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Management Ange: In/Out?
- Thread starter HarrowCoys
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He's a corporate guy; not a football recruitment guy.
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Ange has risen to where he is by doing this very thing in lower leagues, most recently in Scotland where he had a squad that could easily overpower everyone else he faced. But he will never have that here, not at Spurs, nor at any big club in leagues where the competition is much nearer to you every week than what he's seen before.
We will never have a group of players who can forcibly impose their will on everyone they meet in the PL and in Europe, and physically you can't sustain that type of effort over the number of fixtures there are without having a deep squad which we won't ever have, because the chairman manages the team by the ledger and not by the results.
I don't think City or whomever you'd like to name could be successful over the long term doing what he does, you'd just exhaust everyone, and the results would be random like what we see.
That seems to be the consensus among those who are fond of him. Even if his general outlook on football is crude, even if he's not paying sufficient attention to micromanagement, Xs and Os, preparing for the opposition, working on set pieces and so on, his heart is still in the right place. If he's a little bit eccentric in his ways, so what? Let him establish sound foundations that his successor(s) can build upon. In the meantime, accept the fact that we may finish bottom half, take heavy beatings, and vastly underperform in general. See the bigger picture.
Except I'm not sure how sound these 'foundations' actually are. It seems that he just took some of the modern principles that are becoming common sense -playing out from the back, creating overloads, high defensive line, intense counter press etc- and went overboard with them. To a point where trying to execute them on the pitch does more harm than good.
And anybody questioning the wisdow of this extremism is accused of asking him to turn into a route one park the bus merchant. Ange and someone like Pulis represent the two extreme ends of a wide spectrum. There's a huge middle ground in between.
Except I'm not sure how sound these 'foundations' actually are. It seems that he just took some of the modern principles that are becoming common sense -playing out from the back, creating overloads, high defensive line, intense counter press etc- and went overboard with them. To a point where trying to execute them on the pitch does more harm than good.
And anybody questioning the wisdow of this extremism is accused of asking him to turn into a route one park the bus merchant. Ange and someone like Pulis represent the two extreme ends of a wide spectrum. There's a huge middle ground in between.
I agree Iraola is unlikely to want to come to us in the Summer, especially if he continues his good season. He'll be looking to aim higher than landing with us.
Marco Silva though, pragmatic, tough as nails, gets on with it, not going to bitch or lose heart because Levy didn't fix him up properly, already living and happy in London, already in tune with the idea of a scrappy, underfunded project. I worry we oftentimes disregard known talent "below our level" from the Prem to chase after some foreign unicorn like Ange who doesn't turn out to be quite what we needed after all.
And also think of it this way- we already score a lot of goals- if we can just figure out how to play some organized defense think how successful we could be? How many more goals do we think we're actually going to score? Is it easier for us to score more goals at this point, or to play better defense? And which approach is a more efficient use to energy to generate high point per game totals?
Even City are struggling to perform normally without their Balon D'or talisman Rodri. The cavalier "attack is who we are mate" philosophy is idealistically appealing but practically suicidal. Other astute and aware managers with well drilled squads are able to take advantage of these singularly focused strategies with regularity- a testament to the competitiveness of the league. Ange's strategy is just affording way, way too many big chances, shots, whatever attacking situation stat you want to call it, to our opponents, and that weakness is being exposed in our incredibly inconsistent, but overall poor record.
I think the more disturbing part is how hostile he sounds in press conferences when asked if he might change his principles. It's well past the point of pigheaded absurdity by now. He is actively, emotionally invested in not changing. He says set pieces don't matter, and is wary of substitutions that might help the team too much when they don't deserve it. There are strange games of favorites being played with under-performing players, and other seemingly brilliant players isolated on the fringe. These are simply not the type of outcomes that a real top level coach would produce working in good faith.
The perfect testament to the competitiveness of the Premier League would be Chelsea spending a billion quid and becoming champions again.
The PL is City, the Sky Sports establishment and 1 or 2 small clubs who don't have European football that year maintaining the illusion.
Even with the mega rich teams the league is very competitive.
The perfect testament to the competitiveness of the Premier League would be Chelsea spending a billion quid and becoming champions again.
The PL is City, the Sky Sports establishment and 1 or 2 small clubs who don't have European football that year maintaining the illusion.
Well, lower table Prem still seems to pay more than most of the rest of the continent- for both players as well as coaches. It may not be 'relatively' competitive between Ipswich Town and Chelsea, but it's relatively extremely competitive as a whole, pound for pound, versus any other league.
The perfect testament to the competitiveness of the Premier League would be Chelsea spending a billion quid and becoming champions again.
The PL is City, the Sky Sports establishment and 1 or 2 small clubs who don't have European football that year maintaining the illusion.
I watch a good amount of La Liga and the bottom 17 clubs (all except RM, AM or Barca) there would get creamed week in, week out, by the average lower half Premiership club (of which we currently constitute, btw).
Napoli won Serie A. Come back to me when Everton or Spurs win the PL.
Ok buddy- sorry this got personal for you.
I'm trying to make a point about how ruthless and competitive our league is- naive strategies get found out and abused. Ergo Ange's being stubborn about a naive strategy is going to net hurt us long term.
He could have City level money and still not succeed down here. There is simply too much competition throughout the league for a very, very 1 dimensional manager to succeed.
The league is ruthlessly physical. Every team is packed with athletes and can bully you if you aren't at it physically. Then those teams that do it really well qualify for Europe and can't maintain the physical levels playing twice a week so drop down the table. The clubs with the resources, or the willingness to spend their resources, buy a deep enough squad to maintain the physical levels to compete twice a week. Then there is the recovery protocols and the incentive for doping, which nobody really wants to acknowledge but is almost certainly happening.
I get that the product looks competitive and in a way it is but only to the level that smaller clubs can get wins and finish above bigger clubs. If you really want to challenge the clubs that win the PL, that's a very different story and it's not that competitive at all.
The competitiveness and quality of the Premier League is, quantitatively, a bit of a myth created by Sky.
Which is the point of UEFA's system for awarding the extra CL places, and why the PL missed out.
Serie A, objectively, is probably the most competitive league in the way the old First Division was. Clubs regularly finish toward the top one season and toward the bottom the next. Lazio, Napoli, and even Roma have had brilliant seasons and then fallen back. And they do pretty well in European competitions, as well - hence walking the extra spot race last season.
But their TV contract has always been shit and all their stadiums are dilapidated, so Italian football gets severely underrated.
Did Daniel tell you that before or after cuddles by the fireplace?
Daniel Levy is a billionaire. I'd cuddle him by the fireplace, and then laugh at you plebs from my box seat.
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote there. The only other thing that Serie A doesn't have is exciting football. They don't have the level of athleticism and the pace of the game is slower as a result. I don't watch the prem much these days because I'm sick of being a Spurs fan in the premier league but the drop off in pace and intensity is so stark when you go and watch Serie A or La Liga.
Of course UEFA fucked up the system after just 1 year because a bunch of thick people moaned about it and couldn't understand it.
So now it over values CL performance, which does nothing to actually identify which league has better depth of quality and therefore would provide better additional teams to the CL.
We'll end up with a shite Spanish team in the CL one year just because Madrid and Barca are good and people will be saying "hOw CaN ThIs HApPeN?!?!?!?!?!"
Last year was a bit of a one off wasn’t it? They’re not on it this year and weren’t most other years. When was the last time an Italian team won a European cup? Any European cup.
England just had a serious off year. This season it will walk the 5th spot, which is incredibly Spursy tbh.
Italy are currently safely 2nd and being buffered by Belgium and Portugal between them and Spain. I would expect they will get an extra place again this year.
They got one last year, and would have the year before as well. In my opinion, Italy has overtaken Spain as the 2nd best league. Spain would have gotten an extra place by this system 18-19, 19-20, 20-21 but Spain is heavily buoyed by the same 2 clubs every year where Italy has a more even distribution of quality.
They seem to do reasonably well and have a competitive league without having any elite sides who can win the CL.
Which does make for a more enjoyable league. The prem at peak had city and Liverpool duking it out, two elite sides. But the rest didn’t even get close to touching them.