Re: AVB Sacked page 224
Good GHod, more of this from the Pirate!
You can attempt to re- write history in your attempt to " prove" your point, but I for one don't accept your version of events. Rather than offer a point by point rebuttal, which I could do, but too boring for everyone, especially me to relive all those turgid performances again, I would ask you to just ponder these facts.
1. Sunderland. Last game of season. Our whole season rested on this game. A win was imperative and hope for Arsenal to falter at Saudi Sportswashing Machine. Fourth place and Champions League football was the prize. AVB had had all season, plus pre- season and two transfer windows. How did this most important game pan out? We looked guileless, lethargic, slow and tactically inept, a performance which we could well have lost against a team with nothing to play for. It was TURGID and only saved by a late late screamer by Bale. Don't even begin to try and tell me this was all planned by AVB in advance!
No more turgid than the last 10 or so games in the 2011/12 season (particularly the Villa away game when 3rd was IN OUR HANDS), or the 2010/11 season. You could even talk about our chance to finish 3rd in the 2009/10 season – when we lost to Burnley who were ALREADY RELEGATED. Are you going to REALLY say AVB’s performance in that game when we were playing against a team that were happy to mostly play 10 behind the ball all game was worse than this?
2. In Bale we had a world class striker in our ranks at the top of his game. He saved us from embarrassment on numerous occasions. I can't recall where we would be without his goals, but somewhere in mid table mediocrity.
I see what you did there and called him a ‘striker’ – almost as though he started the season as a striker. It’s almost like AVB took over Spurs and Bale was in exactly the same sort of form at that time as at the end of the season. Tut-tut and cheap shot. Put it this way: was Bale a ‘world-class striker at the top of his game’ at the beginning of the season? Or was he a ‘very good midfielder/winger’? I’m sure the stats would back you up on this point. Not.
3. AVB failed miserably to develop any other player to take any of the strain off Bale. It WASNT as if we played to set him up with sitters, almost all his goals he set up, created and executed by himself.
Oh really? So who were these players that should have been developed to take this strain? Are you talking about Ade, Defoe, Lennon?? Bale came on strength to strength in the second half of the season. The vast majority of his goals came in the second half. Btw, after the first half of the season we were around 4th, so guess what: taking the season as a whole there’s at least half where we weren’t reliant on Bale but still kept ourselves high up the table. No doubt that had nothing to do with AVB in your eyes, perhaps it was those players ‘he failed to develop’.
4. AVB did not need to introduce any of the new signings. He chose them, he wanted them, he at the very least acquiesced in their purchase. If he didn't feel they were ready, why did he buy them? All I hear from you and Jordinhos is excuse after excuse for them. There are plenty of examples of foreign players who have made an immediate impact in England. Not one of these seven settled in with us in any way under AVB. Why not just accept that perhaps he was at least partly culpable for this situation.
So now you are saying that any buy – wherever they come from – automatically has to be assumed to hit the ground running? Sure that would be nice, but as there are several examples of foreign players who have, there are also several who needed a few months. In fact there are several players in any given season that are English, or are bought from other PL clubs, who also take time to settle. Look at Liverpool’s Henderson for example, he’s taken a few seasons and I’m sure they saw him as a long-term successor to Gerrard. Then I can talk of Henry and Pires at Arsenal who were both dog-****e in their first six months. Imagine if they were being judged at that time by the likes of you.
Of course, Paulinho hasn’t settled (after all he’s only made lots of dangerous runs and missed some sitters), Soldado hasn’t mostly been starved of service, Chadli hardly gets a game does he, Chiriches has never had a good game and Eriksen, well have you seen him play?? Who’s this Capoue fella eh? If you weren’t so blinded by your hate of AVB you’d have the capability to just say Lamela is the only signing that hasn’t settled. You seem to have thought that poor form/not reaching the heights seen before they signed = haven’t settled in any way! I wonder if you said this bout Lloris last season at this point as well.
5. He completely mis-managed the Ade situation. Apart from Chelsea away, He couldn't get a single decent performance from a player we all know is vastly talented.
I wonder if you were one of those who were saying at the time that Ade shouldn’t be on the pitch last season? In fact, I’m sure you were one of those saying ‘he’s a waste of space’, ‘he’s got a crap attitude’ etc etc. So now you’re saying that Ade not performing shows how bad a coach AVB is? Would you say the same of Wenger, Mancini, Mourinho and Harry post-February 2012? No, I thought not. Of course any stick to beat AVB with is lovely for you. No doubt if/when he shows poor performances from now, it will by TS’s fault? Nah, doubt it, It will be back to being Ade's fault no doubt.
My final point, (before I check out of this thread for good so I no longer have to deal with my frustrations about the dour football he brought to Spurs) is that AVB only stayed at all his previous clubs for only a single season. If all their success was solely down to him, why couldn't he bring success to us in a single season as he had supposedly done for them?
Why did he even need more time?
This is where you show some serious ignorance in why AVB or any manager is hired; Nobody would say AVB’s success at Porto was TOTALLY down to him. Porto are an established club in Portugal and usually fight it out with one or two other big guns to win the available trophies each year. What AVB did there was take them to a higher level in terms of fitness, tempo and the ability to remain unbeaten in all the available competitions. They won them all BTW, something not done every day (even you will have to agree on that point). Doing this in AVB’s first season at the club is what made people sit up and notice him. Not just winning ALL the trophies, but the attacking football and the fact Porto went the whole league season unbeaten. Again, not something done evry season and it hasn’t been done at Porto since. So this was a great achievement, and one built on good planning, strategy, good team ethic and attention to fitness and stamina over a WHOLE season.
Chelski and Roman noticed and wanted ‘in’. AVB initially wanted to stay another year at Porto gaining more experience, but after a while Chelski and Roman can prove rather persuasive. Sadly for AVB, I bet he wished he’d stayed in Porto now.
He got sacked at Chelski due to a toxic dressing-room, which he approached like a bull in a china shop. Or did he? After all he was told by Roman to renew the side. It was well-known that the likes of Terry, Lampard, Drogba, Cole et al, effectively ran that club. It was perhaps naïve of AVB to take some of the approaches he did, but the manager is the manager and if that’s his way so be it. If SAF did that, would anybody have questioned him? The results were below what Chelski expected, but they are not a club that has ever thought (or needed to think) of the long-term so from their point of view he had to go.
However, his stock was still high as he was known as a manager who plans long-term over a season and perhaps beyond. A manager interested in taking part directly in coaching and who is interested in using tactics and strategy in taking on opposition. Somebody who could be expected to give a club as good a shot as possible in overcoming financial disadvantages when compared to more powerful rivals. A club like Spurs in fact.
We had just ****ed-up the best chance we had in recent history to gain some ground on our close rivals who had enjoyed CL money and a bigger gate for years. The Redknapp model had come to the end of its cycle because now we were going to lose a key member of that cycle (Modric) and wanted to stay close to rivals who could now accelarate away from us using CL money and CL participation to attract players AWAY from us. Players like Hazard, Oscar and more recently Willian. The fact that AVB kept us competitive (i.e 1 point off 4th) in this scenario is testament to both him and the players. BTW, Do you think Redknapp would have kept us as competitive without Modric and Hudd (when he was fit) in the previous 2/3 seasons? Maybe you should think about that when you talk about AVB being reliant on Bale.
Missing out on 4th by 1 point showed that AVB deserved to get more time. Big defeats aside at the stage he was sacked, I’m sure statistically we had more points than at the same stage last season. Things could have gone either way at that point, but at a club like ours (who have known more mediocrity that champagne football, where finishing mid-table and having our season over by January/February was the norm) he deserved more time. I’m not sure what would have constituted success for you (other than more sparkling displays) but you’d be hard pushed to get a manager to our club that would have done better than AVB in the circumstances that AVB took over (please don’t tell me that after Harry’s flops two seasons in a row that he would have been able to overcome Chelski and Arsenal again and without Modric, plus with little to no squad rotation capability).
Something to ponder for all you AVB acolytes.
It’s a shame that the worst of AVB’s performances have clouded all of what AVB’s time here. I really can’t remember a time when I felt that with most games against the big 4 we would hold our own or be found hard to beat. I’m certain stats will show we took more points in our games with them than in previous seasons in 2012/13. You may not have liked AVB in the end but please don’t go overboard with your biased recollections to sully the whole time AVB was here and totally make a mockery of why a coach like him could be hired.
In fact I’d challenge anybody (not you, as the post I’m replying to shows you really can’t think fairly when it comes to AVB or even where Spurs sit as a club for that matter) to name 3 managers, after we sacked Harry, that we should have hired instead of AVB, who would CLEARLY have done better and who would have been likely to come as well.
