There were definitely players under Villas-Boas that Old606 posters were ready to jack in I distinctly remember one comment on Old606 where one poster said they felt outright rage every time they saw Danny Rose in the starting lineup, while in the Villas-Boas/Sherwood season Dembele was inured for so much of the season posters *ahem* were saying we should sell him and prioritise Bentaleb Naughton tended to get slated a lot too...but then he did have an irritating habit of squaring the ball back to the keeper only for an opposition winger to nick the ball and either push the keeper into a save or have the keeper pick the ball out of the net
@Left on the Shelf Thought I’d try digging out a few old threads to show what I meant. Walker didn’t end up getting as much stick on here as he did elsewhere on social media but many fans were open to selling super Jan and Danny Rose, Dembele was mixed on whether to keep or sell. Jan in particular copped a lot of flack for his attitude. Safe to say RCL especially hated him at one point . https://not606.com/threads/vertongen.253251/ https://not606.com/threads/summer-clear-out.260652/ There’s a few other old threads I’ve gone through. It’s funny see us make predictions and judgements, some we got right, some we got horrendously wrong
Dembele was hugely frustrating player up until about Poch’s second season when he really got coached properly and put into a role that suited him. You could always see the quality but he was playing too high up the pitch and his decision making was awful. Poch moved him deeper and simplified his game and the rest is history, but it took a while.
It's at times like this that I'm glad I changed my handle - so I can pretend it was someone else making these comments 10 years ago! But in my defence, at least I didn't say that Vlad Chiriches was a better player than Vertonghen, eh, @SpursDisciple
Underlines just how bad Sherwood's tactics were that fans did a 180 on him from one season to the next
Or how they couldn’t see his quality. Even now certain players who aren’t playing well, you can see how a different manager and system would benefit them.
Sherwood refused to acknowledge that DMs even existed, which by complete coincidence led to the defence being under more pressure ...and then I remember the time against West Brom we lined up with Paulinho & Chadli in central midfield
You can say the injury issues are caused by the manager all you want, and you may be right, we don't actually know. What I do know is that if we had basic decent cover for both sides of our CB pairing it wouldn't have gone to total crap regardless of who's to blame for the injuries. This is as true for now as it was for then.
Well yeah if you have better players then results will be better. That doesn’t mean the manager is good enough though. Issues are more than injuries and the defensive cover though. We could both be right or both be wrong. We want the same thing regardless of opinions on the manager.
