Match Day Thread Tottenham Hotspur v NS Mura

Overpaid and couldn't care less. Sack the ****ing lot and get some hungry players in.Baltic States or lower leagues.Start looking before we get relegated. LEVY!!!!

 

Can’t believe I’m agreeing with everything Jamie O’Hara says… Jesus what has Spurs done to me?!

 

Tonight from Antonio Conte...

"We have to do better at many, many things. It is important in football to have vision. Where are you now? And what do you want in the future? I am here to help the club in this aspect. The club is outstanding outside, to create a stadium but now we start from behind.

It is important to know this because I am not a magician and after three weeks I have found players that want to work and have great commitment but sometimes it is not enough."

And there you have it. Three weeks in and Conte's explaining that he's not a magician and hard work just isn't going to cut it. Daniel Levy's High Noon is 5 weeks away. There's no way that Conte's staying at Spurs to work with this rotten to the core group of players...and if the club are committed to him being here next season, they had better deliver him something that he can work with.

 

I agree with what Spurf said in that it’s hard to blame Conte for what happened tonight as well as the selection (albeit I’d have brought Reguilon and Emerson on to provide speed at FB). I predicted that exact team with the exception of Winks in for Skipp as I assumed despite his suspension last weekend he’d be kept fresh for the coming one.

Conte picked his first XI against Vitesse, Everton and Leeds and so I think it was inevitable that tonight we’d see a rotated side to see if anyone could give him something to think about. Despite the fact we know we’ve got some absolutely disgraceful professionals and utter dross players, to see a bunch of squad players at a premier league side go to Slovenian minnows and the lowest ranked team in the ECL and get beaten like that is unacceptable. You don’t deserve your £50k/ £60k/ £70k a week salary if you can’t beat a team that’s pretty much the equivalent of a solid League One team.

Conte’s given a pretty ruthless assessment in his interview and seemingly indirectly laid down a marker to the board because if I’m reading it right it sounds like he’s acknowledged the depths (or at least some of) of our problems and that’s the need to get rid of many and bring in a lot of reinforcements.

Between now and the January window we’ve got one final must win ECL game to finish second and avoid an embarrassing exit from Europe’s third tier competition and we’ve got a League Cup game against West Ham, along with our Premier League games. It’s not unreasonable to now expect our first team to play in all of those. Smart substitutions may be needed but there’s zero reason for the likes of Dele, Doherty and co to be involved in squads any more. Banish them to the reserves, tell them they’re not wanted NOW so that they’re agents can start trying to engineer moves away in the hope that come January 1st there’ll already be offers on the table. Get them out, boot them out in fact with steel toecaps, and then let Conte and Paratici rebuild this football club. Failure to do that and I wouldn’t be surprised if Conte walks before the end of the season, because he’s the type of bloke that won’t put up with ****, from the board to the players.

 

What many of us feared in the summer has actually come to pass. We've somehow managed to spend around £70m to downgrade on last season's already piss poor squad. Quite remarkable really.

Bale, Lamela, Vinicius and Gazzaniga were all allowed to leave without being adequately replaced, if they were replaced at all.

 

Conte is the latest attempt at an ENIC quick fix. While I certainly hope he's successful, there's a reason why none of ENIC's quick fixes worked: ENIC haven't gone about building and maintaining the squad properly, or hired an appropriate manager for them, except during the Pochettino years.

They've studiously avoided following the template provided by many other successful, youth-oriented teams, from Borussia Dortmund to Brentford, because they think they know better. They've firmly established that they don't know much.

I hope they may finally be shocked into following the pattern that works: focus on finding talented youth players; hire a manager who excels at improving them; sell them at a premium when they want to move to another club; embrace being the ultimate penultimate destination for big stars; repeat.

While I would also like to see a massive exodus of players, the bigger the bust, the less anyone will pay them. Few players will willingly cost themselves millions. I suppose Spurs could sponsor their wages, but it would be expensive, and Spurs have lost a lot of money lately. The longer you mismanage a squad, the harder it is to fix. And Spurs have been mismanaging the squad since at least the time Pochettino talked about the need for a painful rebuild...since well before that, really, because they didn't invest when investment was most likely to provide trophies.

 

At 3.31 - "After three and a half weeks, I am happy to stay here but we have to improve the quality of the squad."

Levy really needs to understand that Conte's already indicating that he'll walk if he doesn't get quality players...in January. It should be a given, a no brainer, a stone cold certainty that those signings will happen...and yet, 20 years experience of Levy and ENIC, leads me to believe that it won't.

So, come on Joe and Daniel. Apply the same level of desire and funding to fixing this ****ing mess, as you've applied to non-footballing matters...because, I'm not sure where this club goes in the next 5-10 years, if you don't.

Addendum: Poor old Conte looks like a Spurs fan already... Less than a month with us and he's nearly done!

 

Second part of O’Hara’s rant, never known this guy to be so spot on.


West Ham put us to shame nowadays. They’ve already topped their Europa League group that ironically has the team that knocked us out of it last season - Dinamo Zagreb. Meanwhile at best, we can only finish second in the Europa Conference League and that isn’t even a guarantee.
Never thought I’d be seeing the day where West Ham are putting us to shame, they’ve got players all over the gaff playing for the shirt and manager, we’ve got primarily a bunch of ****ers relaxing and picking up their pay cheques. As O’Hara says - Get. Them. Out.

 

Yeah this is what I alluded to about his brutal press interview.

I know Jose gave the “different coach, same players” interview which felt like a dig more at the players than the hierarchy but this one by Conte feels like he’s saying “you lot have to put some serious money into this team otherwise it’s ****ed and I’m off”.

No hiding for anyone at the club now. Changing managers isn’t fixing anything but right now we’ve got one of the best in the game and he’s basically telling the club it needs to invest if we’re to ever challenge the top teams again. I truly think he walks if January turns out to be a disappointment both with incomings and outgoings, and should that happen, it’ll make the atmosphere at the Utd game look like a playground spat.

 

Genuinely do not agree that Conte was a quick fix.

JM definitely was as the club did not see what a lot of fans did. Namely that:
1. JM himself was an out dated one trick pony (as his time at united proved).
2. That the squad needed surgery not coaching.
3. Our recruitment needed sorting.

Sacking JM and appointing Nuno were not a quick fixes imo. They were panic reactions.
JM needed sacking but the club had spent months ignoring what most fans could clearly see. The ESL fiasco and backlash caused them to sack him, hoping to appease the fans.

Nuno was a panic appointment cos no one else was willing to join and it was becoming embarrassing.

I think that by appointing Conte the club have acknowledged that whole sale changes have to be made.

The board and Levy can not allow this to fail. The fan response to the United debacle shook the up ... that'll look like a picnic compared to fan reaction if Conte walks away cos we refuse to strengthen the squad.

 

Absolutely. He will walk. I was amazed that he took the job on in the first place and that Levy and Lewis offered it to him. I can't help but believe that they just kicked the can further down the road and will be offering Conte more players like Doherty, Rodon, Frazier Campbell

It's the speed of the crisis that's slightly shocking. He's only had 4 weeks and 4 matches in charge and it's blatantly apparent that things are appallingly wrong. **** 'new manager bounce', we're as bad as we were for Nuno and have been for at least half of every match that he's been with us.

I can't find words to describe how bad we were last night. You only have to look at Conte's face in that interview...and that large numbers of fans (me included), laughed out loud when they scored the winner. It's come to that...even I'm laughing at how inept the vast majority of the players are and how awful things are going to be when Conte quits.

 

And I genuinely hope you're right. It seems to me the right manager for the project would be one better known for developing youth than for winning trophies. But I don't know that much about Conte, honestly, or what Conte had in mind when he decided to come to Spurs.

In any case, the manager after Conte will make the direction of the club more evident.

 

Spurs are clearly at a cross roads it's a Robert Johnson moment. The devil is standing there and the decisions made now will effect this club for a decade. Once again they have gone for a manager with a huge reputation but clearly that does not alter the reality of the current squad owned by Spurs. They don't come with a bigger reputation than Mourinho but he proved ineffective in solving the problems at Spurs. Clearly reputation is not enough and unless the lack of quality in midfield and defence is addressed no progess will be made. Levy and his board have put themselves in a very simple situation by employing Conte who now has a clear idea of the task in hand. He's made it very clear, the quality of the squad must be improved, he's not afraid, he says and nor should he be, the fear must be with the board of Tottenham Hotspur who this time must either follow through with their apparent ambition and back their chosen superstar manager OR fail and admit they are second raters dressed in silk Right now Spurs probably have the least effective Squad in the Premier League, newly promoted Brentford, for example, look a class above them. Having world class facilities are a waste of time if you can't produce a football team to play in it.

 

Conte's not a Spurs or an ENIC manager. We walked away from him in the summer, when he was up for the job. Levy hasn't changed his philosophy of 20 years of minimal real investment in players. He's just in a deeper hole than he realised, when he agreed to poor old Nuno (he really didn't deserve the kicking that he got). After the booing at half time against Leeds, it's clear that the fans have no patience left. The appointment of Conte is to deal with an immediate problem and nothing else.

Only on Monday, in the financial statement, we got a rerun of "player spending is no guarantee of success". I'd love to be proven wrong, but that wasn't in the statement for no reason. Conte and Paratici are going to learn a hard truth in January. There's no daring in this regime and they'll skimp on everything that isn't bricks and mortar.

Conte isn't the long term future of this club...the likelihood is that he isn't even the short term future. When Poch went, we should have replaced him with another long term appointment but we've done the exact opposite, three times in a row. It's an utter **** show.

 

Welcome on board!

 

Thanks

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Yep. That's it.

I posted this during the 10 week manager search...

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The club have had contracts with 4 managers to coach the team this season - Poch, Mourinho, Nuno and now, Conte. Three of those managers are considered to be elite managers. Thus far, the result of their employment is that, team is worse than it was last season...and the season before that....and the season before that.

Something is wrong at the heart of this club and until that is fixed, we'll continue sinking.

 

It's so much easier on FM when you can just rinse Newcastle for Ndombele and sign a couple of quality players while also lowering the wage bill...

 

Actually,they are the only team from North London!!!!!