Spurs and the desolation of the Europa League

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trifficTotnum

The europa league is not the UEFA cup people fondly remember. It is a curse. The performance patterns are overwhemling and I am perplexed some seem to be spouting the same boring pub logic about so and so being on X wages and 'should' be able to compete on thursdays and sundays.Anyways i'll split this post up into a few sections to make it digestible

Fitness levels.

I am so disillusioned that I even lumped 20 pounds on Norwich to win as soon as I saw the line up.Norwich had held Man city to an 0-0 draw and they had 10 days rest compared to the 2.5 we had.The premier league is not like the bundesliga,liga or serie A. Physical fitness plays a bigger role than technical ability. There are very few players in our squad who can hack thursdays and sundays. .I think it was around 7 players who started thursday started sunday. Low and behold a tired and laboured performance.

:Weakening the squad

Ok so lets say out of principle we want to compete for the europa cup, why has the chairman and the manager systematically sabotaged this?
The top scorer in europe was defoe and in a lot of the games he was linking up with Holtby. So why would you 1) sell him for a quick buck 2) loan out the creative player assisting him. This inevitably meant that we would have limited options for rotation.Rose nearly picked up an injury on thursday, imagine a back 4 of
NAUGHTON VERTONGHEN DAWSON FRYERS for the next couple of games. with ZERO cover since chiriches, walker ,kaboul and capoue are injured.

How the hell will you compete in either competition with that back 4. It is mutually exclusive, we need to prioritize one right now. If its europe then say ef champions league, if its champions league then eff Europa.


Travel distance
Is travelling to italy,spain and germany, the same as treking all the way to Maldova ,Russia and Ukraine?. Who here can run a marathon sunday, hop on a plane to eastern europe thursday and then come back again and be expected to run a marathon sunday without no drop in his energy levels?, it's a joke.


The evidence

2013-14
Played tblisi at WHL on thursday, lost to Woolwich on sunday
Played in moscow on thursday, lost to west ham on sunday
Played Sheriff on thursday, lost to Newcastle on sunday
Played Dnipro thursday, lost to Norwich on sunday

consequences

We should have beaten Westham, Norwich and Newcastle. This would firmly put us in the race for top 4 even the title race.Absurd but realistic given the data.

2012-13

Played Maribor on thursday, lost to chelsea on sunday
Played panathinaikos thursday ,lost to everton sunday
played internationale thursdsay lost to liverpool on sunday
plated internationale thursday (120 minutes) lost to fulham on sunday

consequence
Loss of 12 points . Including injuries caused by Europa could be as high as 18 but lets give the europa the benefit of the doubt ,at minimum cost us 10 points.Without Europa we would have finished SECOND on 82 points, speculative but believable given the resuts and stats.


CONLUSION

Rather than spouting nonsense about a lack of passion, heart and desire. Lets just get to the fckin basics here. Its about burn out. How can we improve this. better training?, nutrition, rotation?. Sports professionals take their preparation very seriously ,do the coaching staff as spurs?

And for the record, I am not against Europa but we need to be sensible about it. We can't keep repeating the same shit year after year and then acting clueless as to why performance dips on sunday.
 
Half the time I think it's a ready excuse for the players to perform badly after playing away in Europe.
 
We finished 5th in 2005-2006.
We played in the Europa in 2006-2007.
In the games following the 12 Europa cup matches we W11, D3 & L1.
The single loss was to Chelsea away.
We didn't rotate the players.
We finished 5th.


In the 9 post Europa games this season we have W3 D1 L5.
We are in 5th
We are rotating the players.

Fuck knows what that all means.
 
Nutter-Naylor said:
We finished 5th in 2005-2006.
We played in the Europa in 2006-2007.
In the games following the 12 Europa cup matches we W11, D3 & L1.
The single loss was to Chelsea away.
We didn't rotate the players.
We finished 5th.


In the 9 post Europa games this season we have W3 D1 L5.
We are in 5th
We are rotating the players.

Fuck knows what that all means.
Click to expand...

That was a fun time filled with the wonder of no expectations whatsoever. Fucking loved that time.
 
Nutter-Naylor said:
We finished 5th in 2005-2006.
We played in the Europa in 2006-2007.
In the games following the 12 Europa cup matches we W11, D3 & L1.
The single loss was to Chelsea away.
We didn't rotate the players.
We finished 5th.


In the 9 post Europa games this season we have W3 D1 L5.
We are in 5th
We are rotating the players.

Fuck knows what that all means.
Click to expand...
That is interesting, thanks for that. I think it might be because smaller teams in the last 1 or 2 years are much more likely to set themselves up in a more organised fashion and play negatively to ensure any result. They're also more likely to do that to us recently given our growth in stature since 2007.
 
Nutter-Naylor said:
We finished 5th in 2005-2006.
We played in the Europa in 2006-2007.
In the games following the 12 Europa cup matches we W11, D3 & L1.
The single loss was to Chelsea away.
We didn't rotate the players.
We finished 5th.


In the 9 post Europa games this season we have W3 D1 L5.
We are in 5th
We are rotating the players.

Fuck knows what that all means.
Click to expand...


Perhaps it is the travelling that matters - that season we played away at Slavia Prague, Besiktas, Bayer Leverkusen, got a bye against Feyernord, Sporting Braga and Sevilla.

The average distance travelled per game compared to this year must be ridiculous!

And ironically the reason we're playing further afield is our Seeding is higher.........our previous success might actually be harming our PL form.
 
Blanchflower said:
Perhaps it is the travelling that matters - that season we played away at Slavia Prague, Besiktas, Bayer Leverkusen, got a bye against Feyernord, Sporting Braga and Sevilla.

The average distance travelled per game compared to this year must be ridiculous!

And ironically the reason we're playing further afield is our Seeding is higher.........our previous success might actually be harming our PL form.
Click to expand...

Haha, I thought so. Germany, Turkey, Netherlands, Spain and Portugal. Champions league like destinations. Not **** Georgia,Maldova, Norway, Russia and Ukraine.
 
We won 7 out of 10 and some of those were wins we had to grind out, Europa returns and Norwich sinks us. Were they lazy in the last 10 premier league games. Is Adebayor lazy yet an article suggests he has been playing through injury?
 
Nutter-Naylor said:
We finished 5th in 2005-2006.
We played in the Europa in 2006-2007.
In the games following the 12 Europa cup matches we W11, D3 & L1.
The single loss was to Chelsea away.
We didn't rotate the players.
We finished 5th.


In the 9 post Europa games this season we have W3 D1 L5.
We are in 5th
We are rotating the players.

Fuck knows what that all means.
Click to expand...

so starting 7 out of 11 players who started thursday is rotating players .Meanwhile Snograss is galloping for joy at our defence
 
Ultimately spursy that we probably got given some of the furthest and most remote place to travel in the whole competition. Even after getting through the groups we had to go to Ukraine.
 
trifficTotnum said:
We won 7 out of 10 and some of those were wins we had to grind out, Europa returns and Norwich sinks us. Were they lazy in the last 10 premier league games. Is Adebayor lazy yet an article suggests he has been playing through injury?
Click to expand...


I'd like to give him the benefit of doubt.......but he's quite consistently shown over the years he can be very lazy at times
 
The Europa league is a clear Burden to our season. But it is
Nutter-Naylor said:
We finished 5th in 2005-2006.
We played in the Europa in 2006-2007.
In the games following the 12 Europa cup matches we W11, D3 & L1.
The single loss was to Chelsea away.
We didn't rotate the players.
We finished 5th.


In the 9 post Europa games this season we have W3 D1 L5.
We are in 5th
We are rotating the players.

Fuck knows what that all means.
Click to expand...

Don't rotate.

We should sell the entire squad. And buy 11 mint players. Have no others.
 
When i have have been on a plane i get my head down for an hour.It is not like they are going to australia and back its 4 hours on a plane to Turkey or the Ukraine. Fans Travel up and down the country on a weekend on a coach longer after working all week . For the Money some of the players at the club are on i would catch a plane everyday.The bottom line is some are overrated and not good enough.Also if we were not in Europa it would be no fun for the fans and away days out.
 
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