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Thomas Frank - Head Coach

AC Milan winning the league in 1994 by scoring 36 goals in 34 games must be your version of total football (they won 19 of 34 games and only conceded 15 - remarkable record).

Some side though that won the CL final 4-0 against Barca

Loss of Van Basten and weirdly loaning out Gullit to Sampa killed their goal threat, ridiculous that the side one such a brilliant double
 
Yet sit 5th in the CL table with one loss in 7

Yesterday was nowhere near the disastrous performance and people are making out, wonder why that is

Mate, what are you talking about?

- We have 0 wins in the league in Jan despite playing Burnley, West Ham, Bournemouth, Sunderland, Brentford (only 1 isn't a bottom half team, it was basically our easiest run of games for the whole season)
- 2 wins in Dec, 0 wins in November, so 2 in wins in 15 leagues games in 3 months
- We could literally have only the 17th place team on less points than us by end of matchweek

And the response is "well, we played well for 45 minutes (again) and had a few shots, so it's not so bad"?

The club is on a 3-month run of disastrous, relegation form with a month of very difficult games coming up. And CL is irrelevant, flimflam red herring, we all know the first top team or English team we run into, we are out (probably like the PSG games, we will flatter to deceive and concede a bucketload)
 
Mate, what are you talking about?

- We have 0 wins in the league in Jan despite playing Burnley, West Ham, Bournemouth, Sunderland, Brentford (only 1 isn't a bottom half team, it was basically our easiest run of games for the whole season)
- 2 wins in Dec, 0 wins in November, so 2 in wins in 15 leagues games in 3 months
- We could literally have only the 17th place team on less points than us by end of matchweek

And the response is "well, we played well for 45 minutes (again) and had a few shots, so it's not so bad"?

The club is on a 3-month run of disastrous, relegation form with a month of very difficult games coming up. And CL is irrelevant, flimflam red herring, we all know the first top team or English team we run into, we are out (probably like the PSG games, we will flatter to deceive and concede a bucketload)

I am talking about exactly what I am talking about Yesterday was nowhere near the disastrous performance and people are making out

We all know where we are and how we got here, but are we now beyond acknowledgement or talking in isolation now? Seems not

You are literally telling a fan he should not see a game for what it is, thanks for backing up my mornings post about minds made up and driven thoughts before and seemingly after a ball is kicked.
 
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Ange understood this with his 'let the fans dream' line - it's what sport is about. Frank just doesn't, and is paying for it.

I think we may need to stop comparing Frank to Ange in this way. It's obviously natural to do so because he was the last guy in the hot seat.

Where it gets divisive is perceptions. My perception of Ange in the public domain was one of ego, backtracking, being spiky and a general arrogance that I didn't like at all. I tried to like the guy but based on the things he's said, he never won me over at all.

I think there will just be areas of perceptions that fans will not agree on. I'd much rather have Frank's authenticity if we're just judging on the things people say. What I'm worried more about is his ability to pull this thing together on the pitch. Many fans told me to forget what Ange said and judge him on his coaching. I guess I'm now playing that same card with myself on Frank.
 
That’s just boosterism, I don’t want it from our politicians, and I certainly don’t want it from our manager.

You can’t fix problems if you deny they exist.

Pragmatism is a cornerstone of success, that’s a universal truth.

No, @DubaiSpur is 100% right re no one wants to hear how tough a game West Ham, Brentford, Bournemouth, Burnley will be for Spurs.

And while pragmatism works in certain businesses, it doesn't work in sports (sports is literally a history of David vs. Goliath stories, both at team and individual levels, it is exactly why we watch it. I'd also argue most startups/entrepreneurs would never succeed if they just looked at the pragmatic truth, humans didn't get to the moon by saying it was impossible. I can't tell you how many projects/initiatives I delivered where people who didn't know better said it couldn't be done.), Frank is self fulfilling his flimflam by telling the team that these lower table dross teams are so tough, that we are going to have a difficult game, that we need to keep it tight, we need to not lose the ball .. no we need to make them worry about us, we need to score 3 and kill games.

For me, I'm of the same opinion now that I was when he was appointed - Frank is a mediocre coach, but he's not the problem. The structure of the club is. And that will fester regardless of what happens to Frank.

He is a problem mate, he may be a decent coach at Bretford level, he like Potter is a disaster at this level. The bigger problem is the club hasn't even realized that yet.
 
A point about the nice soft 8-point cushion we've managed to secure that is frequently brought up by several people, that it is also only 8 points up to CL-qualification that hardly gets the attention I think it deserves: What does it MEAN that the entire field from 5th to 15th is within 10 points?
To me it means that normal "rules" goes out the window. The Premier League has always been a league where everyone can beat everyone, sometimes. But over the last few years, the unpredictability has become a lot more pronounced, and where the league kind of split first in two, then in four previously, it now splits in three, and rather stays like that.
What it means for us is that we can't count on -anything- from the teams in front of us, nor from the teams behind us. The teams in front of us are just as likely to fudge up against the bottom teams as we are, and the bottom teams like West Ham could just as well go on a winning streak as we can.

I hate to quote a legendary post here, but I've got serious relegation fears!
(that post proved to be a catalyst for banishing that fear, I hope this can do the same!) :)
 
Arteta is a clam but he’s right about the actions in each box being critical.

We might be (are) improving our play, but it means nothing if we concede stupid goals and don’t tuck the ball away at the other end. Not scoring enough is the root of the issue. Our defence becomes focused on generating attacks and scoring and switches off on their main jobs. We are compromised and unbalanced, but there are positive shoots. 4 times out to 5 we’d win that game. And some of the build up play was actually decent. Yes it’s Burnley but they sat deep and made it hard. That final third ruthless precision is the missing X factor. All of our attackers are a bit shy. None have that pomp that Kane had and Son developed. Maybe Frank isn’t as strong a psychologist as say Pochettino. Or maybe Poch would also need time to get these back up players firing. Frank can turn average players into quality attackers, his record of that is there, but will he run out of time first? Probably.
 
No, @DubaiSpur is 100% right re no one wants to hear how tough a game West Ham, Brentford, Bournemouth, Burnley will be for Spurs.

And while pragmatism works in certain businesses, it doesn't work in sports (sports is literally a history of David vs. Goliath stories, both at team and individual levels, it is exactly why we watch it. I'd also argue most startups/entrepreneurs would never succeed if they just looked at the pragmatic truth, humans didn't get to the moon by saying it was impossible. I can't tell you how many projects/initiatives I delivered where people who didn't know better said it couldn't be done.), Frank is self fulfilling his flimflam by telling the team that these lower table dross teams are so tough, that we are going to have a difficult game, that we need to keep it tight, we need to not lose the ball .. no we need to make them worry about us, we need to score 3 and kill games.

Well they should want to hear, they should want to listen, we should take education when its offered, thats how we grow.

Going to the moon was eminently possible, humans got to the moon by taking an analytical and pragmatic approach to the problem building a solution over time, it took them 9 years.

Frank isn't saying it can't be done, it just can't be done overnight. He's had 6 months.
 
And while pragmatism works in certain businesses, it doesn't work in sports (sports is literally a history of David vs. Goliath stories, both at team and individual levels, it is exactly why we watch it. I'd also argue most startups/entrepreneurs would never succeed if they just looked at the pragmatic truth, humans didn't get to the moon by saying it was impossible. I can't tell you how many projects/initiatives I delivered where people who didn't know better said it couldn't be done.), Frank is self fulfilling his flimflam by telling the team that these lower table dross teams are so tough, that we are going to have a difficult game, that we need to keep it tight, we need to not lose the ball .. no we need to make them worry about us, we need to score 3 and kill games.

I always wondered who stacked tins of beans in a pyramid at Tesco
 
I am talking about exactly what I am talking about Yesterday was nowhere near the disastrous performance and people are making out

We all know where we are and how we got here, but are we now beyond acknowledgement or talking in isolation now? Seems not

It's context mate. If that was the first game of November, you could talk about it in isolation, talk about more shots/xG/etc.

The reality is Frank should have been fired after Fulham (end of November), and even if he wasn't, the club should have begun building a plan B for if the results continued to be poor.

There was absolutely no real way back after West Ham, but we let him stay, he got a result against Dortmund, if he had managed a win against Burnley we could be talking about the performance as well as the result. But at this stage, 30+ games into a season grasping at straws in isolation isn't reality, it's delusion and Frank keeps saying we have played well the last 9 games? wtf, if we play well and win 2 in 9, what happens when we play badly?
 
It's context mate. If that was the first game of November, you could talk about it in isolation, talk about more shots/xG/etc.

The reality is Frank should have been fired after Fulham (end of November), and even if he wasn't, the club should have begun building a plan B for if the results continued to be poor.

There was absolutely no real way back after West Ham, but we let him stay, he got a result against Dortmund, if he had managed a win against Burnley we could be talking about the performance as well as the result. But at this stage, 30+ games into a season grasping at straws in isolation isn't reality, it's delusion and Frank keeps saying we have played well the last 9 games? wtf, if we play well and win 2 in 9, what happens when we play badly?

Its nothing to do with context, I watched yesterday, I enjoyed it despite the result and I made that comment. If we can't do that then fcuk me this becomes a dark place
 
Well they should want to hear, they should want to listen, we should take education when its offered, thats how we grow.

Going to the moon was eminently possible, humans got to the moon by taking an analytical and pragmatic approach to the problem building a solution over time, it took them 9 years.

Frank isn't saying it can't be done, it just can't be done overnight. He's had 6 months.

I appreciate nuance, I appreciate as a whole, people should be willing to discuss more realistic solutions vs. easy answers but you are missing the beauty of sport and the fact that one off engagements is not the same as business/technical problem over years.

Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson, numerous unseeded tennis players have beaten legends like Federer, Novak, Nadal, Leicester won the PL, according to you they should all have given up on it, been pragmatic, taken their loss.
 
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