It was shambles the other night but I think until Conte gets more of his own players we're likely gonna see more of it. We obviously had a real purple patch when he came in for the most part, took about 9 or 10 games to get his first loss in the league (which just had to be against Chelsea....) but there were always cracks in some of the performances as certain personnel just aren't A) Top four calibre starting players and B) Conte system players. Conte wasn't and isn't blameless for some of the recent results, he's made some very iffy decisions just as Poch, Jose and Nuno all have but I do think that despite some shoddy stuff of late, we will move in the right direction so long as he gets more of his own players. The WBs the other night both needed to do more, I think Emerson is a bit like Davies, very sound defensively but his attacking game is poor and under Conte in this system it really stands out, I like him as a player but I think it's looking likely that in a 3ATB system with WBs, it's not really his forte. Sess... It's just not working for him, there's a player in there somewhere but we've barely seen it and I'm not sure we ever will, seems to have zero confidence with or without the ball. Reguilon is the only WB that actually suits a Conte system and I think in the summer, providing Conte's still here, we'll be seeing big movement on the WB front, both in and out, especially over on the right hand side. If we had Reguilon and a RWB that's perhaps more astute from an attacking side of things, we'll have not lost that game in my opinion. Kulusevski and Bentancur (sod's law it sounds like he's out for a bit now) have already slotted in nicely and are clearly players who Conte can trust, more of that in the summer, mainly at CB, RWB and CM and I think we'll be in for a good season. The worry of course though is that if we do finish poorly this season, Kane may yet again seek a move away... and unfortunately may get it this time around, which would then throw a massive spanner in the works.
One obvious issue with our pivot the other night is their main movement seemed to be going backwards, with at various times Bentancur and Hojbjerg dropping back into defence as Romero decided it was his turn to try for the Puskas Award What really stands out, and has for a few games, is how Winks and Hojbjerg both move the ball in almost exactly the same way, as they make short, quick passes yet tend to remain pretty static when moving it - while in comparison Skippy actually moves up the pitch with the ball and that not only changes our play as our players are moving into positions for the pass but also changes the opponents' given somebody has to break ranks to close him down and that's how to create a pocket of space And that's been our issue for way too long, our midfield hasn't created space since Dembele started to fall apart and we've never really addressed this, be it when Poch switched us to Air Raid tactics to compensate for using the Winkssoko pivot for longer than comedically necessary, while the ubermensch and Nuno both went for systems where we countered down the flanks while the centre moved forward with the urgency of The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 so there was nobody to actually get the ball to when the WBs got into decent positions - and when we finally seem to be cracking it to a point, naturally Skippy gets crocked and there's complications when he's recovering
The root problem is a stale squad. When your players are significantly less keen than average, simply by virtue of being older and more settled into a routine of destroying managers, it means it was time to rebuild with young players some time in the past. In Spurs' case, it was five years ago, when Pochettino talked about the need for a painful rebuild. The fault is Levy's for thinking his business brain could make better football decisions than the football experts.
No doubt Levy isn't at fault for every player decision. But as Chairman, it's fair to put the blame at his door for a squad that has been decaying for five years. IMO.
As RCL's said, either in this thread or another that I'm getting notifications for, it does have to be said Poch's squad management was unraveling since the summer of 2017 starting with letting Danny Rose stay on after that interview when he put the likes of Kaboul and Townsend on the first bus out of N17 for far less, but that's also where his squad management started to make a lot less sense as best exemplified by having both Trippier and Aurier expecting to start at RB where in the past every position clearly had a first-choice and a rotation option, plus his reluctance to rotate meaning that players such as Llorente barely got games
