Lack of urgency

[Blanchflower]

Dembele's normal role was taken up in part by Huddlestone so it's kind of natural that he wouldn't play his normal game, he still offered more than Holtby though who mostly just did his pretty ineffectual chasing around like a headless chicken thing.

 

[josh_spurs]

Its an ongoing porno feud in the women's body thread...

I'm 15


What's a porn?



:lineker:

 

[NorseYid]

.. but I think we lacked a few key elements:

- a spearhead.
- natural width from left back.
- a driving force in midfield.

All those should be nigh impossible to disagree with for any observer neutral or not.

Sadly, while #2 is pure managment decision (Benny really, really has to be a tw*t in training to be benched for Naughton at LB, surely), #1 and #3 are squad issues.

The players you indicate we lack are completely identical with the qualities Sammy' and others are missing in our gameplan.

It all adds up. Unfortunately, it adds up.

I won't pretend to know what part of our transfer business i Levys responsibilities, which are the managers choices and which are just market mechanisms. But it is pretty obvious, that this squad is not fully coherent and it is not fully functional towards getting us, what everyone seem to work towards.

 

[Smoked Salmon]

Quite simply we need a Ledley, a Mabbutt, a VDV, a Sheringham. Basically anyone who is a figure, a talisman. Daws, as much as he has come on this season, is not it. The others certainly aren't.

We need that man that others can get around. To lead from.

 

[Coalhada]

To look on the bright side, I will say that lack of urgency is in part a symptom of something good -- not panicking and/or giving up when not already leading around the 60-minute mark.

That said, there's no arguing with the general sentiment that we need someone who can set the tempo a bit better.

 

[KYiddo]

so.. much.. problems..
cant.. find.. solutions..
this is so.. fucking..depressing!!!!

out of all the problems above,
what is the most urgent one?
tatics? individual skills? motivation? wafer-thin squad? leadership?

we may be sitting in 4/5th, but I seriously think that we have a very big gap between the teams above us
and to be very,very honest, i dont think we are yet CL level. (i wait for a barrage of neg reps :/)

and as for the matter of "captains", we have a shit load of players that have experience, but i dont know wtf is wrong :/
Parker has some exp, daws too, jan with ajax, gallas with the scum, lloris currently with france. is there anyone im missing?

 

[docomospur]

Quite simply we need a Ledley, a Mabbutt, a VDV, a Sheringham. Basically anyone who is a figure, a talisman. Daws, as much as he has come on this season, is not it. The others certainly aren't.

We need that man that others can get around. To lead from.

Sadly, that's been the case for many years now. Even VdV's role as a talisman was compromised by the fact that he often never completed the full 90 minutes. I was hoping that Parker might suit the part, but he's struggled this season.

 

[Pairsy1882]

While I agree that we lacked urgency against Wigan yesterday are you all forgetting the urgency that we showed to rip apart Man City last week... You don't get too much more urgent than 3 goals in 7 minutes. But as someone rightly mentioned earlier the measured and at times slow approach play is in part a good thing a sign that we don't panic we just need a cutting edge, other than Bale to make the final cut, so to speak.

The times that we look able to up the tempo and show some urgency is when teams need to come at us, our best weapon is the counter attack and that simply wasn't an option against a Wigan side with 11 behind the ball. That doesn't mean that we should panic and lump long balls to JD or anyone else for that matter.

Part of the problem yesterday was the lack of balance in the midfield caused by at absence of Dembele and Lennon. Our midfield works best with those two in it. Lennon is more crucial than a number of people realise, he provides a foil for Bale, whereby he occupies the defenders even when he doesn't have the ball because they have to be wary of his threat. He also supplies much needed width, something that we thrive on as we proved against Man City. When in the second half we got a bit wider and reaped the benefits.

 

[sammyspurs]

While I agree that we lacked urgency against Wigan yesterday are you all forgetting the urgency that we showed to rip apart Man City last week... You don't get too much more urgent than 3 goals in 7 minutes.

No one has forgotten. In my opening post, I said that when we attack with urgency we usually score. Im questioning why that intensity never came yesterday and a million times before that, on same day that AVB was quoted as saying that top 4 would garuantee Bale stays.

And, according to Villas-Boas, PFA Player of the Year contender Bale will resist offers from elsewhere if Champions League football is on offer at White Hart Lane.
"That's the information that I have from the club," the Tottenham manager said.
F365

We dont do it enough, even though we rip teams to shreds when we do. I dont understand the excessive caution against bottom 6 teams.

 

[Blanchflower]

You are over simplifying things IMO

 

[ArcspacE]

"That's the information that I have from the club," the Tottenham manager said.

A gentlemen's agreement of sorts . . .

:modric:

 

[sammyspurs]

You are over simplifying things IMO

Personally I think we still suffer from some of the same things as ten years ago, to a certain degree. We would regularly take a point off Woolwich even when we were a 15th place team and they champions.

We would always give Man U and Liverpool a game, even though we'd lose, but the next week we would always lose to a Hull, or a Wolves. It carried on through the Jol era and is still present today.

We beat AC Milan away, then lost to Blackpool next game.

We can raise it against the best, but we are nonchalant against teams we think we should beat, imo.

 

[Blanchflower]

And why couldn't Hull, Wolves and Blackpool go on from beating us to beat everyone between us and them in the league?.......

Wigan have taken 4 points off us and yet only managed two score draws against QPR, if every game was won by the 'better' team then there would be no point in actually playing the matches.

 

[sammyspurs]

And why couldn't Hull, Wolves and Blackpool go on from beating us to beat everyone between us and them in the league?.......

Wigan have taken 4 points off us and yet only managed two score draws against QPR, if every game was won by the 'better' team then there would be no point in actually playing the matches.

I expect to lose matches or points to lower teams, just not as often, and with far more effort to actually dominate them before conceding a bad result.

41% posession yesterday, and its not as if we were hitting them with deadly counter attackes either. 14 shots but only half on target, where Wigan had 6 shots yet 4 were on target.

We could have done more in my opinion and this result and performance is not in isolation.

 

[1882]

To sum up.., WE NEED A SKILFUL, GOALSCORING NASTY BASTARD IN MIDFIELD NEXT SEASON!

 

[Éperons]

I expect to lose matches or points to lower teams, just not as often, and with far more effort to actually dominate them before conceding a bad result.

I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to test this… to see if Spurs are actually problematically "worse" against "lesser" teams, especially in comparison to the rest of the league.

So this isn't perfect, but I put together a pretend season to test this. The rules are:

1. If the home team is higher in the table than the away team, it "should" be a home win.

2. Under all other circumstances, the result "should" be a draw (there are no away wins).

Here are the results:

So if Spurs had picked up a draw on every away day, drawn against the four teams above them when at home, and beaten everyone else, they would have 57 points. Instead, we have 62 points, meaning that whatever home draws or home losses we've picked up against lesser teams are offset by our ability to pick up away wins.

Top clubs sit in the negative because they pick up away wins. Man U's 12 away wins are a big part of why they're at -16.

Bottom clubs sit in the negative because of their ability to pick up home wins where one would "expect" a home draw (or by getting draws—or even wins!—away). QPR, for example, is supposed to have drawn every home match and lost every away match.

And middle clubs have volatility because the middle of the table is volatile.

But what's interesting here is that, given this kind of brutal/simplistic rule, the table doesn't actually change all that much. Only five clubs are in the "wrong" place, and even so the difference in places is pretty minimal (if not the result of ties).

So my preliminary conclusion is that we're not any more wasteful against lesser competition than our nearby competition… in fact, one could say that the Wanderers are more wasteful. They've lost three away matches to "lesser" competition (Chelsea, us, Norwich) and have picked up far too many home draws and home losses to "lesser" competition to offset their (many) away wins. But even so, they're not so wasteful that they don't belong in third…

 

[sammyspurs]

The point is that I do not want to "swap" results to "balance out" playing shit against shit teams. I am talking about real life.

I would simply liked to have taken more than 3 points from the following 15 available, and possibly score more than two goals.

Spurs 1 - West Brom 1
Spurs 1 - Norwich 1
Spurs 0 - Wigan 1
Spurs 0 - Stoke 0
Spurs 0 - Fulham 1

I dont care that we beat Man U away, or City. Id rather lose the games we "should" and win the ones we "should".

 

[sammyspurs]

I also like how you consider last years 4th place team, and an improved CL winning team as "lesser" opposition in regards to the gooners being wasteful.

A more honest comparison would be the teams I listed above.....which they claimed 10pts off at home to our 3 (with Wigan still to play)

 

[Éperons]

The point is that I do not want to "swap" results to "balance" out playing shit against shit teams.

Fair enough. My point is that I suspect that any top club will be able to put together a similar list.

For example, I'm certain that the Wanderers would like more than three points out of these available 15:
Sunderland home (0–0)
Fulham home (3–3)
Swansea home (0–2)
Norwich away (1–0)
Southampton away (1–1)

Or Chelsea would like more than two points out of these available 15:
QPR home (0–1)
Fulham home (0–0)
Southampton home (2–2)
Southampton away (2–1)
West Ham away (3–1)

And yes, maybe I'm cheating a bit by including two away matches per club where you have five home matches, but that may be exactly the point… "urgency" might not be the right term, but, rather, a look at why we're bad at home compared to the two above clubs (4D, 3L for the Wanderers; 4D, 2L for Chelsea; 5D 3L for us).

 

[Éperons]

more honest

I gave my methodology. Can't be more honest than that. If you don't like the method, critique it as such, but don't claim I'm being insufficiently "honest".