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Player Archie Gray
- Thread starter The Fighting Cock
- Start date
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Why are you still watching Spurs this season? Or at all?
Call him Yang-Hoek Chung and he'd also be a marketing goldmine!
Why do I need to deny material reality like you to watch Spurs? You’re aware that lower league fans who lose every single week still watch their team right? Most of them aren’t utterly fucking off their face like you and pretending they secretly have a goldmine of talent.
We mostly have crap players. That’s why we finished 17th last year and will probably go down this year. Gray is mature & well rounded for his age but I doubt he’ll be a superstar. Of course you could be right but then you think the same of half the squad.
I mean, you literally just spew hate and derision at anyone who doesn’t spew hate.
Why ?
Hate not so much, but your positions generally deserve derision. They’re based on some weird footballing ideology rather than any actual observations or thought process. We’re about to get relegated and you’re spending your time telling anyone who will listen that the players are mostly secretly great and even the manager is good as well.
It goes against any sort of objective truth or anything anyone can actually see with their eyes, because you based it all on a position of default ultra optimism. Which is fine in the stands but going to be called out as totally stupid on a discussion board. Like footballs answer to a CCP propaganda bot.
He touched the ball 9 times in the first half against AM. That's not passes, it's touches. IN CM. He can't take the ball under press, but he's supposed to be an elite midfielder in the making. His passing is ordinary. He's not shown any ability to carry the ball through lines either. And without the ball he's pretty meh too. he ended up completing 22 passes in the whole game. Even Papp Meh Sarr managed 56.
Shadydan
too.Rather than go after people pointing stuff like this out, why not put up a valid argument. Are you seeing him do those things well? consistently?
We've got some deeply flawed midfielders at this club and have for the last few years, how come he's getting hardly any starts there? Even in an injury crisis?
If you don’t think you post Spurs hate in every post, I don’t know what to tell you tbh but you obviously do know that’s what you do.
Why ?
Tudor somehow decided Sarr was the deeper of the CMs tasked with coming to get the ball off the CBs. The failure to progress the ball isn’t on Gray. And tbh the midfield dysfunction dates back to Frank who effectively brainwashed an entire squad to never play through the middle.He touched the ball 9 times in the first half against AM. That's not passes, it's touches. IN CM. He can't take the ball under press, but he's supposed to be an elite midfielder in the making. His passing is ordinary. He's not shown any ability to carry the ball through lines either. And without the ball he's pretty meh too. he ended up completing 22 passes in the whole game. Even Papp Meh Sarr managed 56.
Rather than go after people pointing stuff like this out, why not put up a valid argument. Are you seeing him do those things well? consistently?
We've got some deeply flawed midfielders at this club and have for the last few years, how come he's getting hardly any starts there? Even in an injury crisis?
Your last question was serious? He’s not been getting starts in midfield during an injury crisis BECAUSE we’re in a fucking injury crisis and he’s the only one that can play either FB. The moment another FB was available, he started CM and played 90min
Were you fucking serious?
Like I said, some utter bollox posted in this thread, as per
My read on it is they bought him thinking they could kill 2 birds with 1 stone. He could be our future 6 and, while developing, also provide cover for Porro at RB. 2 high priority positions sorted with 1 shrewd signing.
Problem is it turns out he's not got the skill-set to be a 6 but is more of an 8...and Bergvall who I think they profiled as a potential 10 is also more of an 8. And that's on top of Sarr who, surprise surprise, is more of box-to-box guy too.
So we were drowning in box-to-box mids and then for some insane reason we compounded the issue by buying Gallagher of all people.
It's dodgy profiling by the recruitment team across the board.
First half it was a double pivot so both midfielders had responsibility for moving the ball. I’m mean Gray had responsibility for doing something, right? But he did nothing and spent the whole half hiding from the ball.
The only possible future for Gray I could see is as a 6 but I’ve seen nothing from him positionally, defensively or athletically to suggest he’s going to excel it that either and we’d have to take it on trust because we’ve never seen him play there, probably for those reasons.
Tell me what you think he excels at and how that relates to a positional remit?
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He's got all the athletic and physical qualities one would want for the 6 position. What he needs is a long spell playing there so he can settle into the type of passing and running game that would be expected of him in that position. He's barely played there for us and has nothing to build upon. We are failing him massively by not putting him in the right situation to grow.
I don’t think failing is the right word. We are giving him more first team minutes than almost any other big club, because we’re so shit.
Do you think he would even get near starting for any top team? I’d say he’s played far more first team football here than he would at a better team. You might say that’s failing him, I think he’s probably quite happy with the amount he’s played.
We're giving him minutes at the wrong positions though. He's not a RWB. He's ok as a double pivot 6/8. He really needs to be developed as a pure CDM 6 though, located centrally- not playing in a double pivot. He can be a marauding 8 flanking a 6 also, but for some dumb reason we won't play 4-3-3 even though it maybe produced our best results in the first (?) game of the season (Bergvall and Gray flanking Palhinha).
The other problem is our senior players don't really trust the younger players on the ball, and he is often bypassed in open play. That's a coaching problem, and is utterly sinful, and our coaches need to be better than to allow the senior players to persist with that shit.
Mate we all get things wrong from time to time. Like, perhaps, when you said this about Frank:
We all get a little bit excited when things seem to be going our way. Right now Archie Gray is the one ray of light on an otherwise shit sandwich. It's no wonder some people (including myself) are projecting all our hopes onto him. There's fuck all else to be excited about right now.
There’s a huge difference between getting things wrong from time to time & pivoting from claiming one young player is the next huge thing to the next just by virtue of playing for Spurs. There’s a point where it’s obvious there’s no reasoning behind it, it’s just he is a Spurs player and young, therefore has great potential. I don’t criticise other people for getting things wrong because their working out was entirely sane. That’s the fucking difference.
I’m not turning this in to another Ange thread but despite me viewing you as massively blinkered on him I can see you do logic and working out & you’re not just basing it on Ange was Spurs therefore Ange great.
There's certainly not much "logic" about my feelings about Archie Gray. I pretty much agree with
bus-conductor
's assessment and yet... and yet... I just think the kid's got something. I'm just not sure how to quantify it because there's no attribute he possesses that I can point to and say "that's elite". So I totally get the frustration.