drops by 1 and the difference is even more pronounced. Whether it's because we had more injuries, didn't know our best 11 at the start of the season or we rotate more we still have a much better spread of minutes for each player in the squad. Our problem is not the number of games we're giving our best players but whether the players playing the majority of their games in the cup can still get results as the competitions become more difficult. We have a strong squad on paper but when you put them into Pochettino's system a number of them struggle and that's my concern at the moment.
I didn't say any wins were lucky, YV. I don't think players showing the quality and nerve Eriksen did on Saturday was lucky at all. But I think Pochettino's been lucky that he's had players - Eriksen, in particular - to dig him out of a hole when he's not looked to have the answers himself. I haven't anything particularly dynamic or inspiring in his management. SAF threw forwards on and played 2-3-5 chasing games. Some of your performances at home were very uninspiring - WBA and Newcastle, for example- where you had only one or two attempts on target. The Hull game was different until the sending off - then Eriksen popped up at the end again. Pochettino is fortunate to have good players who have managed to turn results in your favour in other games that might have otherwise ended in draws or defeats. I haven't seen much where you could say that happened because the manager did x or y. You can see with Koeman how he gets the best from his players; how he employs tactics to cater for the opposition. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've yet to see how Pochettino is making a difference given performances are up and down and so many results have been on a knife edge, even though it's worked out OK in the end in many games recently. He may prove to be a very good manager, but so far, has he shown himself to be an improvement on AVB or Sherwood?
Apologies, I misunderstood what you were saying was lucky. I still disagree though. Isn't sticking with the plan and it paying off part of making good managerial decisions? It doesn't really matter what Fergie did, Mourinho used to throw Huth upfront when they needed a goal, Pochettino relies on his best players to get more chances as the game comes to a close, just as Fergie relied on throwing more players forward(you could easily make a case for that being desperation) and Mourinho relied on Huth to win headers and make the direct punts up the field work. If you're going to say Pochettino's lucky to have players that score great goals then you also have to look at the number of great chances our players are missing too, and there have been plenty of them. Everything you're levelling at Pochettino could equally be said about Van Gaal whose main tactical changes seem to be changing from the frequently ineffective 352 and playing players out of position. Lucky for him he's players like Van Persie who are clinical and can also score goals out of nothing, not to mention having £170mill to spend on players getting triple the wages of any of ours.
Put all your savings/pocket money on it - you'll be quids in. There is a reason why it's such long odds.
