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.