The Style v Substance discussion

  • 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...

    Get involved!

Latest Spurs videos from Sky Sports

How much did Palace get Eze for? Why aren’t we looking at such players? Ndombadboy is a beast, but we need another player that can support him or play in his absence. Without Tanguy or Gio we are simply shit in possession. Doesn’t matter who the manager is.
 
we do it well. More aggressively, and with a view to getting out of our half and creating more chances of hurting teams
Come come now BC, we all know that a team containing the likes of Hojbjerg, Lo Celso, NDombele, Bergwijn, Son, Kane don't have the wherewithal to "play through the 1/3rds". Our only possible option is for Dier to kick it as hard as he can from our own 18 yard line (hoping this time it goes roughly in the postcode area he is aiming for) and hope Sonny can take a wonder touch whilst running at full tilt into the oppo's box. I can't believe anyone thinks there's any alternative. Ever.
 
Style and substance please, like under Poch in 2016/17.
I love this club with every fibre of my being and I admit that NOTHING is more important than the result but I am finding these performances ( Everton,Burnley,West Brom, Brighton,Leicester) extremely frustrating.
I am certain the likes of Harry and Sonny will buy into the Mourinho philosophy if we are pushing on at the very top of the table.Will they be so on board if we are sitting a distant sixth or seventh?
If we do begin to slide down the table many posters on here who have been happy to ignore the performance and focus solely on the result will quickly turn on Jose.
I am one of the lucky ones-this is my fiftieth year supporting this club and I have seen all sorts of teams/managers/chairmen and throughout it all my support and love for the club has been total and unwavering.Whatever our results or performances that will never change.
 
I want to see us win. That requires us scoring goals which generally requires style. I do not like us to be under so much pressure that we look like conceding all the time. I did not like the pass, pass, pass football we saw under Poch sometimes with no end product. I enjoyed the 3 goal lead we had V spammers but I think conceding those 3 goals when we should have won hurt more than losing to Liverpool.
I do not have a problem with less possession as long as we actually look like scoring. I was happy with the recent approach against the top 6 clubs recently which brought results. I will not be happy if we play mostly in our half at Home to say Fulham.
To win matches you need sufficient scoring opportunities every match and if you achieve that with less than 50% possession I am ok with that if like against Woolwich we do not look like conceding.
On Sunday we lost because we did not score rather than conceded 2 bad goals. 0-0 would have been a poor result. 0-0 away to Liverpool would have been a great result.
To sum up different criteria for different fixtures and some style to get goals but 3 points more important that open attacking football.
 
Ultimately, I think whilst flawed, Mourinho’s tactics DO work (as evidenced by his trophy cabinet). But the players in his teams need to A) fully understand Mourinho’s system and B) be good enough. I think there are a number of players in our team that fail at both criteria.

This is the reality of our squad. When he cane he explicitly said Sissoko is not a CM. Yet he plays him there every week.

Compare him to say Alonso at Madrid. Or say Modric. Silva. KDB. Massive difference in what they offer to a team.

We are very limited in what we offer going forward. Really need midfielders to score and assist more.
 
How much did Palace get Eze for? Why aren’t we looking at such players? Ndombadboy is a beast, but we need another player that can support him or play in his absence. Without Tanguy or Gio we are simply shit in possession. Doesn’t matter who the manager is.

Eze was all set to sign for us - but then advanced to the stage where he could go to Palace and go straight into the first team
 
Eze was all set to sign for us - but then advanced to the stage where he could go to Palace and go straight into the first team
We really need a player like him. Thing is, he would slot straight into the starting 11 based on his fitness alone as the other two we have can’t manage to get fit or stay fit.
 

Spurs have only scored one Premier League goal with the Wales star on the pitch this season, with the 31-year-old struggling on his return to London

The problem with the unusually compressed Premier League table is that it does not take much for clubs to get caught up in a spiralling crisis or a surging renaissance.

Manchester United have died and been reborn multiple times already. Everton have surged, collapsed, and surged again despite the season being just a third complete.

And now Tottenham, tipped by many (including this writer) to challenge for the Premier League title are suddenly has-beens, out of the running thanks to a sequence of five points from five games.

It is, of course, too early to say their chances are over; too early to fall back on old tropes about Jose Mourinho being outdated so soon after eagerly celebrating his return to the top.

Case in point, had Harry Kane not missed a sitter against Liverpool then Spurs would have won that game and the table would look very different.

Nevertheless, there are legitimate concerns regarding Spurs' attacking deficiencies, and reliance on a counterattacking Plan A, which present a potential barrier to sustaining form over a 38-game season.

These faults are represented most neatly in the curiously small impact Gareth Bale has had since his return to north London.

Bale’s performance as a second-half substitute in Sunday's 2-0 defeat to Leicester City was bafflingly poor. He was not just ineffective, he was seemingly playing without intent, direction, or even interest.

Over and over again the Wales international would receive the ball on the right, look up, see two defenders in front of him, and pass it back inside. There was no attempt to take on his man, no attempt to play an incisive forward pass, and no attempt to make off-the-ball runs to escape that overcrowded area.

It was a cameo in keeping with his performances since arriving back at Tottenham.

Bale has started just one Premier League game this season. He has featured in 161 of 900 available minutes of league football. He has scored one goal in that time - the winner in a 2-1 victory over Brighton - that right now is the only league goal Tottenham have scored this season with Bale on the pitch.

Most damning of all, despite featuring in all six Europa League matches, Bale has only scored once and averages 0.3 key passes per game – the lowest of any Spurs player.

Perhaps he simply needs more time to adjust, having been without regular first-team football for so long under Zinedine Zidane at Real Madrid, but more likely his poor form reflects Mourinho’s limitations.

The Tottenham manager does not coach his forwards like Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola do; he does not provide the structure for their moves or dictate their attacking lines.

In direct contrast to the world’s best up-and-coming managers, Mourinho expects his forwards to freely improvise, rather than coach ‘automatisms’: highly structured tactical set-plays.

Earlier in the season it seemed as though Mourinho’s coaching style – he focuses on the defensive foundations, and expects his players to counterattack instinctively – looked like an asset during pandemic football, in which a congested fixture list has led to fatigued players and severely limited coaching time in the week.

High pressing has dropped off and tactical strategies have lost detail, and, since Mourinho never relied on either of these, his Spurs team flew out of the blocks. This may still be the case, of course, and the current run of form a mere blip on the way to a successful title challenge.

And yet Tottenham fans are understandably worried.

The problem with not prescribing attacking patterns, with using a conservative midblock, and with relying on counters, is that the team becomes reliant on a few individuals to perform consistently.

Harry Kane and Son Heung-min carry a huge burden of responsibility because, unlike the possession-dominant styles at the other ‘Big Six’ clubs, Tottenham do not create many chances.

What Mourinho views as a low-risk strategy is in fact high risk: the margins are small, and if chance conversion drops the points slip away. The 1-1 draw with Crystal Palace, in which Spurs invited pressure after settling down at 1-0, is a perfect example.

The other issue with relying on a small number of counterattackers is that opponents quickly learn how to suffocate them. Defenders are stepping up and doubling up on Kane. Right-backs are staying back to negate Son.

Most significantly of all, managers are starting to hold a deeper line, with Leicester having provided the clearest blueprint yet of how to deal with Mourinho’s approach.

Brendan Rodgers sat his team back, happily conceding the majority of possession in the knowledge that Tottenham are not coached for attacking moves - and therefore cannot play with the speed, fluency, or foresight to pull apart a defensive shell.

That is why Mourinho does not appear to have a Plan B – and why Bale cannot make an impact off the bench. The 31-year-old needs direction; needs to be able to slip into a tactical groove of multiple movements and interactions.

Instead, in a Mourinho team built on individualism, Bale is expected to conjure from a standing start. If Bale looks like he does not have a plan, that is because nobody has given him one.

Some pundits believe reintroducing Dele Alli might help shake things up in claustrophobic matches, but that seems unlikely. Lucas Moura, a frequently used substitute, is yet to score off the bench under Mourinho.

The problem is systemic, and without a top-down restructuring of how Mourinho coaches, Spurs are unlikely to improve their in-game reactivity.

Then again, Tottenham are only six points off the top. A run of poor form was inevitable, particularly in this exhausting season.

There is a danger of reading too much into Tottenham’s bad week. But the problems emerging do form part of a wider pattern of Mourinho’s tactical flaws over the last few years, and are worth keeping an eye on.

Wolves this coming Sunday will no doubt use Leicester’s model. Many more will follow suit.

Perhaps Bale will ultimately become the Plan B Tottenham need to overcome hurdles like these. For now though, he looks like an expensive mistake whose main function is to highlight Mourinho’s biggest weakness.
 
We really need a player like him. Thing is, he would slot straight into the starting 11 based on his fitness alone as the other two we have can’t manage to get fit or stay fit.

Worse is - we had a player like him in our academy that didn't like how youth players were treated and thought there was no route to the first team so left us at 16 years of age.
 
The only way this football is justified is if it takes us further than what we could expect to get with 'stylish' football - i don't see there being much chance of that tbh so really we're just playing boring football for the sake of it.

I expect after a year to have seen some development in our game for when we are playing on the front foot but there has been no progress here whatsoever wgich does not bode well.
 
That was a one off game which happens in finals. They actually scored two goals and we only woke up in the last 15 minutes. Bit like Leicester game they didn’t need to do anything just let us plod around. JM won with inter playing a defensive game.
 
The reality is that it's more difficult to be successful our way. Most successful teams have high levels of possession. Mourinho has shown in the past that it's possible to be successful his way, but the odds are against it.

People are talking as if dull = success and exciting = failure. I actually think it's more likely to be the opposite.
 
Back
Top Bottom