Go down the table and tell me how many teams have a shitter group of forward options.
-
The Fighting Cock is a forum for fans of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Here you can discuss Spurs latest matches, our squad, tactics and any transfer news surrounding the club. Registration gives you access to all our forums (including 'Off Topic' discussion) and removes most of the adverts (you can remove them all via an account upgrade). You're here now, you might as well...
Manager Ange Postecoglou
- Thread starter The Fighting Cock
- Start date
Latest Spurs videos from Sky Sports
Go down the table and tell me how many teams have a shitter group of forward options.
When is that quote from? And what’s the full context? He doesn’t ignore defence ..what a load of rubbish
I can do that but its fucking irrelevant because 2/3 of our front three has been assembled by the manager. So "well our forwards suck" isn't a fucking excuse. It may have been an excuse before he got us to spend 65m on a striker or 50 on a winger, its not now. FYI, I actually like Solanke .. he doesn't suck. But at this point if you really hate our forwards you might wanna think "hmm, but are they the kind of forward this manager wants??"
But for funsies:
City - obviously better
Woolwich - Better but there isn't all that much in it. Saka is great, Martinelli SUCKS, Havertz is a more cultured Solanke. I actually think we have better depth, too.
Liverpool - Better than ours 4 sure.
Chelsea - Better but again, the margins are fucking fine, and mainly due to depth. Madueke/Jackson/Sancho is not some brilliant front three which shits all over Son/Solanke/Johnson, they're not stars.
United - Ours are better.
That's from the top six. Of the rest, you take an Isak and Gordon from Newcastle (but they are so, so weak compared to us elsewhere!!) and Kudus/Bowen are fantastic at W'Ham but its a marginal argument.
Our forwards are NOT so far behind the rest that you can consistently place all blame on them, especially not when the coach has hugely influenced them coming in.
Thought we’ve played better in periods of other games than we did against Brentford tbh.
The difference with Brentford was final execution and even then we still have a few levels to reach in terms of ruthlessness.
I’m not saying we are “better than our position in the table”. I’m saying the season is 5 games old so it’s too early to read much.
Q "Teams that win trophies have solid defences as well as attack"?
Ange "Spot on mate but that won't be us ....."
Have our forwards scored more than a bunch of those forward lines as well?
City no but Haaland.
Woolwich? Maybe?
Chelsea probably not but it will be close at the end of the season.
Manager basically admitting that we'll win fuck allQ "Teams that win trophies have solid defences as well as attack"?
Ange "Spot on mate but that won't be us ....."
Fans : "whoop whoop , elite mentality from Big Ange"
Possibly. Chelsea also have Palmer at 10 currently who is legitimately looking like he's on course to be one of the best players in the world .. which helps.
City and Liverpool are the only two clubs who have frontlines who are very notably better than ours. Woolwich have (like us in Son) one top tier attacker, one good one and one underperforming one. Very comparable.
Villa?
Ours aren't better than Utd's. They just look shitter because they play dogshit football every week.
I would think you get quite low down the league with teams fans saying "yeah I'd take the Son, but the rest are dogshit".
I think there's only maybe 5-6 teams in this league who I wouldn't swap at least 2 of theirs for ours.
Son is 32, even if you ignore all the fucking crap he does, sometimes for weeks on end. Our first choice forwards are now Solanke, who might turn out OK, but who fucking knows, he's had one good season at this level, Johnson, who's fucking garbage at anything other than running in a straight line. Our bench is Richarlison, who's shit and always fucking injured, Werner, who's shit, a 16yo academy kid and a 18yo who no one had heard of despite playing last year in the PL.
If Ange said hand picked and expressly requested Johnson, Werner, Odobert then he deserves shit, but I doubt that was the case, we had sniffed Johnson previously and I doubt he'd even heard of Odobert.
Thing is, we've currently got the third best XGA (Expected Goals Against) a fraction behind Liverpool and City. So what ever he says, we are doing something right so far.
What other games? I think against Brentford we played well throughout most of the game, which is better than playing well for 20 mins then shit for 30.
It was more than that.
Yes I agree so maybe you lot will stop spamming those xG stats too.
Yup, can’t really disagree with most of that.
But BC does have a point in that our front line needs to keep improving on execution. It needs to be more than the sum of its parts because we don’t aren’t significantly better individually.
It’s a team sport
That was accidentally quoted to me but just to be sure, NOBODY FUCKING CARES. We've faced Everton, Leicester, Brentford and Woolwich in a game where they were away, had no midfield and decided to completely park the bus and hope for a set piece. Of course our xA against is low, we've not faced a single team who have mounted more than a handful of attacks all fucking game !! Newcastle had 1.61 xG vs us and that was from about 3 attacks.
Villa maybe, but mainly because I really like Watkins. It's definitely (again) VERY arguable and there isn't some big gap in forward quality between Rogers/Watkins/Bailey and what we put out, no fucking way.
They fucking are. Rashford has quality but can't be arsed, Hojlund and Zirkzee are just potential, Antony, Diallo and Garnacho are different shades of meh.
Almost all teams take Son and most teams take Solanke. He is definitively better than most strikers in the league due to current striker drought.
He could be 40, he still outproduces almost all forwards in the league. Solanke cost 65m and Ange literally said the other day I wanted him from day one.
Ange has made very clear he handpicked Johnson and Solanke. I dunno about the rest but they fit his profile in various ways and I doubt we re-sign Werner if he didn't give his approval.
I agree to an extent that the forwards can and should be improved upon but the way you talk about them you'd think they'd all been forced on Ange and that they were champo level.
You don’t like the xG stats or you don’t like that people also use them in combination with other context that points towards performances being better than our results so far?
I don’t think cherrypicked stats alone tell the whole story. Like those people who were posting stats to big Werner up. You could see he’s terrible, but some refused to accept they were wrong.
They aren’t cherry picked though. They are stats from the first 5 games of the season.
The sample size is too small for them to be predictive but if we continue putting those numbers up over a longer period, the odds of them being predictive goes up. That’s how expected stats work.
What do you mean they aren’t cherrypicked? They are, or you think we’re doing good in all stats?
The stats reflect the type of games we've played. A game against Woolwich who parked a double decker, Newcastle who surrender all territory, and three teams who will battle relegation. Two of those at home.
I'd very much expect us so far to average lots of territory and forays in to the oppo box. We've not played a single team who had intent to challenge us for possession. Against Newcastle & Woolwich (the two quality teams we've faced) our xG was not impressive.
Brentford was by far the most lethal we've looked and the best we have been at making use of territory and what we are very good at which is off the ball stuff. That's whilst not really counting Everton, who are biblically shit this season. But that was great too.
People can wave lots of stats around at this point but with this sample size they're so, so devoid of context and so easy to scrutinise.
I mean they aren’t cherry-picked because they aren’t.
I’ve seen pretty comprehensive stat reports shared in here, with Spurs at different points in the ranking so far. None of them give answers because stats give questions not answers but on balance, when you look at the whole picture the expected stats ask the question why we haven’t had better results as opt to how have we managed to get better results despite the stats.
Usually the odds are that results even out to match the expected stats over longer periods with more games in the sample size.