The way forward for 2019-20

There seems to be an on going debate over some of the causes of our form during parts of this season which has raised various issues.
These debates are or have been taking place on match day threads, the transfer thread and rival thread but I think it is worth having a separate thread so those don't get derailed and there is a single place for those who want to have this debate.

So, what are the issues and what are the potential solutions?

 

Sign Nasri.

 

I take issue with your avatar and hold you personally responsible for Chelsea leapfrogging us.

RCL'ing matchday Spurs games in one thing, but having to look at that annoying little diving ****er each time I come on here is grating on me. Now that the classless scum are above us, you have to take the heat on that one. Your little stunt backfired. Just sayin'...

 

Was a bet with Bobby...I bet that we would play in the new ground by March 31st...missed by 3 days!

 

I suggest you change the article title to "The way forward for 2019-20" .

After all, the perceived issues and proposed solutions are what is being discussed.

 

Done

 

Issues as I see them –

· Probable loss of Alderweireld and Eriksen

· Right Back

· Centre Midfield

· Back up striker

· Squad depth

· Being (I know we hate the term) Spursy

Solutions

From this list it would appear that it is all about player recruitment and improving the squad. I am not going to list players the transfer thread has everything covered in that regard. But our recruitment needs to be quick and it must address the problem areas that have been highlighted and we need to move players in and out as soon as possible, so that the new arrivals are all in place for the whole of pre-season training and the pre-season matches.

We need to assess our international players and if needs be, withdraw them from international duty to protect them and us from burn out again from March next season – and the English players are the ones that I think need the complete break from either next weekend or hopefully from after the champions league final.

The final issue is the most difficult to address, and we may start addressing it by winning in Amsterdam and then Madrid, but that’s probably just a pipe dream given our general form it is at best unlikely and I am not even that confident that we won’t blow the 8 goal difference next weekend and finish 5th. But how do we get from being also-rans to winners. We all know that much progress has already been made, but the chairman, manager, coaches and players all have a part to play in us becoming winners.

Firstly they all have made mistakes previously and lessons must be learnt, a mixture of young, hungry players and experienced players with an experience of winning must be recruited. The manager needs to back his judgement of the players bought in and be prepared to keep the team fresh, with a little more rotation. The best teams have a core of players who play the vast majority of matches, but the best managers also know when to leave out the star men and still get the right result.

Its going to be a very interesting summer!

 

No Inger-Spur is to play a single international this summer.
F**k player patriotism or loyalty or respect.
Which of them have had theirs reciprocated by the FA and Southgate since their 2018 was saved ??

And given that all our players are allegedly sh*te, then this summer will be
a perfect opportunity for the haters to demonstrate emphatically the case
(consider it a kind of 'Ingerland play better / score more with Son in
attack than Kane' claim) .


"The final issue is the most difficult to address, and we may start addressing it by winning in Amsterdam and then Madrid, but that’s probably just a pipe dream given our general form it is at best unlikely and I am not even that confident that we won’t blow the 8 goal difference next weekend and finish 5th. But how do we get from being also-rans to winners. We all know that much progress has already been made, but the chairman, manager, coaches and players all have a part to play in us becoming winners."

Finishing PL 3rd is a matter of pride for the club (if the squad collectively have any) .
It should be the same for reaching the CL final, though I doubt some in the
squad will put in a shift on wednesday with the desire to wipe out the memory of
their performance last saturday.

 

Firstly we all have to recognise that progress is rarely linear and two steps forward followed by one backwards is about the best that can be expected with fallible human beings making decisions.

Secondly winning trophies is an outcome of having a good squad, not something that can be delivered seperately. At our current strength we go into each season with about a 8-1 chance of winning the PL, 10-1 for the domestic cups and 12-1 for the CL. That means that even if we perform exactly to expectations we should only win a trophy every third season. Three seasons ago the odds were much worse.
So no need to panic about not winning trophies. Keep doing the right things and one will turn up.
We ought to aim to bring in 3-5 players a year because players have about 10 years at the top and we will make some mistakes and have to replace others unexpectedly. At least one of those should come from the academy. However because a lot of our players are around 25 years old we have an interesting issue with dealing with that.
We need to be realistic on how good our players actually are. It is easy to watch a lot of our matches and remember the mistakes but then see the highlights of other players and think they are better.

 

Issue 1: Midfield
The issue: We have four first team midfielders in the squad (Winks, Sissoko, Dier, Wanyama) yet we're usually lucky to be able to have three of them available at the same time with Wanyama essentially being injured for the past eighteen months, Dier picking up all manner of bumps and illnesses, and Winks' traditional injury come March/April - an issue that some claim was exacerbated by selling Dembele in January, but as Dembele was only good for half an hour tops that's some rose-tinted glasses thinking right there - and while Sissoko's transformation into the player he has been this season has helped, Dier has been shockingly poor

The solution: We definitely need to address central midfield and this may require the signing of up to three players: we definitely need a powerhouse centre midfielder in the mold of Dembele/Sissoko but with more dynamic passing than they are, secondly we should sell Wanyama and buy another DMF, and we could also do with adding a creative midfielder to the mix. There are players we've been linked to who fit the bill for these roles, with Tanguy Ndombele and Gedson Fernandes fitting the first role in different ways (Ndombele going straight into the team, Fernandes shadowing Sissoko for a season and hopefully stepping up), noted headcase Adrien Rabiot and non-headcase Sander Berge fitting the bill for the second, while Youri Tielemans, Donny van de Beek and Jack Grealish fit the bill for the third - so one of each of those, please

Issue 2: Right Back
The issue: We have three right backs in Kieran Trippier, Serge Aurier and Kyle Walker-Peters and not a single one of them can rightfully claim they are the club's first-choice right back as Trippier's season has been like watching a manure-filled zeppelin crash onto an orphanage and explode into flames in slow motion, Aurier is a confidence player which is the exact description you don't want for anyone in defence on the rare occasions he isn't injured someway or another, while KWP has shown promise but he'll need to be registered from next season and it begs the question if "promise" is worth retaining

The solution: There are whispers suggesting we are shopping around Aurier, and coupling this with the rumours linking us with Youcef Atal it's not hard to guess where this one may be going. The interesting wrinkle is Napoli being interested in Trippier, as that would get us cash for a player whose been dogshit this season while moving up KWP into the understudy role...although having one RB needing to bed in and one whose had ten starts in two season could be worrying

Issue 3: So, yeah, contracts...
The issue: Toby Alderweireld has one season left on his deal and a clause that can see him leave for £25m and it's unclear if we've offered him another deal, Christian Eriksen has a year on his contract and talks haven't progressed in months, and Jan Vertonghen is also entering the final year of his deal

The solution: Let's be honest, we're expecting somebody to come in for Toby, so getting caught with our pants down would be unforgivable - but that's where the links to Joachim Andersen come in, and since the rumoured fee looks uncannily like the fee we'd get for Toby we may have a solution in place already. Eriksen's the tough one, though, because the options there are go all-out to keep him and retain our system, cash in and sign a direct replacement (i.e. van de Beek, Nabil Fekir, James Maddison) or cash in and go for a new system such as a 433 that would require both a creative midfielder (see Issue 1) as well as a winger such as Hakim Ziyech

Issue 4: Depth
The issue: The lack of it in the attacking third, with Janssen and Llorente flattering to deceive as Kane's understudy, Lamela injured far too often to be a reliable rotation option, and GKN being a waste of time, money, effort and a non-HG space

The solution: Llorente is out of contract although suggesting he'd like to stay, Janssen is entering the last year of his deal so is shiftable, and GKN...**** me, he's contracted until 2021, so that's another loan where he doesn't play in the offing isn't it? In terms or players we could bring in, Robert Skov would be a useful player on the right flank as he can be brought in for a reasonable £12m and has a good scoring record to make him a viable addition, while Ryan Sessegnon would balance our squad due to him being both HG and U21 while also offering pace and end product. Kane's understudy is the tricky one, as Poch always goes for a target man, but surely we should be looking at a poacher instead? The issue there is no established player would want to sign knowing they'd be second choice, which rules out the likes of Maxi Gomez, while Patrick Cutrone would be a gamble at £30m, while taking a gamble on an Eredivisie/Primeira Liga player isn't exactly the best option as Helder Postiga demonstrates. So...I don't know, Che Adams?

Issue 5: The HG Question
The issue: Too many non-HG players unbalancing our squad, which was especially problematic in the Champions League

The solution: Vorm and Llorente being out of contract at the end of the season while Janssen has a year left on his contract helps in some regard, as that's two spots freed up and a third made easier to free up even before talk of moving on the likes of Wanyama, Aurier and GKN (or the players mentioned in Issue 3...) so the question is how to address this. Sessegnon and Grealish are the obvious options who would go a long way to providing a solution, and there's the option of re-signing Nabil Bentaleb or even Alex Pritchard to fix both homegrown and club grown quotas while waiting for the likes of Oliver Skipp and Troy Parrott to grow into the players we hope they can be

Issue 6: Youth
The issue: While it's clear that Skipp and Parrott feature in our long-term plans, with George Marsh and TJ Eyoma having Poch's favour, for all the talk of Poch working wonders with youth our U23s seem less likely to be featuring for us next season than members of the Ajax squad - not helped by the likes of Jack Roles and Japhet Tanganga being out of contract at the end of the season, Marcus Edwards seeming doomed to not make it, and question marks hanging over Samuel Shashoua and Anthony Georgiou

The solution: ...is problematic, because we can't just chuck a bunch of our academy players onto the pitch and hope for the best (although if we hadn't cocked up our last couple of league matches, we could have done just that against Everton next week without worrying too much what happens...) but there does need to be better lines of communication between the first team and U23s, not least as Poch has been accused of having the attitude saying that if an U23 player has a first team start they can never play for the U23s again unless they need to regain fitness after injury, hence Janssen has played more U23 games this season than KWP. Everyone has their preferred U23/U18 players they hope step up, and while it is possible to see light at the end of the tunnel for Skipp, Marsh, Parrott and Eyoma as they regularly train with the first team (as has Georgiou, to be fair) there's a question mark hanging over Edwards, Shashoua, Tashan Oakley-Boothe, Dylan Duncan etc as they aren't granted the same privilege

 

We need to act like a club that belongs in our new stadium.

Let's get in someone to work with DL and MP. DL's talents need to be directed to making the club more money, not auditing the spend on football matters. Give MP and the new bloke a budget and a contingency and let them get the hell on with it. DL wants this...MP should.

Let's aim to recruit a full squad of 25 senior players capable of playing a full season of top level football. No more picking half fit players or filling up the squad with players that the manager is only going to use in absolute extremis. Clubs who win things often do so because they have players in the squad who can cover without levels dropping. All our big games are lost because we're on our ****ing knees when they come around.

Let's try to cut out the last minute shopping. The market's changed and it doesn't work anymore.

Like my friend, Changing Man, I'm leaving who we bring into the club but let's get the best players who will commit to coming to us. Last season we bet the farm on getting Martial and it didn't happen. When he didn't ask for a transfer...we should have told him to **** it and moved on.

Could we sort out the club's PR, which is a ****ing joke. Sure, we get a lot of ****, much of it unfairly but we leave a vacuum for this stuff to come out of. We're a big club. Yet again we're ahead of clubs that are supposed to be super powers. Let's ****ing act like it in promoting ourselves.

The club need to sort out the ticketing shambles. We shouldn't be giving tickets to outlets that can't sell them, so that they appear on the OS a couple of days before the match, like Brighton and West Ham tickets did. If those outlets don't sell the ticket to someone who turns up, cut their entitlement until they do sell them. they'll soon sort their **** out. Empty seats is cut price and we don't need to be there.

Start categorising games appropriately. Midweek games outside the Top 6 and The Spammers Cup Final are Cat. C. No more Brighton as a ****ing B on a Tuesday night. Teams outside the top half are Cat. C, unless Arsenal or United continue to decline. If we need to rip our fans off that badly, something's gone very wrong.

As fans, let's do our bit. The City game at the new stadium showed what we are capable of. The place rocked and so did our opponents. We can do this every game, so let's bloody do it. Turn up and shout your ****ing lungs out, every game - win, lose or draw.

4 consecutive CL qualifications and making the semi's marks us out as a force again. The stadium means we should have the infrastructure to maintain that level of performance, improve on it and try to bring in some silverware but we're all in this together and have a part to play.

COYS!

 

5 and 6 are IMHO connected. On 6, IMHO Pochettino has failed.
The process that got the club rewards from the class of 2012-13 has not been repeated.

This alleged notion that certain players are better served by being kept at home
rather than put thru loans is b*llocks. Players need to be playing for real in competitive
games as often as possible, to progress and make their errors away from the fickle ire of
supporters. Not some nonsense train with the seniors and play U23 games instead.

 

There's no reason that Walker-Peters and Foyth weren't playing together in the U23s earlier in the campaign, when we had lots of fit players.
We need to bring in someone that can do better with that side of the club though, in my opinion.
Martin Jol for the U23 manager's job? Clive Allen seemed to do well when he was coaching the academy players, too.

 

I have seen Wayne Burnett draw flack this season not just for the up-and-down results of the U23s, but some of the bizarre tactical choices he makes (i.e. central midfielder TO-B playing as a winger, winger/worst player in our U23s Shilow Tracey playing as a striker, Tariq Hinds and Brooklyn Lyons-Foster being used to fill gaps in the back four no matter how out of position they are)

While it is fair to say that the U23 side has looked unbalanced all season due to loaning out Shashoua and Edwards in August (and further unbalanced when Anthony Georgiou was loaned in January) which was out of Burnett's hands, that doesn't excuse Burnett for spending most of the season hammering square pegs into round holes until J'Neil Bennett and Dilan Markanday became viable options for the U23s in the last few months

 

The most important player we need to sign is a leader who has won things and therefore has the experience. Just listen to Kompany and what they are saying about him on SKY.
We talk about Tielemans and Sessegnon and Grealish and they are important players but we need the experienced player. At the beginning of this season Yaya Toure was available and I believe he could have helped us in a position that we have needed strength.

 

I always think though that these type of players only really have such a strong influence at the club they gained that reputation at. They become part of the fabric and that allows them the platform. Of course you need to have a certain set of minerals in you to be able to bring out the Leader in you.

Im a bit disapointed that we cant find a leader between the likes of Dier, Alli, Kane, Verts and even Toby. Theyve been here long enough to have wanted to take the bull by the horns due to their affinity with the club and their involvement under Poch.

 

We have all discussed at length the players that need to be moved on, the gaps in the squad, and the issues we need to sort.

IMO our top priority has got to be our change of approach in recruiting early to bed in our new players throughout the summer.
We’re a champions league club, and need to adjust our approach slightly and start acting like one. I know there’s a stadium to pay for and I’m not suggesting wild transfer fees, but we’ve got to start helping ourselves a bit more.
Rather than trying to shift everyone we don’t want as a priority, whilst we watch other clubs pick up their signings, we need to do the same. Identify who we want early, and move for them.
I think this alone will make a huge difference to our season. These late signings cause such a knock on effect.
I also believe that a statement of intent by recruiting early shows players like Eriksen and Aldewiereld that we’re not messing about, and could result in their mindset changing, meaning we don’t have to end up dealing with the headache of their potential departure.
Once we’ve got 2 or 3 of our targets in, we can then start the process of shifting some of the dead wood, whilst continuing to identify any other additions we want to make.

 

The transfer window unofficially opens for Spurs come FT on sunday.
On that basis, I expect the clubs possessing our primary signing targets to
receive a formal request to begin negotiations for each one, on their
doorsteps at 9am on May 16.

 

Fixed...