BrainOfLevy
Michael Carrick
i see your point. good ones too
but unless you have a crystal ball then 4th at any point should be considered good
not to mention that it wasnt as clearly that the other teams were bad as it was that the rest of the premiership are getting better at grinding out results, so now they dont just lose when a team undrperforms
which brings me to something else, your talking about the factors that contributed to us being seen as title contenders. what about the factors that HINDERED us? what do you have to say about them?
I think we were incredibly unlucky. The disallowed goals, the England speculation, Chelsea's ridiculous luck, basically every little thing and every big thing that could go against us, did go against us. So I'm quite sure Harry would have got us 3rd if even half of all that bad luck didn't happen. I don't have any issue with him as a manager. It's nice to have good players and see them perform to their level. It was always frustrating under Jol or Ramos that we had good players that just didn't perform because there was something missing for them. Harry keeps it simple and with good players, that means relative consistency. I said I didn't really want to defend him any more after the omission that speculation affects players, but I would actually feel some sadness if he went. He has delivered us consistency.
So there was a fair bit that hindered us. So no issue with Harry there. No issue with anyone really. Except John Terry. It was basically GHod/The Universe saying 'Nuh-uh Tottenham, you simply should not getting any ideas about getting above your station, it will be the Europa League for you next year' because so much went against us and there's nothing much that could have been done about it.
...So actually I've just seen your point I was about to say that we still should have gotten 3rd considering how crap the other teams were, due to all their unfortunate circumstances. But actually we had seriously unfortunate circumstances ourselves too. So in actual fact we should be bloody grateful that we were good/lucky enough to have such a strong run in the first half of the season. Chelsea had a bad manager for them, Arsenal had fudge loads of injuries and loss of key players, Liverpool wasted tonnes of money, and we had to deal with England speculation and bad luck a plenty. So maybe 4th is an achievement considering all of that.
Immensely frustrating, because all that considered, losing your key players, wasting money or hiring the wrong manager are all things self inflicted by those clubs. The bad luck and speculation was simply things out of our control going against us. The only thing we were at fault for was having a manager good enough to be linked with England. The world just isn't fair.