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The elusive press

5 min read
by Dan Rattigan
We can all guess where it went wrong, but Dan Rattigan has his own opinions, it was our move away from a high tempo pressing game. Dan examines our downfall. Glory.

Beyond the yellow transfer ticker-led highs of the summer, it hasn’t felt a great season to be a Spurs fan. Sure we’ve been worse in recent memory, but it just hasn’t been much fun.

image spursEvery home game I’ve been to this season, admittedly a smaller sample than some, has been characterised by moaning, tension, audible groaning and, most sadly of all, a spattering of boos (most alarmingly when we went in 0-0 at half-time with Palace).

That’s with the exception of the home game against Dnipro where, sat in the Paxton, I had a first-hand view of how Block 35 lifted the rest of the stadium and, in my opinion, the players.

There is so much to write about this season – on the failings of the players, managers (or ‘head coaches’) and the board. I’m not looking for saviours, villains or scapegoats. Instead I’ll (try to) take a dispassionate look at a part of our play that’s more elusive than Erik Lamela (did he ever really exist?), our pressing game.

[linequote]There is so much to write about this season – on the failings of the players, managers (or ‘head coaches’) and the board[/linequote]

Much of modern football discussion, and I blame Sky Sports and rolling news for this, is concerned with transfers (after last summer, I’d gladly see Spurs never make a transfer again – if only for my heart-rate), ‘mind games’ (perhaps more accurately the ‘Is Tim Sherwood losing his mind’ games?) and stats (perhaps a useful tool for illuminating a point, but more often than not used selectively to push a given agenda). I’ll try and stay away from all three.

Plus it’s Wednesday night and having got palpitations looking at the side going to Benfica, I have absolutely no intention of going into that.

When is a manager not a manager? When he’s a ‘head coach’

I’ll start by declaring an interest – I bought into Andre Villas Boas massively. I fell head over heels for the young, smartly dressed coach with a vision and a Rolodex full of some of Europe’s best players. A classy man with an often ignored dry sense of humour. He didn’t get on with Terry and Lampard?

Good, I can’t imagine many at Spurs would. I’m of the view he was unfairly dug out in the media, though with fresher eyes he could have been a bit less sensitive.

At the beginning of last season I saw something in our play, even in the early defeat to Newcastle but particularly in the first half of our victory at Old Trafford against Fergie’s United: an intensity, players hunting in packs, breaking with pace.

Modern football, the sort Liverpool fans must be loving now, underpinned by an intelligent pressing game. The high line came as a relief after the previous season, having watched Ledley’s battered body regularly give out around the hour mark and our whole team drop back inviting pressure (most notably vs City away).

Problem is the last time I remember seeing it was Lazio away. Tim Sherwood, and I don’t know where his apparent flexibility in formations and personnel becomes indecision, isn’t as far away from Villas Boas as I initially assumed. We still play with the sometimes suicidal high line and he might even own a laptop despite what Jamie Redknapp thinks (and I use ‘thinks’ lightly).

[linequote]I’ll start by declaring an interest – I bought into Andre Villas Boas massively. I fell head over heels for the young, smartly dressed coach with a vision and a Rolodex full of some of Europe’s best players[/linequote]

But without any pressure, teams have been slipping almost straight passes that take out our entire team. If Woolwich’s famous back four is the model for how a successful defensive line should position itself, we’ve looked more like the Wombles of Wimbledon with Dawson, Vertonghen, Rose and Naughton all guilty of breaking the line on more than one occasion.

So where’s it gone?

I’ve got a few working theories, none of them perfect. The first being that Sandro’s injury against QPR robbed our team of the only bit of our team that could have been said to be working excellently – his midfield axis with Dembele.

Neither perfect players, both flawed as individuals, appeared to blend seamlessly when together. For me, this injury defined our summer spending; as it ripped up our season last year, we sought depth this year. I will state the obvious and suggest that didn’t necessarily work out as planned.

This may sound insane but perhaps it was the sale of Clint Dempsey?

Solid, unspectacular Clint Dempsey. If he did nothing else, he knew his limitations and ran around a bit. Allied with Aaron Lennon’s chronic lack of form this season, we’ve lacked urgency in wide areas.

As an aside, I’ve started wondering what would happen if we didn’t ‘Levy’ Liverpool and let them sign Sigurdsson and Dempey. They surely wouldn’t be as good as they are now, would they? No money for Coutinho for one.

The exile of Emmanuel Adebayor may be another thing. Until recently a player who divided opinion like no other – I even found myself falling into the trap of calling him lazy at points.

[linequote]Our next steps will again be dominated by club politics – a temporary head coach positioning for Franco Baldini’s job[/linequote]

But let’s be honest, he isn’t. You can tell when he’s having a bad game – his second touch is a tackle – but he does run those gangly legs into the ground. Without someone to lead the press from the front, did it just fall apart?

My last theory, and I think most accurate, is fitness – we couldn’t keep it up physically last season, which led AVB to change the way we played this season. I remember suggesting to Miguel Delaney on Twitter, after a good piece on the game against Fulham in December, that perhaps our training and gameplan had been altered to prevent yet another end of season collapse.

Optimistically, perhaps naively, I felt we were building to something. Ripping that up mid-season and turning from a sometimes turgid, controlling style of play to one that resembles pinball in its randomness was always doomed to failure. But who knows, perhaps Sherwood will still benefit from that regime?

What next?

Our next steps will again be dominated by club politics – a temporary head coach positioning for Franco Baldini’s job, while we wait for an international manager to finish with the formalities in the summer and sign (that’s so 2004!) We wait in baited breath for a former Barcelona manager, feted for his attractive football, soon to be maligned in England for his rotation policy.

Perhaps our pressing game, our modern football was fleeting. A glimpse at the future as we’re stuck in the mire of endless transition. I hope not.

All views and opinions expressed in this article are the views and opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of The Fighting Cock. We offer a platform for fans to commit their views to text and voice their thoughts. Football is a passionate game and as long as the views stay within the parameters of what is acceptable, we encourage people to write, get involved and share their thoughts on the mighty Tottenham Hotspur.

Dan Rattigan

1 Comment

  1. Spurgatso
    20/03/2014 @ 4:49 pm

    Sorry from the moment you said “I bought heavily into Villas Boas my mind started to wander ,I havnt read the rest of it,just went straight to comments which I suppose this is.

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