I love big Pat and big Chiv, proper Spurs legends, even though Pat was treated disgracefully by the club and joined Woolwich out of spite, he never wanted to leave and is always proper Spurs.
Marcus Edwards wins and scores a penalty to put Sporting 5-0 up against Braga: https://streamja.com/5qbn2 That touch before the foul...
While the simple explanation for his decline is the combination of injuries catching up with him coupled with our move away from possession football meaning he wasn't a good fit for how we were set up, the other night I watched the Maradona doc on All4 and something struck me Early on he says that he's two people: off the pitch he was Diego, the awkward kid from the slums who wanted to play football so he could buy a house for his parents, while on the pitch he was Maradona the insanely gifted ****ehouse - but, as friends said, around 1988 Maradona was taking over his life off the pitch It's hardly unique, after all Pele has said similar about how he's Edson off the pitch and Pele on it, and it's worth asking if Paul Gascoigne went through something similar where Paul the awkward kid who wanted to play football was consumed by Gazza, the media creation who liked a drink (or twelve) And this is where it's worth considering Dele, as between 2016-18 the Dele persona was being created not just on the pitch but off the pitch, via his Twitch channel, and also coincides with him ditching the name Alli from the back of his shirt - but when injuries and our dropping possession football meant that Dele started to be left behind and he went back to being Dele Alli, the awkward kid whose father walked out on him when he was a week old, whose mother was an alcoholic, and whose adoptive parents never legally adopted him
True, but he could be a worthwhile option if Moura leaves in one of the next two windows. We're desperately short of homegrown and club grown players, in my opinion. There aren't many being linked with us, either.
Lucas is surely off next summer, and there's rumours of Gil wanting a January loan At that point, yeah, Edwards would be a player we need - as we wouldn't have any cover for Deki
Dele got subbed off on 30 mins yesterday and was booed by the Besiktas fans as they were losing 2-0 at home to a 2nd or 3rd division team. They ended up winning 4-2, Nkoudou was one of the scorers. Just how much lower can his career fall?
I think that Mourinho has kind of dipped with him, but it looks like he's been proven right there. You have to wonder if there's anything that could turn it around for Alli. Still only 26.
I know Jose was always up against it with Spurs fans for obvious reasons but I do feel a lot of what he said was correct when it came to squad analysis and his chats with players in the doc, even if it was extremely blunt at times. As for Dele... I think an early retirement is on the horizon, I don't see a fairytale revival for him. I'd imagine once this Besiktas loan is done, he'll have his deal mutually cancelled by Everton, will then probably take a deal to the MLS or Middle East, probably struggle out there and then call it quits by 28/29.
Lots of spurs fans saw the end of Dele and Rose before Pochettino was sacked. It was only the pundits who kept insisting both were treated badly by JM. Tbh Pochettino's insistence on playing them (plus spending £140m on Lo Celso, Ndombele, Clarke and Sessegnon) is one of the (if not the) major reason I do not want him back
Yeah the signs were pretty clear. Assuming Conte was to leave, the only way I'd be open to Poch coming back would be if we had assurances Paratici was staying. Poch working under him could be quite effective because Paratici clearly has an eye for talent and Poch is someone capable of improving talent.
Even then I wouldn't trust Pochettino's judgement. His insistence on playing Rose and Dele when they were producing nothing week in week out was incomprehensible to me. I liked what Pochettino did with us. He took us forward playing great football (until 2019) so he is up there with Jol and Redknapp in terms of managers who who made watching spurs enjoyable.
I just hope Dele has a decent support network, cos otherwise he's staring down the barrel.of some serious mental health concerns. He had Dier as best buddy at Spurs, someone very level headed (except when he's jumping into the crowd ), but not sure there's anyone else on his side right now. Worrying!
I heard that the relationship went sour at the start of Dele's demise , that came from within the club
Pretty sure Dier ended up becoming best buds with Vertonghen, they've spent one or two holidays together since Jan left too. I think Dier and Dele are still friends though but they're definitely not the bum chums they used to be in their earlier years at the club.
I agree with you about Rose as we had Davies who was more than capable of playing in that position. Dele though is somewhat more complicated. With Eriksen visibly declining week on week and our options on the bench extremely young and unproven (Onomah and possibly Skipp), the only obvious candidate to take his place was Lamela, but he missed almost 25 games that season through his usual repertoire of injuries and knocks. I don't think Poch had much of a choice beyond changing his entire system to be less reliant on Dele in our attacking configuration, which is what he attempted to do the following season to disastrous effect.
Poch's biggest failure in the summer of 2019 is he pretended the previous season didn't exist While we were playing attacking, possession-based football up to the end of the 2017-18 season albeit with a tweaked formula as we weren't hard-pressing for all 90 minutes and alternating between pressing and sitting back, throughout 2018-19 we pretty much stopped pressing altogether once the Air Raid tactics were introduced And that's where the business of the summer of 2019 made no sense: Ndombele would have made sense as a like-for-like replacement for Dembele in the summer of 2018 because the system and he would have slotted in with the tactics pretty comfortably...before we had to sub on Sissoko after 60 minutes in every games as he started to look like he was keeling over. Similar goes for Lo Celso, who was signed to be the Brundlefly of Dele and Lamela, which would have been ideal in the summer of 2018, but with us sitting back we effectively removed the second striker role from our team which also removed the effectiveness of Lo Celso (and Dele) in one fowl swoop If Poch signed players based on how we were actually playing in the back end of the 2018-19 season he would not have signed Ndombele because at that point our midfield needed players that could either throw themselves at the ball for 90 minutes like Hojbjerg or players who could dictate play through the middle with passing like Tielemans or Lobotka so we would be controlling possession in the centre third - something we really haven't done for the best part of three years at this point
