Says it all. Giving the wrong manager time won't help, of course. But the rightest manager in the world SHOULD improve for two, three, four years or even longer. What that means is that he won't be spectacular right off the bat. We're currently still in the first bad patch of Pochettino's time at Spurs. Unfortunately, even though the team spent most of last year gelling, or failing to gel, the gelling clock still started from zero when Pochettino came in. We're now at zero plus two months. Sometimes I think if football fans took a look at a two month old baby, they'd say "He can hardly move around at all! He's obviously crap. Put him up for adoption and let's make a new one!" I actually think we do have quality players. Everyone is still working out how to coordinate themselves with each other. I hope so, anyway, but we can't really tell yet. I do think in retrospect the current bad period was partly a result of playing nothing but weaker teams in preseason. The team learned that if they got up a reasonable head of steam, they'd be too much for the other guys. When that wasn't true against Liverpool, it was a real jolt to confidence levels.
You're such a naughty boy, nudge nudge , wink wink, know what I mean , say no more. Negative but you say positive. We can debate till the cows come home but the squad is a perfect example of a collective blandness of mediocrity . We can replace one team with another and it will have little effect on the balance of quality. Except for The keeper they are nearly the same. One whole season , one World Cup of underperformance is enough to say we are the new messiahs of buying damaged goods. As the first 11 is weak in creativity , flair , crap strikers , what is the point of 2nd version . Better to have you'e eggs in one basket , a team that can compete at a higher level, go for top 4 , maybe challenge for silverware and actually beat a top team. We can all live in hope but Spurs are the "nowhere men" They aint got a ticket to ride. This the price of our-master plan of self destruction . The days of the noble idea that hoping youth will become star players in numbers at tbe highest level is over, as many teams above can constantly buy instant quality. This policy will reap little as we have been left behind. As you glory in you're moral high-ground , steadfast loyalty to the established order but an endless cycle of non achievement for others is not acceptable Puritan ethics ( Didn't they all piss of to America ) in an age of decadence means Christmas is banned or as in Narnia, the White Witch rules and it is always winter. Sadly there is no Aslan .
But look at Gylfi: too medicore to play on a mediocre squad. The moment he gets to a team with a settled system, where people know what they’re supposed to do, he gets a goal and four assists in four games.
City are a big name now, a proper punishment like throwing them out of the CL would bad for UEFA's pocket - if it was a 'smaller' club like some random Eastern European club, or hypothetically us Saints UEFA would suddenly have grown a pair and had them\us dispatched from the CL. I have no idea how you Spurs would have fared in the same situation.
I agree we have a bunch of mediocre players, but we need to play to their strengths and Lennon on the left is not one of them. I miss the days when I'd watch games in Jol/Redkanpp era and crosses would be whizzing across the box from both flanks and I'd be oohing and aaahing as the ball narrowly missed a player etc. Soldado would love to have those opportunities.. I just find spurs so un-interesting these days, and they never seem to get me excited. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.
Oh, they can't stand us, don't worry about that. Platini turned up to two of our Europa League games last season, both which were rife with dubious decisions. We progressed anyway and UEFA's mascot looked like someone had been squeezing lemons into his champagne all night. I'm struggling to accept our constant draws against Europe's most racist and anti-Semitic teams as a coincidence, to be honest. Maybe it's just the way that the competition is, but it seems something of a coincidence. Spurs and Arsenal visiting Istanbul days apart should be fun...
And I think our problem has been entirely some combination of choice of managers, failing to give them time to get their system fully in place, and the consequent failure to get players settled and comfortable. I base that on how much better players seem to do before and after their stints here. Gylfi is the perfect example. He went from being a big scoring CAM to lost in the mix here right back to a big scoring CAM. Soldado and Lamela were scoring for fun, Gio is another before and after case. My theory is that our players are actually quite good, far better than Everton's for example, but we'll only see it if we stick with Pochettino--and, of course, if he is the right, or at least a right, manager for us. Players thrived under Redknapp, and two players (Eriksen and Ade) thrived under Sherwood. Right now we've got Chadli, Kane and to some extent Lamela doing well under Pochettino, but it's early. But Everton's players have had enough time to know exactly what they're doing, whereas ours are still in the relatively early stages of learning. I think the best thing we could do at this point is take a deep breath and promise to give Pochettino a full two years, and evaluate then. Even if he is the wrong guy, the two year stint should encourage better managers to come after him. In the meanwhile, any attempts to be patient or even supportive would probably not have a terrible effect. I do. Incidentally, I think (based on one article I read not very closely) Besiktas have an anti-racist reputation, though I'm not at all sure about whether they're anti-anti-Semitic as well. I'm dubious, because I seem to remember from that article that one of their rivals, Galatasaray, are the Jewish club.
If we keep chopping and changing we will never have success unless we luck out with another Redknapp-esque manager (not necessarily in style mind), who just fits the club really well at the time. If we're going to employ a manager like Pochettino, who appears to have a very definite style he wants to play, then we have to give him time to do it. Its not a quick process. Swansea, for example, play the style they do well because they have been doing it for years, and the managers and players they have employed over that time are all of a similar style. They have of course evolved, you have to to survive, but evolution has been gradual. Whereas we haven't had any continuity - Redknapp to AVB to Sherwood to Pochettino - and we haven't had anything like Pochettino's style at this club. I'm not saying its necessarily going to work, nobody can know at this juncture if it is nor not, but surely we have to let him at least try, and that could take a couple of years, not a couple of months.
The problem with teams is they all have to buy into the one ethic. You have a collection of individuals from different backgrounds, who have played in different teams for different managers, in different systems, in different countries, in different climates. They come to Spurs needing to settle into a new team in a new country in a new league with a new manager. So not only do they have to learn and change but the existing team also has to go through this process because their manager has changed and he wants to change things. So we have no stabilty, no continuity, and NO TEAM! Is it any wonder we perform to less than the sum of our parts.
I gave Pochettino until now to have his sides playing more frequently in the manner seen of his Soton sides last season. I have yet to see that has happened. The big concern is that things look too much like exactly a year ago. But the excuses of massive squad churn over the summer etc are gone.
Spurs and Southampton played a similar style, I thought, though we were a bit better. We’re playing much better football in general this year than last year--some games. We’ve done better against top four clubs, picking up as many points this year in two games as we did last year in eight. We don’t have the issues scoring from open play we had under AVB, or the lethargy we had under Sherwood. Pochettino has shown a plan B and C I wasn’t expecting. He has an almost uncanny ability to turn games with substitutions (half the time in the wrong direction, but still!) The points total is disappointing, but the league position is okay (though not good). But good, bad or indifferent, any judgments seven games into Pochettino’s time with us are very preliminary, IMO. It’s interesting to look at the ages of our starters and near starters. If Kane and Bentaleb play, it’s 21, 22, 22, 25, 20, 25 (I think), 28, 26, 23, 24 and 26, I think. And that’s not including Dier. So it’s a team that should improve for three years or more if they just keep playing under the same system.
