I think bringing on Huddlestone and him spreading the play shows we are at least looking to address beating teams who put 10 men behind the ball.
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Here is a link to the current PDO table. It really is shocking we rate in the bottom 3 in both shot% and save% and have the worst luck in the entire league. One can say it's bad luck or it has been poor finishing.
In the past 10-12 years every side in the English top division with a PDO around 900 has only earned 30-40 points at the end of the season. That tells you all you need to know.
PDO Table Link
Probably. Everton won't roll over for them but they are in good form and even the shit players they have winning games for them.
It's about finishing top4 though, we might not have to beat Woolwich to achieve that. Chelsea's run looks hairy to me, while I concede that Scum is looking like favourites at the moment for 3rd.
I like the thread btw, good read! I will update my own thread once I get back home from London.
Next weekend Woolwich have two games vs Norwich and Everton. With 6 points they would be 4 points ahead with one more game played. Chelsea face a tough away fixture vs Fulham.
The round after we have City at home which is hard, but Woolwich have a difficult task to get all three points at Fulham and Chelsea should struggle to win vs Pool away.
The last round in April we and Chelsea have the 'easier' fixtures as we meet Wigan and Chelsea have Swansea at home. Woolwich face United.
I can see it being quite close after these games and after this we have 'easier' games coming up, apart from Chelsea we've got Southampton, Stoke and Sunderland. Chelsea got us, Everton, Villa, United which are, apart from Villa really hard games. Woolwich have only three games left by then, one 'easier' fixtures vs Wigan, one possible banana skin vs QPR and a really hard game in the last game of the season, away to Newcastle.
This will be a rollercoaster...so Come On You Spurs!
Next weekend Woolwich have two games vs Norwich and Everton. With 6 points they would be 4 points ahead with one more game played. Chelsea face a tough away fixture vs Fulham.
The round after we have City at home which is hard, but Woolwich have a difficult task to get all three points at Fulham and Chelsea should struggle to win vs Pool away.
The last round in April we and Chelsea have the 'easier' fixtures as we meet Wigan and Chelsea have Swansea at home. Woolwich face United.
I can see it being quite close after these games and after this we have 'easier' games coming up, apart from Chelsea we've got Southampton, Stoke and Sunderland. Chelsea got us, Everton, Villa, United which are, apart from Villa really hard games. Woolwich have only three games left by then, one 'easier' fixtures vs Wigan, one possible banana skin vs QPR and a really hard game in the last game of the season, away to Newcastle.
This will be a rollercoaster...so Come On You Spurs!
Still, i think we will need at least 71-72 points to finish in the top four.
You may well be right. At the moment it's impossible to call either way.
Would have made more sense to start the game with Hudd surely then?
Perhaps, but when we went a goal down, that was a logical switch to change our approach. Starting with Hudd might not have had the same impact.
This is by far the most important part of all that for me, as football is played by human's.
A graph will not show how mentally fragile we could become with last season in mind.
Or how much confidence the Scum will have now that 4th (at our expense) is in their hands.
I think it shows more that we had know one else better to bring on.
CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
note: this is the only remaining bit of information I can conjur out of my brain from the one statistics class I took, at least 15 years ago. i have no idea if it even pertains to the data presented which i should state the length of which i found prohibitive from a time perspective and therefore did not actually peruse. also of note, i employed capitalization in an attempt to strengthen my argument.
note: this is the only remaining bit of information I can conjur out of my brain from the one statistics class I took, at least 15 years ago. i have no idea if it even pertains to the data presented which i should state the length of which i found prohibitive from a time perspective and therefore did not actually peruse. also of note, i employed capitalization in an attempt to strengthen my argument.
Well, no, but the point is well taken and worth keeping in mind in general.
If I can be a bit of a narcissist for a second (wait… who's going to stop me?), I'll say that one of my goals is to disabuse Spurs fans that there's something "so typically Spurs" about things that happen to our club. This forum is, on the whole, a pleasant break from that kind of mentality, but we all can imagine someone like Mike Leigh saying, "It's just so Spurs to cock it up at the end/to score too soon/to throw away a lead over Woolwich"… Those sorts of comments irritate me to no end because they're so obviously testable, yet the people spouting such opinions make no effort to actually test them.
The only thing that's "so typically Spurs" about our side is that it is made up largely of inexpensive players who are playing at a level that is commensurate with clubs that have more expensive rosters. That is, I do think that there's a certain amount of correlation between price of squad and points in the league (though I'm too lazy to test that myself--let's say it's a hypothesis!). This means that for Spurs to play at an elite (3.5th place, say), they will either have to spend lots of money or capture lightning in a bottle. For the most part, we make do with the latter…
So I don't think it's "so typically Spurs" to swoon late or to be plagued with injuries (something I've tackled elsewhere here). And the former is what I tried to indicate with this thread. Yes, we've got four points in four matches after a run of four (or five?) victories in a row. But I've also tried to show that of the indicators we have available—possession, shooting, and goals—none indicate a drop in form. Now there's famously "no" correlation between possession and winning (see Inverting the Pyramid), but I do think that when Spurs are playing they way they want to, they also win the possession battle, because they are recycling the ball into attacking positions, which takes time and equals more possession. So in that case, possession is merely correlated, but not causing, goals/victories. Since our possession hasn't changed much, it's hard to say we've been underperfoming or something in the past four matches in a way to suggest a multi-match "swoon".
Shooting, well… we've been shooting less lately. And that could suggest why we're not winning. But our goal rate remains the same as it was during our good days. So the lack of shooting isn't resulting in fewer goals, which suggests that there's no correlation between shooting and winning (especially since the fall in shooting had already started when we were still stomping all over the league).
Which means it's simply something else that's caused this hiccup. And I think that something else is this: Spurs are a team that wins 2–1. That's what we do. We score first (and often early), then score a second and concede late or do the opposite. Consider how many of our clean sheets were also 0–0 draws… we're just not terribly good at shutting down other sides. Of course, neither are our rival clubs, but they're more likely to win 3–1 or so (I'm speculating).
And that narrative works rather well to explain what happened recently: Anfield away was a 2–1 match with two outlandishly freakish goals (imo). I fully agree with the TFC podcast crew that the result simply doesn't match how we played. The next two matches I didn't see because of streams/traveling, but they also fit the narrative: one is nailed on 2–1 (Swansea away), and the other was… well… if you average two goals, some days you'll get four and some days you'll get none. And Everton was, again, a tricky bit of business in which we had to play an unfamiliar lineup, etc.
The point is that each match shows unique glitches that are still within the realm of random fluctuation, so it's impossible to draw long-term conclusions from the data we have. I don't think there's anything "so typically Spurs" about Lennon's and Bale's being injured, for example.
The problem with my position is that it can seem a Harryesque "some days are like that" that over-values an independent nature of each match, as though every match was played in complete isolation from the others. I definitely do not think that's the case, and there's absolutely nothing controversial about my saying that… after all, our rosters remain the same!
But even within "on average, Spurs win 2–1", it allows for the variations we've seen the past few weeks. If we had put together four straight matches without a goal, then I'd be more concerned, but for now, we're just doing what we do…