Yiddi You're being highly selective. So what that we didn't look like we turned up before Royal was wrongly sent off? This is our gameplan and to be honest against Woolwich that was probably the best way to approach the game, they look to dominate a game and press really high and aggressively for the first 20 mins of a game, so you allow for that, play compact, deep and narrow, don't let them in behind, let them blow themselves out and once the press drops then play a different phase of the game. Don't get sucked into the narrative that we have to go all out guns blazing from the opening whistle, it's a 90min game (people are so sucked into this narrative that they think we played like this in the first half yesterday, which just shows how fucking clueless people are - between the two goals we were comfortably the better side - but people talking about that half as us "starting slowly" again, that's bollocks!).
Against Utd we were dogshit and deserved to lose, as at no point in that game did we have any control of the game, from defensive phases, possession and into the attacking third, we were totally outplayed.
Control isn't always about us being on the ball, if we chose not to have it then we are still controlling phases as the oppo isn't getting in behind. An example of this and back to the Woolwich game, we contained them, their only effort was from outside the box from Partey which they scored with. In the margins and percentages of the game that's how we chose to set up and play if they are going to attack them let it be from outside of the box or at worse crowd them out inside the box and make it as low % as possible. The same again when we went to Stamford Bridge, we let them have the ball and they didn't create much (they have issues in this dept), perhaps we showed them too much respect (that's my feeling) but we were worthy of that point.
"Same old Tottenham" - Is just utter bullshit. We've lost just 6 PL games in our last 30! In the manager's 1st season whilst taking over from the worst 2 performing managers, we've had in 20yrs!!
Now, if you have an issue with the aesthetics of our style of play then that's fine to crack on with that. It's not great on the eye (although I thought that wasn't the case yesterday). But I feel there is context to this too, mainly because of the world cup and 3 games per week from almost the get-go. But our record under Conte shows how effective we've been playing this way (the end of last season was better on the eye also)........
The aesthetics of how we play I don't like. I like my teams to have the ball and press high (I'm a full-blown Poch disciple) and my posting history attests to this. I was highly vocal on a) not wanting Jose at Tottenham b) and hated how we played under him because we were shit. However, people putting these two managers in the same bucket are clueless, just look above at the graph in case there is any doubt, Jose is a dinosaur vs Conte is elite and knows exactly what he's doing. (When Conte-ball is clicking it's also very good on the eye, for those transitional phases that is, it will still have a period of control without the ball and those transitions are developed by lots of backward passing as we attempt to draw teams onto us to create the space (but it's a long way off Jose ball).
Yesterday was a good performance and the result didn't reflect the performance, whilst hugely frustrating I'm hugely encouraged about the performance. It's also miles away from any comparison on the other games you mention and even better than the Newcastle performance in which we were the better team on the day.
