The window has been a weird one, because the types of players that clubs are looking for - most obviously strikers and metronome DMs - either don't seem to be in abundance, or they're being priced out of moves by their clubs and/or stockpiled by a handful of clubs who think having more players than anyone else balances out being an unmanageable shambles, so instead the main narrative of the summer window is clubs balancing out each other's PSR spreadsheets with youth or squad players being shuttled around for blatantly hiked fees as if nobody can see what's going on The bright spot is it does seem we are clearing the decks to allow the likes of Moore, Lankshere et al to move up into the first team, though the obvious gap from this window that is the LCB won't be sorted until next summer when Luka Vuskovic is eligible to play for us
Parallels to Poch's side are important. In many ways, he benefited from a group of players who definitely weren't signed as established stars, but rather developed and grew as a team under his guidance. Some, like Hugo, Eriksen, Toby and Dembele were somewhat more obvious. But I doubt many fans would have foreseen just how good Walker, Rose, Dele, Son or Jan would be when we first signed them, same goes for Harry emerging from the academy at just the right time. To me, it looks like we are aiming for exactly the same outcome under Ange. Sign a load of players and hope they develop quicky and broadly in the next year or two. We're already seeing multiple players exceed all expectations (Gigi, Micky and Udogie all spring to mind), and it seems that the hope is others follow suit. The big difference now is that we do have a deeper squad than Poch ever did, especially since clearing so much deadwood. And whilst we do lack quality, the hope is clearly that it will emerge from within the group, which is exactly what happened under Poch. This is an eminently sensible strategy. We have abundant evidence that the club can't yet compete for the signatures of superstars and that when we do, we end up with wage wasting b-list celebrities. So we're trying to develop them in-house instead.
In a way I'm missing the Harry Redknapp lead up to deadline day , Harry leaning out of the Range Rover getting up our expectations only for us to get a loan defender when we so badly needed a striker
The quality difference more so than quantity is the concern for me. Poch’s team(s) from 2015-2018 likely beat Ange’s current one about 4 or 5-1. Especially as Poch’s system was more complete. In terms of foreseeing the impact of certain players I do think Poch and his staff need to take huge credit for some. Something he has (so far) massively excelled over Ange on is the ability to develop players. Walker and Rose hugely benefitted from Poch’s arrival after multiple poor seasons, even Vertonghen and Dembele had struggled too. There’s then also the academy players, especially in his first couple years. Kane, Mason (who all thought would’ve been sold/ released at 23), Bentaleb and Townsend all became starters and helped Spurs finish 5th in his first season and all eventually left for healthy profits, only KWP, Winks and Skipp have since left for good profits and they all initially came from Poch as well. Ange currently has arguably Spurs’ best ever batch of young players and we’ve barely seen any given a sniff so far, so there’s definitely an expectation for him to deliver on that front over the next year or two. As for signing superstars, I’d argue that’s more down to the club’s choices/ ambition more so than being unable to compete. We can’t quite get the truly world class but we’ve shown an intent to spend amounts that should get you great players that are just below the world class bracket yet we’ve spent it on average ones hoping they’d turn into such. £50m-£65m+ should get you players capable of elevating a team, instead it got us Ndombele, Richarlison, Johnson and Solanke. The latter might be harsh to throw in right now but he isn’t a player that had been excelling over seasons, at almost 27 he’s had just one good season to his name. I think the club is sort of banking on Ange having a Poch-esque ability to improve multiple players as the way to increase quality, more so than actually giving Ange quality to work with from the start. I really hope he can do it but I think it’s going to be a tough ask and the club could’ve certainly helped him out more.
Ange seems to be pleased to have Spence in the squad and has now got some young players he trusts. I guess he doesn't want to sniffle their development by denying them game time which would absolutely happen if we made more signings?
That's likely why the LCB isn't coming in: Vuskovic will cover that next summer That being said, a loan to cover the worst case scenario would not go amiss
With the extra games from Europe and it nearly being impossible to do worse in domestic cups, I still feel the squad is 2-3 players light. Feel like 1-2 injuries to key players and Spurs are bang in trouble. Signing younger players is good but you also need experienced players signed alongside them too.
Agreed. And as last season showed, the intensity and all-action style of Ange's system makes injuries inevitable.
Yeah I’m worried about that and disappointed with the window. Building for the future is good but you also need to focus on the here and now. Chances are Spurs team that will start against Toon on Sunday will probably be 9 that started the game last year, that’s not a good thing imo.
That’s my concern too. I feel like I’m one of the biggest advocates for promoting and developing youth in order to build a promising future but you’ve got to have that balance of bringing in some who are ready-made to impact the present. It’s definitely a balancing act. We made mistakes in Poch’s era by somewhat banking on what we had to just automatically get better and I don’t want to see past mistakes repeated, especially as Spurs are in a much healthier financial position nowadays.
Poch was an excellent motivator and coach but I worry that his record since leaving Spurs indicates that his ceiling wasn't perhaps as high as we thought it was. He benefited enormously from a great crop of youngsters all coming through at the same time, as well as a nice group of players already at the club (as you've mentioned) Hugo, Jan, Walker (he was already showing huge promise under Harry, he was the PFA YPOTY in 2012 lets not forget), Dembele, Eriksen etc. And with Mitchell overseeing recruitment, Poch was very much in the right place at the right time. I'm also not so sure Poch was that good at developing youngsters. I'll give him credit for Danny Rose, Dele and maybe Kane, but the latter was already showing his ability under Interim Tim - it wasn't as if Poch plucked him from the academy and started playing him. The rest of the players you've cited were gone within a year or two and did not help elevate us to title challengers. Then the failure to develop Skipp, KWP, Foyth, Wimmer, Janssen and CCV has to be taken into consideration and the sum of it all is probably: Poch is no better or worse than most managers at developing young talent. What he was good at was building a cohesive team that fought for each other, playing wonderfully cohesive football. Ange isn't all that different in that regard. I personally think our current team would comfortably beat the 2014/15 crop and would run a very close game against the 15/16 (that team was nowhere near as good as people think) and 18/19 teams. Only the middle two seasons of Poch's reign would have trounced the current team imo. And that's the benchmark we now have to aim for and could well reach given time and allowance for the youngsters to develop.
After Walker winning the YPOTY he then had two stinking seasons, a lot of fans were calling for him to be dropped/ sold. There was never really an expectation when Poch arrived that Walker would then become arguably the Prem’s best ever RB and Poch’s management is a huge reason for that. Vertonghen and Dembele were also coming off the back of underwhelming seasons and Dembele himself often found himself behind Mason and Bentaleb in Poch’s first year. Poch’s development of Mason shouldn’t go unnoticed either, he was 23 when Poch arrived and had just returned from a loan in Ligue 1 where he didn’t play a single minute, he was expected to be released or sold that summer yet became a regular starter and was sold two years later for about £15m IIRC which back then was a solid enough fee. Bentaleb went for £20m too. Townsend went for just under what Mason did as well. These were all players that Poch chose to play over more senior guys like Paulinho, Capoue, Dembele (for a spell) and Lennon. I think the failure to develop other youngsters after that can potentially be attributed to expectations of the club massively rising and us having an XI that was so, so good to the point where spaces weren’t really opening up, no one was expecting Janssen to oust Kane or Wimmer to oust Jan or Toby etc, Wimmer was sold for a profit though. KWP is probably the main one I felt could’ve been introduced and developed though, as after Walker and then Trippier’s first season as first choice, the RB slot then became problematic and we all know how that panned out until Porro. This team would beat the first Poch side, mainly because this one also cost a lot more (even taking inflation into account). Beyond that, I don’t think it beats a Poch side until the Ndombele/ Lo Celso fiasco season where Poch ended up getting sacked.
I guess the main thing and the only thing that really matters is that Ange is happy with the business done this summer. Is he?
The thing with Poch's reputation for developing young talent is people took it too literally: he did develop plenty of young talent, but young talent we paid for such as Dele, Eriksen, Son, Dier etc etc instead of young talent we produced ourselves (barring the obvious exceptions) - and it's no surprise the wheels fell off when he stopped doing that as well, as happened with Foyth, Sanchez etc In terms of Wimmer we did develop him, just in a different way: we developed him from a player we signed for £4m to one Stoke were willing to pay £18m for (to their everlasting chagrin, apparently) which is how we viewed development in the Arnesen era - and Poch certainly failed there, because his refusal to loan youngsters meant we couldn't generate value on them if they weren't quite up to standard
I said last night he seems pretty satisfied so I think that’s a good sign. He himself is speaking of loftier ambitions as well, highlighting how he wins things in his second season, so maybe he does feel the team can do something big which would be great - personally I think we’re lacking a bit of extra quality to get us over the line - but naturally hope he’s right.
The problem with the Omerta which Lange has installed is it's hard to tell if Ange is happy or not, due to the guesswork that so many aggregators are having to make and how regularly two different takes conflict with one another Case in point, earlier in the month one was suggesting that two strikers were on the slate, with the implication that Solanke and David might both be coming in - but I cannot see that coming to pass and that leads to questions if that suggestion was bollocks from the outset, or if plans changed as Richy didn't want to leave, and so on
I think the club probably wanted to move Richarlison on but he said he wanted to stay which meant no second striker was needed. I see Richarlison leaving in January or next summer though.
We need to rotate heavily during the congested parts of the season and probably start doing so quite early on. It'll piss people off and we'll drop points, but the alternative is what happened last season, when we collapsed and died, basically. Our failure to secure backup/competition for Udogie and Vicario could be very problematic. Bloody predictable, too.
