AVB - A year on (roughly)

[Dier Hard]

Good afternoon fellow Spursonians.

I've decided to be original and do a thread about AVB, seeing as we've NEVER spoken about him before ( ).

Any how, it's pretty much been a year since the young, croaky-voiced Portuguese maestro took over.

I remember my initial views to his appointment:

"Oh for **** sake you cannot be serious!" (John McEnroe accent)
"The guy's clueless"
"Chelsea will be wetting themselves!".
"Bring back Harry!!!".

First few games of the season strengthened my initial views, we looked poor. We were playing 2 DM's at home and the football wasn't much more attractive than Stoke's. Things looked bad... AVB seemed without ideas on the touchline and I was beginning to believe this man was a great blagger by somehow getting the Chelsea and then Spurs job.

Then came a historic win at OT... Ok AVB, you've just masterminded something no Spurs manager has done in a couple of decades, I take my hat off to you... But you're still ****!
Then things got a little brighter (with a few niggles along the way), Sandro and Dembele were looking like a partnership that'd been together years, Defoe couldn't stop scoring, Lennon was raping full backs and Bale was starting to show why he's one of the worlds best, all on top of an improvement in the style of football we were playing too. Ok AVB, maybe you're not total **** and do know a little about the beautiful game.
The year was progressing and with a few odd decisions/ selections/ results aside, we were looking pretty good and on course for a CL position. Bale was taking his game to a level we've not seen, he decided he didn't like scoring boring goals anymore and a particular game in East London saw him hit an absolute screamer then run and cradle in the arms of our young Portuguese lad on the touchline. That moment their gave the impression he (as well as others) felt a connection with our manager, something you don't usually see these days.
Andre said that Bale asked him to bring the happiness back into his game and Andre did just that, and more. Bale was now miles ahead of any player in the league and was also (in my opinion) the best performing player of 2013 throughout Europe. AVB, stop making me look clueless, you're actually looking like a decent manager now!
Unfortunately we slipped up in some games and it allowed our rivals to capitalise and despite a strong finish to the season, we unfortunately ended outside of the top 4 BUT doing by finishing with record points. Ok Andre, you done pretty well in your debut season, it has to be said.

AVB exceeded my initial expectations of him, the players seem unified and happy, the football wasn't bad (not as good as recent seasons), Bale was playing out of his skin under him and everything seems settled at club with the exception of an odd disturbance from those ******s in Madrid. It seems AVB has won Levy's trust as well by getting the DoF installed which supposedly he wanted at the start of last season.

Overall I'm now quite excited to see what AVB can do, while I'm not jumping on the "he's the messiah" bandwagon anytime soon, I do feel a lot different to how I was this time last year and I can safely say, AVB has proved me wrong about him. I do think however, that Champions League football MUST be got this time around, regardless of whether we need a 100 points to get it, otherwise without, not only will it make for another disappointing season by not reaching expectations but it could also result in an exodus of key players... Which'd take us back a number of steps. I hope we can improve the style too, we were inconsistent last season with our style of play, one day we'd be the entertainers, the next, Stoke version 2.

Have your views changed of AVB changed from a year ago? What do you expect from him this season?

 

[THFC6061]

Put as simply as possible, AVB has the best statistical record of any Spurs manager since the club joined the Football League in 1908.

This was in his first season as our manager and with the loss of three of our four best players at the start of the campaign (Luka Modric, Rafael Van der Vaart & Ledley King).

Things can only get better!

Tottenham Hotspur Manager's Records & Statistics 1898-2013

 

[Spurm]

Well, i always thought he would do ok, he wasn't my first choice (would have tried for Moyes) but i wasn't angry at his appointment.
With the upheaval in management and the loss of key players i thought we would finish 6th. So to miss out on 4th by 1pt and get a record points haul i would say the team + manager did better than i expected. AVB gets some credit but so do the players (particularly Bale).

I learned recently (it may have been on here) that AVB has never been in charge of transfers at any of his previous clubs. He's a coach and a coach alone (anyone confirm that?). If thats the case it could explain are slightly stunted summer last year with nobody truly call the shots.

 

[Dier Hard]

Well, i always thought he would do ok, he wasn't my first choice (would have tried for Moyes) but i wasn't angry at his appointment.
With the upheaval in management and the loss of key players i thought we would finish 6th. So to miss out on 4th by 1pt and get a record points haul i would say the team + manager did better than i expected. AVB gets some credit but so do the players (particularly Bale).

I learned recently (it may have been on here) that AVB has never been in charge of transfers at any of his previous clubs. He's a coach and a coach alone (anyone confirm that?). If thats the case it could explain are slightly stunted summer last year with nobody truly call the shots.

I never knew that, it would make sense though baring his mind his job title is "Head Coach" and not manager.

 

[PleaseNotPoll]

I said last summer that I'd have preferred Moyes, but I could see the sense in going for Villas-Boas too, especially in the long term.
He's done some things very well and his overall record with us is an impressive start, but there are aspects of his game that need to be addressed.

We suffered from a distinct lack of creativity for large chunks of the campaign, but I'm not sure how much of that was down to the manager and how much was down to our squad's deficiencies.
Losing Modric and van der Vaart sapped us of anything resembling a playmaker, so he had to resort to the immobile Huddlestone, who was returning from injury, or the inexperienced Carroll.
Not ideal, by any means.

His tactics veer from the sublime to the ridiculous. One week he'll pick exactly the right side and we'll look very good, then he'll make a couple of bizarre changes and we'll look poor.
He seems to know exactly what to do when we're behind in games, but his substitutions when we're ahead lack imagination at times.
We started too many games in first gear and often had to watch pretty turgid first halves, then seemed to come out like a different side for the second half. Very strange.

Some players seemed to excel, with Bale being the biggest improvement, especially in the second half of the campaign, but others either dropped off or fell out of favour.
Gelled a number of new signings very well but also failed to get the best out of some previously good performers.
Injuries could be pointed to for a number of these (BAE, Adebayor, Parker) but it's something to note, I think.

 

[Spurm]

I never knew that, it would make sense though baring his mind his job title is "Head Coach" and not manager.

yeah, and why he seems to be well onboard (and even pushing for depending on what you read) with the DoF idea

 

[Spurm]

Some players seemed to excel, with Bale being the biggest improvement, especially in the second half of the campaign, but others either dropped off or fell out of favour.
Gelled a number of new signings very well but also failed to get the best out of some previously good performers.
Injuries could be pointed to for a number of these (BAE, Adebayor, Parker) but it's something to note, I think.

This seems to be true of most managers. I guess the relationship and communication between player and manager is a very crucial thing and a very personal thing when it comes to what works and doesn't.
Defoe also improved under AVB, especially in a lone role before his injury.

I do wonder about VdV sometimes. He very outwardly mentioned about Harry's lack of tactic talk and how he liked being told to "go and express yourself". AVB comes in and suddenly out of nowhere VdV has gone. I heard no complaints from VdV and he has always said he wanted to finish in Hamburg so maybe it was nothing. Perhaps it was just too many acronyms and something had to give

 

[Dier Hard]

I said last summer that I'd have preferred Moyes, but I could see the sense in going for Villas-Boas too, especially in the long term.
He's done some things very well and his overall record with us is an impressive start, but there are aspects of his game that need to be addressed.

We suffered from a distinct lack of creativity for large chunks of the campaign, but I'm not sure how much of that was down to the manager and how much was down to our squad's deficiencies.
Losing Modric and van der Vaart sapped us of anything resembling a playmaker, so he had to resort to the immobile Huddlestone, who was returning from injury, or the inexperienced Carroll.
Not ideal, by any means.

His tactics veer from the sublime to the ridiculous. One week he'll pick exactly the right side and we'll look very good, then he'll make a couple of bizarre changes and we'll look poor.
He seems to know exactly what to do when we're behind in games, but his substitutions when we're ahead lack imagination at times.
We started too many games in first gear and often had to watch pretty turgid first halves, then seemed to come out like a different side for the second half. Very strange.

Some players seemed to excel, with Bale being the biggest improvement, especially in the second half of the campaign, but others either dropped off or fell out of favour.
Gelled a number of new signings very well but also failed to get the best out of some previously good performers.
Injuries could be pointed to for a number of these (BAE, Adebayor, Parker) but it's something to note, I think.

Literally agree with all of that.

 

[Dier Hard]

yeah, and why he seems to be well onboard (and even pushing for depending on what you read) with the DoF idea

Yeah it makes sense. I credit him for that too, it's as if he knows what he's good at (coaching) and happy to have someone like Levy/ Baldini do the negotiating which perhaps isn't his strong point.

 

[PleaseNotPoll]

This seems to be true of most managers. I guess the relationship and communication between player and manager is a very crucial thing and a very personal thing when it comes to what works and doesn't.
Defoe also improved under AVB, especially in a lone role before his injury.

I do wonder about VdV sometimes. He very outwardly mentioned about Harry's lack of tactic talk and how he liked being told to "go and express yourself". AVB comes in and suddenly out of nowhere VdV has gone. I heard no complaints from VdV and he has always said he wanted to finish in Hamburg so maybe it was nothing. Perhaps it was just too many acronyms and something had to give

You're right that every manager has players that they get on with and players that they don't, but I always try to look for patterns in those things.
Sometimes it's down to personalities and sometimes it's roles on the pitch.
I've yet to work out what it is with Villas-Boas or even if there is a pattern, to be honest.

I think that the van der Vaart thing was down to problems in his marriage. It all seemed to fall apart pretty quickly once he returned to Germany.
At least he can see his kid regularly now.

 

[NSIS]

Obviously it helps greatly if players get on with their manager on a personal level. However, everybody is different, and sometimes that's just not going to happen.

More importantly, for me, is to look for signs that the players respect he manager. These guys are professionals, some of whom have been around a long time. I think if the players thought that AVB was incompetent, didn't know what he was talking about, etc, then we would have seen that manifest itself clearly by now. I've seen no obvious signs that that is the case - quite the contrary, in fact.

 

[Tottenham Jamspurs]

Frankly - No - Because I always thought he was a TOP CLASS manager who was way better than people were giving him credit for and deserved more time at Chelsea and was simply undermined by Terry and Lampard.

Astonishes me that even now people doubt him.

 

[No Kane No Gain]

To put it succinctly, I think he's done fairly well so far.

A record points total is no great feat because he's had one of the best squads we've had in the Premier League era. Realistically he's competing with the previous 3 Redknapp seasons. I think having the highest points total to not finish in the top 4 is more important, it suggests that we were somewhat unlucky to miss out on the top 4 target that would've been set at the start of the season.

Not everyone likes him as a character but I do, I think he handles himself well and enjoy listening to his interviews.

As for the rest, time will tell. He's not been a massive failure or a massive success so far and there's enough scope, from what we saw in the first season, to be skeptical or optimistic about him. Management's a fickle job anyway, as we saw with Mancini and Di Matteo, winning trophies doesn't buy you much time so one season's hero can see their stock plummet quicker than it rose. If we don't improve next season then there won't be any panic from Levy or the fans if a club's looking to poach AVB but if he gets us in the top 4, the continuing of his regime will be seen as paramount to our attempts to stay there.

 

[No Kane No Gain]

Frankly - No - Because I always thought he was a TOP CLASS manager who was way better than people were giving him credit for and deserved more time at Chelsea and was simply undermined by Terry and Lampard.

Astonishes me that even now people doubt him.

AVB's the first to admit that he had a lot to learn from his Chelsea departure. I wouldn't say he was top class when we hired him nor is he now - for me top class managers don't make some of the mistakes he has. Apart from the fact that I like the guy, what makes me happy we have him as manager is that he's making mistakes and learning from them, which is not something we really saw from 'Arry(our play no doubt evolved under him but there were the same faults running through his sides).

I don't think we have to be covinced that AVB is some brilliant manager right now for us to want him to continue at the club.

 

[KingHotspur]

Hopefully he's learned a lot from last season and will be a bit more forceful in getting his targets signed as I felt last summer we didn't sign anyone that AvB wanted.

The true test is this year as it is now more 'his team'.

 

[redwhiteandermblue]

I never knew that, it would make sense though baring his mind his job title is "Head Coach" and not manager.

All this time I've been training myself to call him manager when he's been what I wanted to call him, "head coach," all along!

In my not always very accurate recollection, I supported AVB's selection right from the very start--until, influenced by what I read, I went through a nebulous period of being neither on nor off the AVB bandwagon, culminating about three or four games in, when I was verging on hostile.

But I got right back on pretty quickly, and have stayed there since before I thought we'd beat Man U and did.

I was most impressed with how well he got the tactics right overall in getting a mismatched collection of talented parts to win. His man management seems to have been good overall, but the truth is most Spurs seemed clearly to prefer either Harry or AVB. It's no coincidence that perhaps the two freest spirits, VDV and Beni, went or are going elsewhere. I understood Harry's approach better because it's what I taught myself in tennis: the part of you that plays is nonverbal, so let it play, don't think your conscious brain knows better. But AVB's more deliberative approach also seems to have its merits.

While I am not a big fan of AVB's subsititutions, I think his worst mistakes were in his lineups. Generally speaking we did very well when there were no surprises, and there usually weren't. Unfortunately, at a few key junctures, there were surprises, and it cost us. Huddlestone vs. Chelsea, anyone? Dembele starting on the right versus Liverpool?

The most interesting thing about AVB to me is that he seems to be going off the beaten track in aiming for a Paulinho-Dembele-Sandro all-strength-and-talent-no- playmaker three man midfield. I'm fascinated to see how it works out.

 

[Spur of the Moment]

Pretty much agree with the OP - that was how I initially viewed the appointment and sums up how the season developed.

But for me the real positive was the squad unity that was apparent throughout the season. Yes, the way he gelled with Bale was the most significant example, but there was very little, if any, dissent either on the pitch or through media sources (other than the 3rd party muttering s around Lloris' introduction). Spurcat may tell a diffent story from 'behind the lines', of course!!

I cannot recall a more together group of Spurs players and he must take credit for that.

And that was achieved with some potentially difficult and potentially disruptive characters to deal with (Gallas and Ade for example) and never seeming to be worried about dropping/resting established players.

I think AVB achieved about as much as could reasonably be expected of him in his first season given the resources he had at his disposal. The bar will definitely be raised however in a 2nd season if the investment is made.....

 

[deedub93]

I thought he would need three seasons before the team was truly his and I haven't changed my mind. I said that after losing Ledley, VdV and Rat face he would do well to finish 6th and he did better. With proper refereeing we might have been third of fourth. He tried in the Ropey League which is an improvement on Redknapp. He deals well with the press, which is quite an achievement because when he started his tenure 'the fat journo was typing'. When PSG came sniffing he remained loyal.

Most Points, best record since we joined the league, he may struggle to match it. However, would I swop him for any body else right now? No, so that must be my vote of approval. May the AVB project grow and bloom.

 

[littleDinosaurLuke]

He's young and inexperienced, but clearly talented. Like most talented juniors in any profession, his performances have been like a curate's egg - good and bad in parts.

On the whole, he's done very well. He pushed the boundaries a little further than 'Arry - the expansive, fearless performance in the first half at OT or 2nd half v City at home, playing Bale centrally, showing some ambition in the EL - but at times he couldn't rectify failings or influence performances enough through tactics, substitutions etc - for example, Wigan (h & a), Fulham (h).

7.5/10

 

[totsfan]

Didn't agree with his appointment,as Manager,but he's done well in his first season,i said i expected 5th,hopefully higher,which in other years we would have got with 72 points.The other good point is he stopped out end of season wobbles. I like him and hope we continue to improve under him,he's not a top manager yet,but he is getting there,and i think RA made a big mistake in sacking him instead of backing him,just wish he would speak louder in his interviews,seems to mumble