Very, very worrying. I can't even bring myself to write a full blown report. Suffice it to say I never want to see Townsend in a Spurs shirt again, on either flank. Trippier needs to seriously up his game and possibly lose some weight before he can call himself a competent full back. Lamela needs to be reminded that 3 good games a season is not sufficient. And last but certainly not least, Levy needs to take a good long, hard look in the mirror and ask himself why we currently find ourselves with one out and out striker on our books.
What a rubbish performance that was. Absolutely overwhelmed them for ten minutes, then gave up. Some ridiculously poor individual contributions tonight, too. Up there with Fazio's mare against the Goons. Sloppy passing, disorganised defending and wasteful finishing. You'd hope that the manager would be suitably furious with that lot and himself, as well. Our right hand side was appalling.
13 games in all competitions, 4 wins, 3 losses and 6 draws. Only 3 ocassions where we've scored more than one goal. Not good enough, is it? We can sit here and blame the defence but they're not always going to be able to keep cleansheets so we have to start taking our chances at the other end. Every training session should be shooting practice until we start scoring more, as far as I'm concerned.
It became more and more obvious as the second half went on that Trippier had no idea what he was supposed to do. "Do I press the ball or do I cover the pass? I don't know so I'll sort of jog alongside and cover nobody" Awful, there's no other word for it. The scoreline may have ended 2-1 but we were well beaten there and Lloris had to pull off a couple of really good saves. Lots of weak links in that team right now.
Townsend was poor Trippier was terrible Lamela was mer Kane was mer Alli was mer Njie was decent Dembele decent ish Toby was mer at best Lloris was good Vertongen was decent Davies was average - decent Dier was ok Eriksen was good Omooah ...no time to judge
Woeful. No thought, no control, no chance. We played like a school team does - kick and rush. Nobody on our side comes out of that with any credit, Hugo and maybe Eriksen as exceptions. Unless we learn to keep the ball we'll never get anywhere in Europe.
But that's the stupid part Brian - we did and often do keep the ball. Once again - 67% of possession with nothing to show for it, for the simple reason that we have no strikers and the only attacking midfielder we have who has a brain is Eriksen: and guess what? He's scored all of our last 3 goals. Lamela and Townsend have been passengers at best for the majority of the past 3 years, and I don't think the Dier-Dembele combination worked whatsoever as both seemed thoroughly confused as to who was meant to be doing what. The most worrying thing of all, though, was the almost total lack of urgency or desire after they equalised.
Son returning is really important...we are looking so goal shy at the moment. Walker and Rose will give the defence a strength that was missing tonight. But our squad players looked clueless tonight
Our problems are summed up by the new-found growing (slightly) appreciation of Lamela's performances by people including me. His evolution under Pochettino could be used as a reason to praise or criticise Pochettino, though I'd err on the side of praising him. By that I mean that I don't know what we bought Lamela for but I'm pretty sure it would have been for his creativity and goals. Yet these aspects never looked that great (yeah - I know about the assists stat but that belied some very ineffective attacking performances IMO). This season his greatest attributes are his tenacity, his tackling, his pressuring, his keeping possession and keeping it simple. A very Pochettino forward. And I wanna give Poch credit for getting what he does out of Lamela (for example) but at the same time when I see the a front 4 of Townsend, Lamela, Eriksen and N'Jie I can only see a goal or bit of magic coming from one of those players. Adding Chadli to that mix might not improve much on that front either. N'Jie's not really done much since his first couple of games, Son's injured, Kane's out of form and once again we're looking to a very few (one) player to provide goals and a bit of creativity. I just don't think we have enough skillful players for those 3 forward midfielders spots. I do feel more optimistic than I have for a while, though, because I feel that the answers to our problems are probably not that far off (Kane hitting form again; Son coming back; players like Alli, maybe Onomah and, yes, Lamela developing; N'Jie being used as an impact sub). Plus the attempts to sign Berahino show that we were never really 100% happy to have the forward options that we have despite already signing N'Jie and Son. Crap performance tonight but we still really should have got something from this and could well have ended up winning. Onto Bournemouth and forget about it. We have to be patient - once we get 2 of Harry, Eriksen and Son playing well we'll be twice as threatening and that's surely not an unrealistic thing to expect to happen soon.
He cost £30 million, he's been with us 2.1/2 years and best statement you can make is "he's showing signs of progress", he was absolutely woeful yet again. and why play the first team in such a meaningless competition,
Disagree about it being meaningless...it's a trophy and it gets the winner into the CL so we should be trying to win it imo
I just realised that in my previous post whilst I went on about the number of ineffective options for the front 3 midfielders I didn't even bother mentioning the fact that we have one proper striker at the club. That goes without saying, apparently.
Thats the bit I don't get...how did we leave ourselves in this situation where we only have 1 striker?
100% correct. 'Signs of progress' was last year's excuse and the reason I was against selling or loaning him in the summer. His performances up until the City game all hinted that this would finally be the 'breakthrough' stage of his career - the step after 'signs of progress' and one that a £30m player in his 3rd season MUST show in order to justify his inclusion in the side. But since City, his performances have regressed back into the familiar running around like a headless chicken not contributing anything of note picking up yellow cards and giving away fouls because he's an attacker pretending to be good at defending because he can't bring himself to attack, and today's performance was as reminiscent of Lamela of the past 2 years as I've seen thusfar this season. The only reason I'm willing to cut him some slack is that he had very little support from his fullback, whilst Townsend strove to provide further proof of what I've been saying for 5 years - he should give it all up and become a window cleaner.
