Yes, but that was strategic. It would have made firing Mourinho more difficult if he went out and won a trophy. He had to be stopped before he won some hardware.
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Management Nuno out
- Thread starter SausageVince
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I don't know
He'd do no better with the shit sandwich Nuno's dealing with.
Yeah after Mourinho I think we really have to face the fact that the problem isn't the squad, it's everything above it.
The problem is Daniel Fucking Levy and the Circus that is the admin of Tottenham Hotspur.
Who's in charge of players now? Paratici? Hitchens? Both? Do they still have to get Levy's ok? Who ended up killing the Tomiyasu deal?
These are the questions that have to be asked.
Again, I never thought Nuno was right for the job, but the job right now isn't to manage a football squad, it's to manage the owner and his ridiculous aspirations on a shoe string budget.
Rose colored glasses apparently also hide the smell of shit.
What I mean is they was so bothered about building a world class stadium that they can hold such events but not interested in building a world class team to put into that stadium. New whl has been built for the same reasons new Wembley has and it's to make money for the owners not for the team or the fans.
No idea why he changed tactics when after both chavs game and wolves in cop he said there were positives we could take from those games and build on that? For some reason he ditched the good things from those games and didn’t even revert to type as we certainly didn’t play on the counter and we weren’t even solid and hard to break down. Especially when you have players left upfeld basically all in line with goons back line.
That’s debatable but my point still stands, our tactical
Approach was on Nuno. He wanted them to long ball it and vacate midfield, they followed his instructions
Are you saying that Brighton’s squad is better than ours then? Or could it just be that Potter has them playing together with tactics to suit the strengths and weaknesses of the team- something Nuno seems incapable of
Why? Never thought he was the right person for the job and I wanted him to prove me wrong but he is much worse than I could have imagined. The fact is we could easily be on1 point this season. We do not look like we are attempting to do anything as a team.
Levy has once again proved how inept he is, We had all the signs not to let Paratici choose the manager from the two he chose at Juventus neither lasted more than a year. Levy made promises last season about Spurs DNA then he chose to hire a defensive manager. We have Roger Loyd Pack’s voice speak before every home game what it means to be Spurs before every game in the We are Tottenham video and for the last two seasons I have not seen it. The fact is we are chore to watch now days and have no style or patterns of play. Levy Out. Nuno Out. Paratici Out. Enic Out.
The difference between the Mourinho patch and the Nuno patch was that we actually did close out those games against City and Woolwich that we won. Neither of them really troubled us, the team was set up in a shape and it performed its tasks well. It wasn't great to watch but it was deliberate.
First 20 minutes this season against City we were all over the show. Pulled in every direction and didn't see the punches coming. Wolves utterly battered us. If it was a boxing match it would have been a 7+ point unanimous win. We were clinging on for dear life. Also like to say how good Wolves looked, their fans have some hope that performances will eventually lead to results...
Watford was a dull match. They seemed afraid of us and that's why they lost. 1 goal from open play. One accidental free kick. 1 penalty.
The amount of chances missed by City and Wolves were scary but there were fans on this forum acting as though it was the resurgence of Dier and Sanchez that caused it.
I know someone else is adament now that it's the midfield and to a large extent, I agree too. It can be both.
What was evident to me under Mourinho was that he knew the defence was weak so he consequently deployed midfielders to try and reinforce it. They sat deep and made it a back 6 at times.
Nuno doesn't seem to have seen it and there's holes all over the place.
That said, if you have intelligent centre backs with positional awareness and full backs who are athletic enough to get back when needed, the midfield can be a little more adventurous and we'd see some better football.
So Nuno has no clue.
The defence is appalling.
The midfield isn't operating properly and the attack is cut off.
100% agree
Agree but there’s another very important differentiator - the club is broader than the first 11. I strongly believe our non football staff are fractured from top to bottom. Yesterday’s Telegraph alluded to it, don’t underestimate the impact of that the overall vibe - couple that with snakes like Paratici and that bald scout divkhead scrambling to save their jobs and undermine the manager and it’s toxic. Brighton is the opposite
Well why the fuck dont winks, dier, dele, davies etc just quit the club so?
Seriously though your right and tbh apart from hugo, son do the fans respect any of the players we have at the moment?
Gutless, mentally weak players
I’m not saying whether he should or shouldn’t, I’m just saying that nobody is getting sacked after only six games, particularly if he’s won half of them.
Brighton squad are mentally stronger. Let's not underestimate that.
yes won half but thrashed in the other half
Losing a derby is one thing, but losing one like this is something else.
This was a first-half performance so disastrously awful, so utterly abject in every possible way, that it has to prompt a list of questions about how things have come to this. How could it be so easy for Woolwich to cut through Tottenham at every opportunity? What were the Spurs players trying to do on the pitch? How much credibility and authority does Nuno Espirito Santo have as Tottenham head coach? And how deep are the problems that led Tottenham to this point?
It was only Son Heung-min’s goal that stopped this from being Spurs’ third straight 3-0 defeat in the Premier League. The loss to Chelsea last Sunday did at least see Spurs put in a creditable first-half performance, which felt like a platform to build from. This was the opposite. If the first half against Chelsea was enough to make you optimistic about Spurs’ direction under Nuno, the opening 45 minutes here were so bad that it can only prompt waves of pessimism.
One of the many reasons this was so exasperating was that Tottenham did come into this game with a sense that they finally had a plan for playing bold, attacking football. The first halves against Chelsea and Wolves last week did at least provide a blueprint: 4-3-3, pressing from the front, Tanguy Ndombele back in the team. It even felt as if the Nuno reign at Tottenham might turn out to be fun. That idea looks rather ridiculous now.
If the Chelsea first half was all about energy, teamwork, commitment and application of a plan, none of those qualities was on show here. Tottenham looked lost, like a group of players who had never shared a pitch together before. The midfield was non-existent and it was laughably easy for Martin Odegaard to pick up the ball between Spurs’ lines or for Woolwich’s entire attack to slice through Spurs on the break. Yes, Spurs stabilised in the second half, should have had a penalty and did eventually score a goal, but none of that should distract us from the real story here, which was Spurs’ appalling first-half no-show.
So whose fault was it? Nuno insisted in his post-match press conference that he took responsibility and that the problem stemmed from “decisions” that he made. He did not sound at all happy with his players and said in his Sky Sports interview that there were “individuals who did not play the game plan right”. No Spurs player played well and there were plenty of individual mistakes that contributed to Woolwich’s overwhelming dominance and superiority.
Spurs have looked very poor in recent games but the malaise goes back further (Photo: Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
Each player is responsible for his own performance but when every player plays badly it has to be down to the coach. And as the execution of Nuno’s game plan went so drastically wrong, it makes you wonder how much the players really believed in the plan that Nuno sent them out with. Watching the Spurs players stumble their way through that catastrophic first half, they did not look like a team who had any faith or even comprehension of what the manager had asked them to do. This was only Nuno’s sixth league game in charge of Spurs but it felt more like the type of defeat that comes towards the end of a manager’s spell, rather than at the start. You would have to go back to some of the worst moments at the end of the Mauricio Pochettino or Jose Mourinho tenures — the 3-0 defeat at Brighton in October 2019 springs to mind — to come up with a performance as bad as this.
After a run like this — Crystal Palace, Chelsea and now Woolwich — it is only natural to ask what direction Tottenham are heading in. The argument for Nuno when Tottenham appointed him was that he could be a stabilising force, who would get Spurs fitter, more disciplined, better organised and, crucially, difficult to beat. But how fit have Tottenham looked in the last few weeks? How disciplined? How well organised? And — as Woolwich cut them to pieces this afternoon — how difficult to beat?
During those three league wins at the start of the season it was easy to forget — or at least to put to one side — the reality of how and why Nuno got this job. Nuno was appointed, remember, at the end of a 10-week search for Mourinho’s replacement. Nuno had initially been discarded as an option when he left Wolves because he did not fit with Daniel Levy’s vision for Spurs’ footballing “DNA”. Tottenham tried and failed to appoint Hansi Flick, Mauricio Pochettino and Antonio Conte and pulled out of moves for Paulo Fonseca and Gennaro Gattuso before finally giving Nuno the job just days before the players returned for pre-season. Being so far down the club’s list can only undermine a manager’s credibility, and today Nuno did look like an appointment of last resort.
Flick was in the stands here, alongside his assistant with the German national team, Danny Rohl. It was tempting to wonder whether Tottenham would be in better shape had they succeeded in tempting him to take over at Spurs when he left Bayern Munich. Spurs tried hard to get Flick (and Rohl) in late April and early May before he eventually decided to take the Germany job. Flick would at least have fulfilled Levy’s famous promise to the fans to bring back “free-flowing, attacking and entertaining” football. Who knows how the results would have gone, but they would hardly have been worse than this one.
Nuno is not to blame for the circumstances in which he got the job, but he is likely to eventually become a victim of them. He only has a two-year deal at Tottenham and if there are many more games like this one it makes it less likely that he will even see in his second season here.
We will not know for a while whether this was a nadir in the Nuno era or just another step in the wrong direction. But we do know that this is a marker in Tottenham’s recent struggles. They have only registered one league win at the Emirates, and 3-2 that victory came 10 years ago. In Nuno’s defence, Tottenham’s decline started long before he got the job.
Pochettino wanted to cash in on Rose but Levy did not (Photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
If you are looking for root causes for an afternoon like this, you can go back much further than the 72 days between Mourinho’s dismissal and Nuno’s appointment. You could look at the decision to replace Pochettino with Mourinho almost two years ago, when Daniel Levy decided to get rid of Spurs’ best manager for a generation to replace him with someone whose best days were behind him. You could look at the misjudgements in the transfer market in recent years, the lack of creativity in midfield or quality in defence.
Or you could go further back to those peak Pochettino years when the manager knew that he needed a clear-out of players to refresh the team. Maybe if Danny Rose, Dele Alli, Toby Alderweireld and Christian Eriksen had been sold at the right time for the right money then Pochettino would have been able to rejuvenate the squad and go again. He might even still be there now.
The point is that Sunday afternoon’s mess was long in the making. Tottenham, in a sense, had been building up to something like this for a while. Nuno has walked into a difficult situation not of his own making here. He is certainly not the only problem here. Although that does not necessarily mean he is the solution either.
theathletic.com
This was a first-half performance so disastrously awful, so utterly abject in every possible way, that it has to prompt a list of questions about how things have come to this. How could it be so easy for Woolwich to cut through Tottenham at every opportunity? What were the Spurs players trying to do on the pitch? How much credibility and authority does Nuno Espirito Santo have as Tottenham head coach? And how deep are the problems that led Tottenham to this point?
It was only Son Heung-min’s goal that stopped this from being Spurs’ third straight 3-0 defeat in the Premier League. The loss to Chelsea last Sunday did at least see Spurs put in a creditable first-half performance, which felt like a platform to build from. This was the opposite. If the first half against Chelsea was enough to make you optimistic about Spurs’ direction under Nuno, the opening 45 minutes here were so bad that it can only prompt waves of pessimism.
One of the many reasons this was so exasperating was that Tottenham did come into this game with a sense that they finally had a plan for playing bold, attacking football. The first halves against Chelsea and Wolves last week did at least provide a blueprint: 4-3-3, pressing from the front, Tanguy Ndombele back in the team. It even felt as if the Nuno reign at Tottenham might turn out to be fun. That idea looks rather ridiculous now.
If the Chelsea first half was all about energy, teamwork, commitment and application of a plan, none of those qualities was on show here. Tottenham looked lost, like a group of players who had never shared a pitch together before. The midfield was non-existent and it was laughably easy for Martin Odegaard to pick up the ball between Spurs’ lines or for Woolwich’s entire attack to slice through Spurs on the break. Yes, Spurs stabilised in the second half, should have had a penalty and did eventually score a goal, but none of that should distract us from the real story here, which was Spurs’ appalling first-half no-show.
So whose fault was it? Nuno insisted in his post-match press conference that he took responsibility and that the problem stemmed from “decisions” that he made. He did not sound at all happy with his players and said in his Sky Sports interview that there were “individuals who did not play the game plan right”. No Spurs player played well and there were plenty of individual mistakes that contributed to Woolwich’s overwhelming dominance and superiority.
Spurs have looked very poor in recent games but the malaise goes back further (Photo: Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
Each player is responsible for his own performance but when every player plays badly it has to be down to the coach. And as the execution of Nuno’s game plan went so drastically wrong, it makes you wonder how much the players really believed in the plan that Nuno sent them out with. Watching the Spurs players stumble their way through that catastrophic first half, they did not look like a team who had any faith or even comprehension of what the manager had asked them to do. This was only Nuno’s sixth league game in charge of Spurs but it felt more like the type of defeat that comes towards the end of a manager’s spell, rather than at the start. You would have to go back to some of the worst moments at the end of the Mauricio Pochettino or Jose Mourinho tenures — the 3-0 defeat at Brighton in October 2019 springs to mind — to come up with a performance as bad as this.
After a run like this — Crystal Palace, Chelsea and now Woolwich — it is only natural to ask what direction Tottenham are heading in. The argument for Nuno when Tottenham appointed him was that he could be a stabilising force, who would get Spurs fitter, more disciplined, better organised and, crucially, difficult to beat. But how fit have Tottenham looked in the last few weeks? How disciplined? How well organised? And — as Woolwich cut them to pieces this afternoon — how difficult to beat?
During those three league wins at the start of the season it was easy to forget — or at least to put to one side — the reality of how and why Nuno got this job. Nuno was appointed, remember, at the end of a 10-week search for Mourinho’s replacement. Nuno had initially been discarded as an option when he left Wolves because he did not fit with Daniel Levy’s vision for Spurs’ footballing “DNA”. Tottenham tried and failed to appoint Hansi Flick, Mauricio Pochettino and Antonio Conte and pulled out of moves for Paulo Fonseca and Gennaro Gattuso before finally giving Nuno the job just days before the players returned for pre-season. Being so far down the club’s list can only undermine a manager’s credibility, and today Nuno did look like an appointment of last resort.
Flick was in the stands here, alongside his assistant with the German national team, Danny Rohl. It was tempting to wonder whether Tottenham would be in better shape had they succeeded in tempting him to take over at Spurs when he left Bayern Munich. Spurs tried hard to get Flick (and Rohl) in late April and early May before he eventually decided to take the Germany job. Flick would at least have fulfilled Levy’s famous promise to the fans to bring back “free-flowing, attacking and entertaining” football. Who knows how the results would have gone, but they would hardly have been worse than this one.
Nuno is not to blame for the circumstances in which he got the job, but he is likely to eventually become a victim of them. He only has a two-year deal at Tottenham and if there are many more games like this one it makes it less likely that he will even see in his second season here.
We will not know for a while whether this was a nadir in the Nuno era or just another step in the wrong direction. But we do know that this is a marker in Tottenham’s recent struggles. They have only registered one league win at the Emirates, and 3-2 that victory came 10 years ago. In Nuno’s defence, Tottenham’s decline started long before he got the job.
Pochettino wanted to cash in on Rose but Levy did not (Photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
If you are looking for root causes for an afternoon like this, you can go back much further than the 72 days between Mourinho’s dismissal and Nuno’s appointment. You could look at the decision to replace Pochettino with Mourinho almost two years ago, when Daniel Levy decided to get rid of Spurs’ best manager for a generation to replace him with someone whose best days were behind him. You could look at the misjudgements in the transfer market in recent years, the lack of creativity in midfield or quality in defence.
Or you could go further back to those peak Pochettino years when the manager knew that he needed a clear-out of players to refresh the team. Maybe if Danny Rose, Dele Alli, Toby Alderweireld and Christian Eriksen had been sold at the right time for the right money then Pochettino would have been able to rejuvenate the squad and go again. He might even still be there now.
The point is that Sunday afternoon’s mess was long in the making. Tottenham, in a sense, had been building up to something like this for a while. Nuno has walked into a difficult situation not of his own making here. He is certainly not the only problem here. Although that does not necessarily mean he is the solution either.
Tottenham’s capitulation was years in the making. And raises questions for Nuno and Levy
Levy not rebuilding the squad, the Mourinho failed experiment and now Nuno's tactical weakness all played a part in defeat by Woolwich
theathletic.com
Scraped half of them those wins could have easily been losses
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