I think Mount's actually a good player, but he's become very injury prone and they don't use him correctly. All of their attacking midfielders, including McTominay from last season, do better with somebody behind them with some creativity. They had Mount, Eriksen and the Scott-ish bloke and chose to just run Fernandez into the ground, instead.
I did put a smiley in front of my reply to your comment, it didn't appear. Making my flippant reply look serious, apologies for that.
In fairness I can see both sides of the Werner debate although now I would tend to lean to the side that he should not be in the starting 11 at the moment. I see a player completely devoid of confidence and that is having a knock-on effect to the rest of the team, who clearly have also lost confidence in him to a degree. To me a big issue with him, and that applies to a lot of professional players, is that he so one footed! Back when my son was starting out playing, he was a natural left footer and never used his other foot so we spent ages getting him used to using it. Once he was around 13 - 14 the difference was simply enormous as so many on the pitch were not. With that first one-on-one on Sunday a fit Sonny drops Banana on his arse and goes left before slotting it away. As he is so right footed there was only one option and you can see he was never going to take it. The second one later on was just inevitble. I would be surprised to see him start on Thursday just for his own sanity.
I’ve been more of a Werner advocate than others so I’ll try and play devil’s advocate. He obviously wouldn’t likely even be starting if we didn’t have two injured wingers ahead of him! And I think he does a lot of what Ange wants but obviously the end product is too inconsistent at the best of times, let alone when his confidence is through the floor. Relying on a 17yr old to take those minutes when that player has barely played any senior football would have been a massive risk though. I think Moore is mustard and will be taking Werner’s minutes by the end of the season most likely, if not perhaps even further up the pecking order, but it would have been a big call to make 4 months ago.
Whilst there's complexities at times, I find football to be largely quite simple, especially when judging players. You have great, good, average, poor and terrible ones, doesn't have to be those exact brackets but you get the picture. As a fan of football but more importantly a fan of Spurs, I want to see good players and especially ones at our club. I can't quite wrap my head around the notion of constantly wanting to defend players that almost always let us down. It's not a case of "get behind the team" it just borders insanity to want them to get more chances in the hopes they finally produce something good once in a while. We as fans all have fond memories of many players, the oldest generation on here and in general were blessed to have seen far more greats than I and others, those who have memories of Greaves and Mackay all the way through to Kane and Son have my biggest envy. Not all memorable players have to be elite though, there's many examples of what I'd say are the "job do-ers", the Chimbonda's or the Tainio's of the world, more recently Ben Davies would be a great example of such. But I guarantee you that in 10 years, no one will be talking of the Werner's of the world with any fondness, just as we won't with the Sessegnon's, the Emerson's or the Gilberto's and how we already don't with the Postiga's or the Rebrov's. I think we have the right to demand better for this football club and I'd much rather risk the unknown young quantity of Mikey Moore getting chances, where we don't even know if he'll become a good player or not, than persist with the known poor quantity of Werner who comes with as close to a guarantee as you can get that he'll let us down.
I don't think your analysis is right though. Every member of our squad is definitely in the top 5000 players in the world and most likely in the top 2000. Since there are many millions of football players they are all well inside the top percentile so by any normal measure they are all excellent. The top 100 or 200 players still stand out though because edges of distributions always have outliers. But the difference between the 500th best player and the 2000th is going to be almost undetectable to the human eye. Werner is probably somewhere in that range. If he is doing his best we should support him and try to increase his confidence, not criticise him and undermine it.
Agreed, if Son is fit, he is nowhere near that starting 11. Moore is a prodigious talent but at his age I doubt he can play every game without doing some damage to himself as freaks like Rooney who can, are rare. There have been worse than Werner who have offended me over the years but he is an average player who has a lot of pace but unfortunately not the quality to finish things off. Now I tend to gloss over these early European games at the moment but it will be interesting to see who tales the field on Thursday night and against Brighton on Sunday..
Equally I don't find yours right. There are probably around 10-12 clubs bigger than Spurs in Europe but we will have a stronger income than a few of them plus the Premier League pull which plays a significant part. Factoring in a matchday squad of 20 players and multiplying it by either 10 or 12 - we'll do 12 - to reach 240, then for averages sake put it up to 300 or even 400, Spurs should be fishing in the pool of players that would be ranked around 240-400 with the hope of getting a few inside it - which the likes of Son, Romero, van de Ven and Bentancur would definitely be, arguably one or two others too. So even if you're correct about Werner being from 500th to 2000th, he still shouldn't be playing for this football club. The fact that two clubs - one slightly bigger in Chelsea and one slightly smaller in Leipzig - both deemed/ deem him not good enough for them, that should further act as a confirmation for us that he won't be good enough here too - and he hasn't been. Supporting or criticising him on a small forum isn't going to change his fortunes either.
Well said. It should be self-evident if you are a supporter. It serves no usefull purpose to trash our players. We already had the situation of Johnson having to disable his social media account because of abuse. Dier, who is now playing for Bayern Munich (which should tell all these player ability experts something) was the butt of such abuse as was Emerson Royal ( who now plays in Seria A). As a supporter is it really your job to make life difficult for players in your team? You don't seriously think it helps your team do you?
You've completely missed one of my points which was that it's actually very hard to tell which players are relatively good. Your comment about Chelsea rejects would apply equally to Salah and de Bruyne. Werner might just be in a bad patch. He scored at more than a goal every two games in his first spell with Leipzig and at all levels with Germany. He is a perfectly good squad member and one that hardly costs us anything. Who would have been on the bench on Sunday if we didn't have him?
You may think it's hard to differentiate someone like Werner who would be in the very high hundreds or even thousands to someone like Son who is inside the top 200 but I doubt many others would. Salah played just 19 times for Chelsea and de Bruyne even fewer with 9. They simply never got a chance more so than being a reject, when they left Chelsea they showed their immediate quality and both returned to the Premier League within 2 years for huge fees. Werner played 89 times across 2 seasons for Chelsea, was sold to Leipzig, played a further 54 times and has been on their sale list for the past 2 windows. You're welcome to try and compare them but it'd look silly to do so. Werner wasn't on the bench on Sunday, he was in the starting line up, he is also our second highest earner.
Yes I know Werner started...I assumed someone on the bench would have played him if we hadn't signed him so asked who would be on the bench instead. We don't have any better players than Werner available that I can see
You said it’s too hard to see the difference between players because the level is so similar and then say you can’t see anyone better than Werner to start. Make your mind up.
Don’t really understand the issue with critique Do we just applaud everything all the time? You can’t always support everything someone does, jeez I don’t do that with my children, why would I do it with a footballer? If you can’t handle criticism then you’re in the wrong profession or maybe even on the wrong planet.
