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It's been the pattern since Redknapp's days - apart from Bale during that period we've lacked a world class player who can produce quality moments and unlock such cloggers. We also lack pace on our wings and played very narrow and predictable. This is the kind of game where Lennon would have excelled, imv
Thing is Jan's agent was making noises about Barca being interested, and other top European clubs, which was all total bollocks. We never had any offers. He had a 2 yr option and his contract was going to be either extended or if anyone wanted to pay £18m + (and bettered his wages) he would have been off.
Didn't see what?
Poch's impact
That'll teach 'em! Sure they can have some free goals but they'll be so confused they'll think they've lost!
When Mauricio Pochettino arrived in England, he was greeted first with incredulity and hostility, due to the sacking of the popular Nigel Adkins, and then with a growing warmth as his Southampton side played some of the most fun, attractive football in England.
What many people didn’t realise at the time, however, is that a big part of Pochettino’s success was down to the situation he landed in on England’s south coast.
Pochettino’s system relies on a very specific sort of midfielder. Pochettino’s midfielders must be intelligent, energetic, and confident passers in order to make his system work.
At Southampton he had two such players in Morgan Schneiderlin and the massively under-rated Jack Cork. It is because of those midfielders that Pochettino could implement his system so quickly and could, with such apparent ease, establish Southampton as the best team outside the Sky Seven.
Problem: Who plays the Schneiderlin role for Spurs?
At Spurs, however, there isn’t a single established player in the team who combines those attributes. Etienne Capoue and Mousa Dembele are experienced, hard workers and read the game well, but Capoue is very slow on the ball and Dembele is far too conservative with it.
Consider the two passing charts below. The former is from Schneiderlin in Southampton’s 2-2 draw with Woolwich last January. The second is from Dembele in this past weekend’s Spurs loss to the Baggies.
Against a Champions League side while playing for a mid-table side,Schneiderlin played 45 forward passes, successfully completing 42 of them–many of which went to left-sided forward Jay Rodriguez on the flank in the attacking third.
Against a relegation candidate while playing for one of England’s biggest clubs, Dembele played 17 forward passes, completing 16, most of which went to his fullbacks. (Sebastian Stafford-Bloor has a good piece looking at Dembele’s performance against WBA in more detail.)
Etienne Capoue has been marginally better, but has his own problems with distribution. First, most of his “forward” passes are not the sort of aggressive diagonals that Schneiderlin perfected at Southampton but tend more often to be cross-field balls to the fullbacks.
The chart below, which shows Capoue’s forward passing against Liverpool, is representative. Most of his “forward passes” are only barely forward and the vast majority were going to Danny Rose or Eric Dier rather than Erik Lamela or Nacer Chadli.
Of Capoue’s 53 “forward” passes, few are played into the area where you’d expect the wide forwards rather than the fullbacks to be the recipient.
The other problem with Capoue is that he tends to be a bit more ponderous on the ball. The best way of understanding Capoue may be to see him as a French Tom Huddlestone.
Both players are big-bodied midfielders with decent defensive ability who like to play the ball long but take a bit too much time on the ball when doing so–which is perhaps why Huddlestone, despite being a sublime passer, is playing for Hull and why Capoue was being linked with Cardiff before his unexpected move to Spurs.
Most modern tactical systems require midfielders who can move the ball quickly and these two players, for all their quality in other areas, aren’t particularly adept in that area.
AVB vs Pochettino
The problem behind the problem, of course, is that this is a midfield mostly put together by Andre Villas-Boas, a coach whose style has some overlap with Pochettino but who tends to be less aggressive and more rigid than the Argentine.
In some ways, having a predecessor like AVB means that the squad is already well set up for Pochettino. Hugo Lloris is an ideal keeper for both managers.Jan Vertonghen is an ideal centre back and Erik Lamela, Christian Eriksen and Nacer Chadli are all very good players for both systems.
The one area where Pochettino is hurt by succeeding AVB, however, is in midfield. And unfortunately for Spurs, midfield is the most important part of Pochettino’s system because it is the midfielders who will often be the ones to win the ball back and start the attacks going forward.
Midfielders like Dembele and Capoue are wonderful for Villas-Boas because they are strong, muscular players who shield the back line effectively and don’t give the ball away cheaply. Sandro was also a very good Villas-Boas player for precisely this reason.
Pochettino’s system, in contrast, is less about maintaining a consistent shape and staying organised defensively and is more about aggressively pushing the ball forward, trying to win the ball back as quickly as possible when it is lost, and using a more fluid shape so as to give the players maximum freedom to press when necessary and to attack when in possession.
So while the two midfielders tend to stay deep and central for both managers, their different roles are reflected in the positioning of the front four.
Under AVB it is more rigid and defined. Under Pochettino it is more fluid. Essentially, it’s the difference between a Bielsa disciple who spent years working for Jose Mourinho and a Bielsa disciple who spent years playing for… Bielsa.
What are Tottenham’s options moving forward?
What this means is that there are essentially three possibilities for Spurs:
Unfortunately, this weekend’s North London Derby comes at an inopportune time for Pochettino, as he’ll be reluctant to hand Stambouli his first league start in such a massive fixture.
- First, they don’t figure out their midfield issues and they continue to struggle.
- Second, Dembele or Capoue (or Paulinho) mature under Pochettino’s guidance and become the sort of midfielders required by the system.
- Third, Pochettino turns to his other options in midfield, most probably Nabil Bentaleb and summer signing Benjamin Stambouli–billed as a cheaper version of Schneiderlin when signed. He could also look toward academy graduate Ryan Mason, who featured in Tottenham’s preseason friendlies and scored a corker against Nottingham Forest in the League Cup.
This means that we’ll likely see the Capoue/Dembele pairing again, despite their very poor record thus far. If they do start, Capoue will need to be much quicker on the ball as he was routinely dispossessed in dangerous areas on Spurs’ last league trip to the Emirates.
If he starts this weekend and has a repeat of that performance, it could mean that Stambouli, Bentaleb or even Mason will soon be getting a chance to establish themselves in the Spurs midfield.
I have a problem with cherry-picking of examples in that article. Citing Dembele in the West Brom game is a bit disingenuous, as his partner had just had a baby and he was playing on zero sleep. How did he look against Sunderland? I think that would have been a better comparison. The problem the author identifies is correct though. Pochettino's verticalidad demands very quick forward passes from central midfield, and without them, we don't have a functional attack. We'll see who can deliver them as requested, and if no one does, I expect we'll be finding a couple of people in January who can.
It's what Pochettino calls it. I'm not scared of non-English words.
It'll definitely be emotional - either cream-tastic ecstasy or nuclear meltdown, nothing in between!
With the drama-queen fan base that is Spursdom, it can't be any other way.
