An interesting read from
Goal.com:
The Dossier: How Pochettino’s Tottenham revolution is ramping up
The Argentine has made some key personnel changes since the last north London derby, with Spurs' academy-peppered first team starting to get to grips with his press-heavy style
The last time Tottenham faced off against Arsenal, Younes Kaboul left the field with his shirt dripping in sweat having delivered a gargantuan performance. The newly named captain had at last shown that he was worthy of the armband as Spurs dug in to claim a hard-fought draw. Four months later, the 29-year-old has been axed from the side, barely worthy of a place on the bench, and almost joined West Ham in a shock deadline day move.
The Frenchman, scorer of his club’s only winning goal away to Arsenal in the last two decades, has been omitted from the starting line-up for Tottenham’s last 12 Premier League outings – playing just 270 minutes in the FA Cup and Europa League in the meantime. He is unlikely to even be included in the matchday squad for Saturday’s north London derby despite being ever-present at the start of the campaign.
Far from merely highlighting a player on the decline, Kaboul’s plight, from skipper to the sidelines, is representative of a much broader shift at Tottenham. Mauricio Pochettino, installed at White Hart Lane in May, gave every player the chance to prove their worth and adapt to his methods – he even let the squad vote for their captain – but, by the beginning of November, and specifically after a humbling home defeat to Stoke City, he had seen enough.
Pochettino wanted his side to play with the vein-popping intensity and full-throttle pressing his Southampton team had exhibited, but that style only ever appeared in fleeting glimpses early on, if at all – ironically, one of the rare instances where the side did press with the requisite vim was at the Emirates. The spine of the team needed more energy, more aggression, and Kaboul was far from the only problem.
MISSING MEN | Kaboul and Capoue started all of Tottenham's first 11 games, and Adebayor started nine, but none have made the starting XI since, while Naughton has joined Swansea
Such a radical transformation in philosophy was always going to take time, but the process was stalling. “We left a team at Southampton that practically trained itself after a year and a half to come here where we had to recreate everything that we had done at Southampton, pretty much from zero,” Pochettino explained to Catalan radio station RAC1. But while the south-coast outfit’s squad had embraced his methods, the Spurs side he inherited struggled initially to adapt.
So the Argentine changed tact, culling the experienced players still clinging on to the tactics and styles of managers past, and their own personal foibles, and instead began giving more prominent roles to the malleable, eager-to-learn academy graduates who now permeate his starting XI. At last, Tottenham are starting to carry their coach’s fingerprints and echo the tempo of his Southampton side. Publically he continues to assert his faith in Kaboul, Emmanuel Adebayor and others, but it is a long way back for those players now.
The largest area of improvement has been the appetite and work rate of his fresh-blooded side. In the first 11 games – a telling cut-off point, with Kaboul and Adebayor not starting a league match since then – they ran 110.1 kilometres per game according to Opta, in the following 11 matches they averaged 113.9km, an increase of 3.8km per game. It may seem like a marginal gain, but it is a significant one. Their first tally would rank them 14th for distance covered in the Premier League, their second is bettered by only three teams.
Not only are they running further, they are also running harder. Their average number of sprints – any time a player exceeds 25.2 km per hour – has increased, though only by 6.6 per game. That is not insignificant though; their average of 535 sprints per game since Kaboul & Co. were axed would now rank them second in the division, behind only Burnley (538), while the number of sprints they complete more than their opponent, per game, has increased from 4.1 to 30.7. A mammoth change.
MARATHON MEN | Only three teams have run further than Spurs since the cull of Kaboul & Co., while Christian Eriksen has covered more ground than any other Premier League player
Burnley’s presence so high up the list is no surprise, with the old adage that teams run more without the ball ringing true for the side with the second-worst possession in the league. But not so for Tottenham, who have the fifth highest possession; Pochettino’s men just simply run more. It is a mantra that could almost be plucked out of Harry Redknapp’s ‘run around a bit’ playbook, were it not for the brain that accompanies this brawn.
The team are becoming smarter out of possession, more adept at disrupting and badgering teams, and capable of manipulating opponents thanks to an off-the-ball structure that is more coherent and disciplined than that which existed in even the most successful of recent Spurs sides. In theory their large percentage of possession relative to much of the league ought to yield fewer opportunities to win back the ball, yet they have successfully completed the most tackles in the division (404) and fifth-most interceptions (423).
“[Pochettino] puts emphasis on blocking passing lanes,” revealed Morgan Schneiderlin about his old manager’s defensive setup in an interview with L’Equipe. “I recall that he showed us from the start that a meter or half a meter could block two passing lanes in midfield, we just had to move a step ahead of orientate our body in a given way to put the opponent in trouble.”
Unsettling the opposition high up the pitch through this blend of tenacious tackling and cunning positioning is paramount to Pochettino’s philosophy, and his evolving Spurs side are developing a real appetite for it.
Tottenham’s tackles in the opposition’s half have increased from 5.0 per game in the first 11 matches to 6.9 in the latter half, meaning that, since dropping Kaboul et al, Spurs have gone from having a mediocre press to potentially the best in the division. Currently, they are averaging more tackles in the opponents’ half than Arsenal, whose 6.3 per game average is the best season-wide tally, while the number of final-third tackles has similarly increased by 30.3 per cent. Opponents’ pass success has dropped too, from 78% to 74%.
POCH PRESS | Tottenham have gradually increased their opposition-half tackles since the start of the season, hitting a campaign-high 12 against Sunderland at White Hart Lane
With this in mind, it is no surprise that players like Ryan Mason, Christian Eriksen and Harry Kane are beginning to shine. Mason averages 4.1 successful tackles per 90 minutes (of Premier League players with 10 or more appearances this term, only three are more prolific), while he has the highest forward pass percentage (72.5%) of any Spurs midfielder. Eriksen, meanwhile, has run further than any player in the division and Kane is covering 25% more ground per 90 minutes than the man he replaced in the side, Adebayor.
For too long Tottenham have been bereft of an identity, a clearly defined playing style, but Pochettino’s ethos is starting to take root. There is an energy and electricity to Spurs at their peak, the blend of fast breaks and up-tempo pressing coming together most notably against Chelsea, while the refocus on academy products has started to chip away at the disconnect between players and fans that started to develop under Andre Villas-Boas.
They are not the finished article yet, of course, and there have been plenty of laboured performances and poor defensive displays bailed out by the individual brilliance of Messrs Kane and Eriksen, but there is enough improvement to suggest that – with further opportunity to reshape the squad in the summer – Pochettino can get it right.
Now, Tottenham have back-to-back games against Arsenal and Liverpool to contend with. The double-header is likely to be decisive in this season’s race for the top four, but even a pair of defeats should do little to avert Pochettino from his current, ever-improving course. In the meantime, Kaboul’s expected omission against Arsenal serves as a continuing reminder of the skill and dedication the Argentine expects, and the consequences for those who can’t keep up.
