-
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...
Latest Spurs videos from Sky Sports
He is the lord of anti football. And its a choice, not a constraint.
He got Stoke into the league playing Anti football, kept them up playing anti football, then spent a serious amount of money (relative to them of course) and didnt improve the football at all. Just made them a bit better at anti-football rather than had them start playing a bit.
And as Hughes and Martinez have shown, its not actually that dramatic a task to change it around. Hughes has them playing much more football than before (albeit hardly attractive) and I believe has them set for their best ever finish.
I like that Pulis can galvanise and motivate a squad. I like that he is reliable for a certain amount of success (ala BFS) but I dont think he has it in him to make a team play attractive football. He has that old school pragmatism of "get the job done at any cost" and thats all he seems to aim for.
I have tremendous respect for what he has done at Palace though, it reallyis remarkable and IMHO should have him in the running for manager of the season.
He got Stoke into the league playing Anti football, kept them up playing anti football, then spent a serious amount of money (relative to them of course) and didnt improve the football at all. Just made them a bit better at anti-football rather than had them start playing a bit.
And as Hughes and Martinez have shown, its not actually that dramatic a task to change it around. Hughes has them playing much more football than before (albeit hardly attractive) and I believe has them set for their best ever finish.
I like that Pulis can galvanise and motivate a squad. I like that he is reliable for a certain amount of success (ala BFS) but I dont think he has it in him to make a team play attractive football. He has that old school pragmatism of "get the job done at any cost" and thats all he seems to aim for.
I have tremendous respect for what he has done at Palace though, it reallyis remarkable and IMHO should have him in the running for manager of the season.
The jumper tucked in to the trackies look never ages....
fucking hell, fucking hell, seriously, fucking hell
*insert generic comment about how if his name was Toni Pulisio we'd all want him*
This.
Everyone should know by now that spend on transfers is not as important to the quality of incoming player as the amount spent on their wages. We might have spent almost £100m on players last summer but it's £100m on players that know they're not in the £150k+ a week earnings bracket.
Stoke have the 14th highest salary outgoings in the league. The biggest spenders on wages tend to be the top clubs, not the biggest spenders on transfers (wages wise it's City >> Chelsea, Utd > Woolwich > Liverpool >> Spurs in that order and magnitude).
Just for the record, I don't think Pulis would play attacking football. I just think it would be interesting to see him given a punt at a bigger club (again, somewhere other than Spurs)/
Stoke have the 14th highest salary outgoings in the league. The biggest spenders on wages tend to be the top clubs, not the biggest spenders on transfers (wages wise it's City >> Chelsea, Utd > Woolwich > Liverpool >> Spurs in that order and magnitude).
Just for the record, I don't think Pulis would play attacking football. I just think it would be interesting to see him given a punt at a bigger club (again, somewhere other than Spurs)/
Fair enough. Though I was ambivalent about him until I noticed a thread of xenophobia in his comments.
Looks like the (FOREIGN!!@!) Stoke board sniffed that in his actions, as well. Stoke's squad was 67% HG last season. The only clubs to finish higher than they w/ a similar proportion of HG players were West Ham and Norwich, two clubs that had recently plied their trade in the HG-heavy Champo. Maybe he'd still be at Stoke if he'd looked past Britain for players…
(In Pulis's favour, however, when looking for a correlation between league position and percentage of HG players, r is only .42. Some relationship, maybe, but not a confident one:
)
Look at our most successful managers. A lot closer to Pulis than some of the names being touted at the minute.
I remember that no-one fancied Butkinshaw as a seemingly dour Yorkshireman but his teams were fantastic. A bit flawed at times but you certainly got your money's worth. And we were there or thereabouts for trophies.
I remember that no-one fancied Butkinshaw as a seemingly dour Yorkshireman but his teams were fantastic. A bit flawed at times but you certainly got your money's worth. And we were there or thereabouts for trophies.
I can't be arsed looking up the stats, but I am sure I remember reading somewhere that over the last few years, the only teams to have spent more on transfers (net spend) than Stoke were Chelsea and City.
Its exactly the same argument as Moyes.
People would say "Oh but he never has any money" or "He has to play that way to get results, because he has such limited resources" but the truth of it is and always was Everton (and Stoke) played the way they did because thats what the manager WANTED.
Because of which, Ive never bought into the idea "if they just get a chance they could be really exciting..."
Moyes and Pulis spent more than enough time at their respective clubs to build a team in any shape they liked. Look at Swansea for exhibit A. Look at what Dyche has achieved at Burnley on a shoe string in a single season. Look at what Martinez has done at Everton in just one season.
That Stoke and Everton were eye bleedingly poor to watch was by design, not circumstance.
Pulis at any other club will be just the same as he was at Stoke.