I've got this Spurs news feed which is all bullshit all the time. It's sort of useful because if you see, say, Remy coming to Spurs it makes it highly unlikely he will.
Striking situation is a problem I really don't envy Poch with. Do we stick or twist on what we have? We have a possibly rejuvenated Adebayor, who since his re-inclusion to the side had a strike rate bettered by only one or two players in the league if I remember correctly. But will he continue that form into the new season? Because you never really know with Ade, it's either superb or super ****. Then we have Soldado, will his Valencia form be revived under Poch and become the lethal number 9 many of hope/ believe he can be or will he continue to miss 99% of opportunities like last season and just be known as the penalty king? And then finally super Harry Kane. Took Soldado's place in the final 5 or so games and done himself justice with a few goals and some well worked performances. Does he still need a PL loan to guarantee regular first team football before being truly ready here or do we stick with him as 3rd choice and hope he can progress with the competition around him? Nice headache to get you started Maurice!
You could spend a lot of money and end up with someone no better than any of these three. Costa doesn't impress me for example. It's the standard thing: these guys are all in the top 20-50 in the world probably and such players will have almost indistinguishable records over their whole careers so there is no reliable way of telling who is better.
Yeah agree. I've not been impressed with Costa either, cue him scoring 30+ this season now but something tells me the guy won't adapt too easily to the Prem. Last season was also the first time he scored more than 10 goals in the league, here's hoping he's a one season wonder
Therefore forget the records and consider the player, the way he plays and how he scores goals. In other words you need to select players who will fit the team. If not you end up buying players like Darren Bent.
I don't get this 'fit the team' thing at all. All players have the same body parts and similar skills and basically have to run around, pass and head the ball. It's human nature to see differences that don't exist. All this buying and selling of similarly skilled players merely disrupts the team without making any real difference in my view. I can see why we had to spend the Bale money on improving the team because having it in the bank doesn't lead to success on the field, and buying seven players gives us a good chance that one or two might turn out well, but changing a quarter of the squad every season just doesn't feel right. We used to sign about one player a season back in the 60s, the last time we had a prolonged period of success. Why on earth isn't that the best strategy now?
Too many virtual football games? If you cannot see the way different players play then you really need to go back to basics. It is not the ability to kick a ball that we are talking about but the thinking behind how and where you kick it. To talk about all players having the same skills is to ignore MOST of the attributes and MOST of the game itself.
I agree. His injury will keep him at Southampton this summer. Because the game's changed. Teams don't have squads of about 15 anymore, either. Making enormous changes all the time is a bad idea, but holding onto old ways of doing things because they used to work is equally bad.
Agree absolutely with that but I see no evidence that anyone, even the more successful managers/coaches, have any long term ability to make the judgments Spurf refers to. EG Anyone can see that Lamela and Townsend have different skill sets but which one would fit best into say Chelsea's style of play is a much more difficult call. We've got Lennon, Townsend, Lamela and Chadli as wide players. If instead we had say Walcott, Stirling, Willian and Nani would that really be any better? Surely we get more value by them getting used to playing with each other and coaching them in skills than by selling and buying.
If you cannot identify players that fit a team then you have no business being a manager. Example: Redknapp identified the need for a defensive midfielder, employed Palacious than found a better one in SCott Parker. Sherwood could not see the need for players like Sandro??? Goodbye Sherwood. It's all about identifying the right players.
That explains why most managers get sacked after a short period - they claim that they can do this but can't in practice
Looking back at Darren Bent, I couldn't help but think of this... [video=youtube_share;rOmFCMhAKeU]http://youtu.be/rOmFCMhAKeU[/video]
Ever see Congo? On paper it made so much sense: based on a Michael Crichton book, produced by Steven Spielberg's production team, on paper they had another Jurassic Park. Instead they wound up with a torrent of unfiltered animal faeces that occasionally pops up on Movie Mix. Same goes with the signing of Darren Bent: he was banging them in at Ipswich and Charlton so would be even more deadly with our midfield feeding him, and there was the pleasant bonus of him fulfilling our quota of English players. Instead he failed to fit in with the team's style of play and was shipped off to Sunderland a couple of years later.
