When I say bad characters, I just mean players that don't act like winners. And the way I see that is by taking responsibility on the pitch, and not making stupid mistakes because the pressure is now on, and because we are now in the business end of the season.
Lamela for example, noticeably stepped up when the league title was in sight. He'd always been a hard runner throughout the season, but you could see in the last few weeks, he believed. When other players didn't want the ball, he did, he tried to make something happen.
Toby, on the other hand has made a number of errors in the last few weeks. Poor decision making. Stepping up when he should be dropping back, not being tight to obvious danger players, not clearing the lines when he should. Very noticeably performance dropped at the business end of the season. A shame because he was such a rock for most of it.
And then I look at players like Dier and Alli (and actually, Bentaleb. Despite him being pretty terrible this season as he was never able to pick up a run of form when he did get on the pitch). They have a bit of a nasty streak in them. Rose has it too. Nice boys off the pitch I'm sure but on it, you can tell that for the next 95 minutes, they hate the opposition. And they hate the opposition so much that they aren't going to let something as stupid and irrelevant as 'pressure' allow them to stop giving the absolute best version of themselves for the duration of the match. But I look at Walker, who despite being really talented looks a bit ponderous, like he's control is always waiting to let him down, like he's going to have a bad reaction should things not go his way (as his Twitter outburst proved a couple of years ago).
So I'm seperating by performance level noticeably dropping in the business end alongside what we can make out of a player's character. It transparently tinklees Dier off when he loses, or when Spurs get called soft, because he knows he isn't. I'm sure it hurts someone like Eriksen, but I also get the sense that he's quite a measured guy and probably isn't totally consumed by winning, like it's an obsession. We can't have a team of nasty bastards, but I don't think we can continue to rely on players that are happy with the bear minimum in key positions.
And look at Leicester. Winners every single one of them. Vardy. Drinkwater. Morgan. Huth. They weren't going to let pressure get in the way because they thought they fully deserved it. I'm sure they had a class clown in Fuchs, a maverick like Mahrez and Albrighton who I assume is quite a nice chap in the Ryan Mason mould, but they had enough winners in the team that meant that when the pressure was on, they looked more like champions than ever. The opposite happened with us.
And I don't think it was tactics. The tactics got us to where we were, and I think Poch is the closest to a manager with a winning mentality that we'd had in my Spurs supporting life. Watch his interview again. It transparently tinklees him off, but he doesn't get overly emotional like Sherwood after the 4-0 Chelsea loss (although I agreed with Sherwood at the time!). Poch is tinkleed off but very calmly says he's got good information about what decisions to make in the summer. He's given the players the chance to prove themselves to him, and some of them have let themselves down. He's disappointed, he probably likes a lot of them on a personal level, but there won't be any excuse for mental weakness. They will be gone.
I should also say, we scored the most, conceded the least, had the best shots for and against statistics. The system was working very well, but the amount of games we absolutely dominated but didn't win was ridiculous and again that lies with the players IMO. Everton home and away. Arsenal away. We absolutely played them off the park but didn't kill them off, quite bizarrely so in fact given our dominance.
