This is the game I brought the old man to for his 70th.
Apart from against us it’s probably the first time I’ve watched a full spurs games in a few years. They are utter trash. They offered absolutely nothing going forward. Milan were terrible too. A really shite game of football.
Waiting for the train back and overheard a lot of angry sentiment and Conte out. One guy was going on about how Poch is the only one who can save them and get them where they need to be…not sure where that is for spurs mind.
There are good 0-0 draws. There are heroic exits, games where you chase the sun and come up short. This wasn’t any of those things. Instead, this was a night that seemed to raise some very basic questions about what Spurs are for, what this entity is intended to express.
A team that is just good enough has been built to play football that is just good enough, cashing in on the happy accident of a single home-grown world-class player, teasing its fans with the sense of standing quite near to other people’s success. And not just once, but year after year, following the same patterns.
What is the point of the rest of Spurs’ league season from here? A desperate push to finish fourth in order to do all this over again? What is the point of erecting this mimesis of an ambitious team? Who, exactly, is enjoying this, destined to look back on it all as the days of their lives? This is product. Stuff on a stage. They have a go-kart show here too apparently.
And at times watching Spurs try to attack is like playing a very basic video game: the same patterns, the same angles and lines and pre-set rhythms. Kane spins deep. Kane turns and hits left on the joystick, long pass inside out. A basic computer could “learn” Conte’s Spurs in four-sevenths of a second, spooling out a predictive printout of their expected attacking moves for the next 400 years.
I think what’s particularly satisfying about watching them collapse is that for a bit there was a line of thought that if only Conte had gotten the guys he wanted and not the players Levy bought him that the club would be going gangbusters.
Well Perisic has been awful and without a doubt helped contribute to Son’s decline. They went out and bought Danjuma and Porro but neither have made an impact.
For a guy who was identified as one of the reasons by a few journalists that Spurs would finish above Arsenal, watching him fail like this and more or less beg to be fired in his post match conference is really great.
Isn’t that pretty much most coaches? They have a certain style and they drill it into players. Football in the current era is ultra tactical with limited amount of expression from players. Much of what we see is rehearsed patterns of play and stuff like that.
If you look at the “big seven” (inc Newcastle now) Spurs have:
-Smallest global fanbase besides Newcastle, which limits revenue potential.
-Stingiest owners of the seven.
-Arguably worst young first team talent of the seven, maybe similar to Newcastle or United.
-Worst academy along with Newcastle.
-Arguably the worst worst footballing structures in that the business exec/owner meddles in footballing decisions while the sporting director is a guy who hired Nuno and currently under criminal investigation in Italy.
As we have shown you can turn things around very quickly if you find the right manager and string together a couple good transfer windows but its hard to be optimistic about Spurs. There are a ton of headwinds.
Fair enough. I guess with Conte, The issue is predictability. Predictability becomes even more of a problem when they don’t attack often. If you come at an opponent 20 times, the chances are something will come off, even if all 20 of them are predictable. Conte’s sides don’t come at opponents as frequently as a top side should.
Klopp also focuses on a single plan but because his sides come at opponents at such a high frequency, things eventually click for them.
