Re: AVB - Making Tottenham His Own
So its the players fault that we play at pedestrian pace and have virtually no movement off the ball? Nothing to do with managing of the team or tactics?
AVB wants them to play quicker and move but they don't do it?
I'm quite sure AVB doesn't want us to "play at pedestrian pace and have virtually no movement off the ball", and from that I suppose it follows that I think he wants us to play quicker and move, but they don't do it.
We have an imbalance in our squad, a few too many "direct" players that wish primarily to take players on and go straight for the goal at every opportunity that aren't great at keeping possession and not enough players that are great at pass and move football. The first category of players are players that need service, they need the right passes in the right areas (primarily the final third) to do damage. If they get the right passes they can be great or even fantastic, but if they don't get the right passes they fade badly and become invisible. The second category would be players that always want the ball, that play quick football and find those passes into the right areas to our direct players.
Van der Vaart was important for us with his passing, but even more so was Luka Modric. He really was a key player for us and a player we had no backup for last season and who we weren't able to replace this season. I think he papered over quite a few cracks last season and without him we often looked average at best. A single player at that level can make a massive difference, and with us having quite a few defensive players (Dawson, Walker, Gallas, Parker) that I think aren't good enough on the ball the lacking that one top class player becomes even more damaging.
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It seems that you really want someone to blame, someone to be at fault for this, and fair enough, I'll bite. 3 options the way I see it:
Levy - for not providing the funds to the managers to sign the right players.
Redknapp - for leaving us with an unbalanced squad.
AVB - for not bringing in the right players.
I'm not going into the whole Levy debate in this thread too, but financial reports show us spending the money that has been available to us. Could he have gotten us Moutinho for a price that would have been right for us? Possibly, possibly not. I'm not going to say that it's his fault without any clear evidence that it is.
Redknapp - partly perhaps. I thought our squad did need quite a bit of work over the summer. Not looking to get into a Redknapp debate here either, people will already have their opinions, they're unlikely to change and this is the AVB thread.
AVB - partly perhaps. With our squad needing quite a lot of work over the summer I thought he did well though. We needed a new goalie, a new first choice central defender, a striker or two and some attacking midfield options in addition to at least one central midfielder (I think two personally). The job he did in the transfer market wasn't perfect, but he got a lot of things right and we compensated quite well for the loss of our best/2nd best player, an important player and our club captain. There was still work to be done, there was still an imbalance in the squad, but with how much work there was to be done over the summer I still think it's unfair to harshly blame him at least as we got a lot of work done.
