Exactly right. When we play a good team like Juventus, Liverpool etc we've got about a 50% chance of a draw and around 25% for winning or losing. In the last five such matches we've got 2 wins, 2 draws and 1 loss. Over the whole season we've got 6 wins 3 draws and 5 losses. It would clearly have been better to lose to Liverpool and draw with Juventus but I can't see what Poch, the team or anyone else could possibly have done differently to make that happen. We're not bottling anything. We are about as good as the top ten teams in Europe. We should be overjoyed by this. Unfortunately being that good only gives us about a 50:50 chance of winning a trophy.
All the bottle talk is cheap and easy and a substitute for real analysis. No one lost a bottle, Spurs lost a football game that they could just as easily have won. Luck played it's part, as it always does in football. That's why you get results like Wigan beating the hacks finest team in the universe. Kane's header could have crossed the line,Juventus could have had a penalty. These are the kind of hairline incidents/ decisions that decide the outcome of any given football match. Stupid comments like 'will Spurs reach the next level' deserve to be put into a bottle and launched into the Pacific along with the originator of yet more dross. Spurs don't have to apologise, we were not outplayed we were not outclassed on the contrary you could argue the opposite. Chiellini and Buffon are old stagers with huge experience, their job is to reduce the part luck plays and they have done that for years in one the world's most defensive minded leagues. It is normal for Italian teams to sit back soak up pressure and be ready to take advantage when the very few chances they create appear. It is not a coincidence that some of the worlds greatest defenders are Italian. Who can better this list of world class defenders? Maldini, Baresi, Nesta, Cannavaro, Gentile, Zambrotta, and Chiellini of course. Italy have won World Cups, and European Cups playing their defensive style, they are masters of the world in defence. Spurs scored 3 goals against one of the best defensive teams in Europe. Take your bottle, you know what to do.
Oppo fans use that to demean and undermine us. For me it's not about looking at the percentage success rate recently over top teams. We talk of ourselves as being a top team so we should be mixing it with Pool etc. It's not as though we are West Brom yet we talk like we are top 4. We are top 4 so we should be up there, nothing wrong with expectancy, it's progress we shouldn't be afraid to grasp as a club. However the one game we lost was the game where our mentality was going to be tested, the world was saying it, Juve were going to come back at us, where we were going to lay another marker if we won. We failed, we had them in our pocket from the 10th minute of the first leg to the 60th minute of the 2nd. The test came when they equalized, a psychological test, we failed in spectacular fashion, flipping the tie on its head within 3 minutes. I'm not saying we should have won the trophy or we can't be happy but that game was a certain type of game, with certain pressures and we once again failed to turn that corner. They had 2 ten minute periods where they won the tie..they didn't grind us down and show their European pedigree and all the other stars and badges Juve come with over 120 minutes. We failed somewhere in that game.
I don't agree. Juventus didn't show better psychology. They didn't find a way to win. They just had more luck than us in the same way we had more luck than Liverpool in the draw at Anfield
A few minutes of defence madness and switching off in both games is what cost us.in game management may have changed the result ie subs coming on earlier and maybe moura coming on may have changed it for us who knows.we had enough chances in both games to win it but we weren't clinical enough.Juve did what they do best niggling fouls breaking up the game and had 2 clinical finishers.I really don't think we could have done much more but as has been said before IF we had someone verbal in the middle of the park like a Roy Keane we may have seen the game out.we were so close to going through but it's very fine margins that change games like these.
Maybe poch and his team have identified a player to sign in the summer who will be experienced and vocal a leader in the middle when things need calming down to see us over the line.
May be needed a lot sooner than that. Battle of the Bridge part 2 coming up in 3 weeks time. Who in the Spurs squad do you think will be able to do what you described, if things degenerate to the level of that 2nd half in 2016 ??
I had high hopes of Dier becoming a leader on the pitch but he doesn't seem that vocal to me.I hate to say it maybe the brute force of Wanyama and SISSOKO are needed for the chavs game
If I was able to write what I'm thinking I would have written this. But you've said it so much better, and it's a perfect summary and answer to the "step up to the next level" / "bottlers" / "must win trophy" crew.
Totally agree. It's like England's national team- always failing when it matters. Cruising through qualifiers, outplaying opposition and then losing because of a moment of brilliance by the other team, by a hand of god, because the ref didn't see the ball cross the line, because we missed a penalty in a shootout. We failed at the last three PL campaigns because of a fluke season ( where everybody handed them victories and did their upmost to stop us, and because their player consistently dived and won penalties), because a team had an incredible season ( sandwiched between two mediocre seasons) and we accrued enough points that in previous seasons would have won us the title, and because a country decided to bankroll a team. Luck? Fate? Psychology? Experience?Ref ineptitude? Whatever it is , we ain't got it.
Or, as happens far more often with the England team, they go into a match thinking it's "only" the USA/Hungary/Poland/Ireland/Sweden/Norway/Australia/Croatia/Iceland and promptly get dropped on their proverbial backsides and never, ever learn. But don't worry, it's "only" Belgium, Panama and Tunisia in the group stages this summer.
I agree with @Spurlock, we are way too wasteful with chances and it massively costs us. We don't recognise it so much when we win but in games we lose or draw you realise just how much we lack that clinical edge - and FWIW, this isn't just a problem this season, many of us have spoken about it over the course of 2-3 years now. To put into perspective, I had a look back at some losses and draws this season, the statistics are shocking, I'll do a little table (hopefully it comes out alright), will be in this order: Opposition - Their shots in total with shots on target in brackets - our shots in total with shots on target in brackets - scoreline. Juve home - 8(3) - 23(6) - 1-2 Utd away - 11(3) - 13(4) - 0-1 Arsenal away - 14(5) - 14(4) - 0-2 Chelsea home - 9(2) - 18(6) - 1-2 - meaning Chelsea scored both their only shots on target. Swansea home - 4(0) - 26(8) - 0-0 Burnley home - 13(3) - 28(5) - 1-1 It's criminal how wasteful we are and it needs to be addressed if we want to progress to that next level, we're extremely close don't get me wrong but nonetheless it's something we need to improve on.
How do you address it? Do you tell Kane to practice more? It's nonsense it really is do you think all those teams you mention have better strikers than us? Only United are ahead of us in the league so we are doing better despite our poor (according to your stats) conversion rate. Once again stats just cloud issues and enable made up arguments to flourish. Football is played on grass between human beings mistakes are what make football exciting.
It's the nature of our system and the way that we play. Teams that get anything against us tend to do it by sitting back, absorbing a lot of pressure and then hitting us on the break. We'll create tons of half-chances and take pot-shots from range, while their opportunities will be against exposed defenders, when they get them. Compare those stats with games that we've won and I'm sure that they'd be pretty similar. We probably could do with a bit more firepower, especially from the bench, but I'm hoping that Moura and Lamela will provide some of that. Llorente chipping in with a few would help, but it's a struggle to find someone that can do that and will be happy with a place on the bench. Arsenal had that in Giroud and sold him, rather bizarrely.
I don't know how to address it but I'm not paid too, that's for Poch, his staff and the players to sort out. It's not about teams having better strikers or not, it's about us needing to finish more chances. We're fourth in the league. City, United and Liverpool are ahead of us. Our wastefulness has cost us positions in the league in recent seasons, points in numerous games and most recently our place in European competition. Between Burnley and Swansea at home, we had over 50 shots combined and scored just one goal, are you honestly telling me that's not a problem?! If we weren't so wasteful, we'd be ahead of Utd and Pool at the moment.
DH that's a cop out. I expected an opinion not just MP has to sort it. I don't regard creating chances through positive play as wasteful and I am sorry but it does depend on Kane and Son scoring goals so in your argument they are to blame. They are the expected goalscorers they are there to take advantage of the chances created. Kane is the most successful striker in the PL how does that square with your argument. Do you want to play like Juventus? or Leicester (who use a similar style)? ED: perhaps Leicester who DID use a similar style under Ranieri who just by chance happens to be Italian.
They probably are, that's why I think we don't recognise it when we do win as naturally all we care about is getting those three points but ultimately in the ones we do lose/ draw, we've often lost through being the more dominant side yet failed to actually assert that dominance with the adequate amount of goals required to win. From memory, City is the only team who've given us a real lesson this season, in every other match we've lost or drawn, there's been an air of "what if" about it and it's so frustrating. For me, we're literally inches, maybe even centimetres away from being a real elite footballing team but if we can't finish chances when we really need too then it'll forever hold us back.
You attempt to replicate the conditions in training. So I will have a 2 hr shooting session where it is not just you vs GK, I will put lots of opposition "clutter" in the box to confound you, and I will make you attempt to get as many of your shots on target at the minimum, force the GK to save etc. I will then do similar, but this time I will reduce the clutter a bit and have real players trying to charge down your attempted shots.
