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Mauricio Pochettino - Sacked

Well, right and wrong. Football is undoubtedly about enjoying and yes, I am enjoying our performances.

But it is also about winning trophies, especially for clubs in a good position.

We are not a pauper club. We are also not a tiny club. We are the 5th most successful club in the UK and have a record of winning trophies.

So I am absolutely loving what we are doing now. I love Poch, I love our squad, I love our performances. But we also need to win trophies. If in 5 years time, we still have no trophies, then, while I have enjoyed watching us play, I think it is fair t say that could be classed as a relative failure.

Also, while I actually agree with a lot of what Poch has to say in that article, some of his comments scream a bit of trying to run before you can crawl. How many clubs win their domestic league/ CL without first having even won a domestic trophy? Not saying that one leads to another but I think it is very difficult to do so, except in sensational circumstances like Leicester.
 
billyiddo said:
I kinda wish he'd keep quiet on this one tbh

Just reinforce the idea we're a young team with our peak years ahead of us
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Tbh I don’t think keeping quiet is a choice. As far as I can see he is dealing with this narrative about the “lack of trophies” in the same way as other narratives that have cropped up before. Remember how he dealt with “Spurs cannot finished above Arsenal narrative?” By playing it down so much that even Wenger started to copy the same “I don’t care about Arsenal/ tottenham. ” Remember the Wembley hoodoo and how he played that down after our draw with Burnley? He is a professional who wants to take the pressure of his team and is not concerned about upsetting the sensitivities of supporters. We should trust him on this, he usually finds a way to silence these narratives.
 
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It's a conundrum do the fans want good football, trophies or both and if they can't have both which would they prefer. Some teams have managed to produce both but we never have since Keith Birkinshaw's time. Our most recent cup wins have been in seasons where we have been poor in the league, I think we hardly won a league game after Christmas when we beat Forest. I personally enjoy the way we have been performing under Poch and as much I would like us to win a trophy I know it will count for nothing with the put down merchants unless its the league or CL.
 
Hootnow said:
Well, right and wrong. Football is undoubtedly about enjoying and yes, I am enjoying our performances.

But it is also about winning trophies, especially for clubs in a good position.

We are not a pauper club. We are also not a tiny club. We are the 5th most successful club in the UK and have a record of winning trophies.

So I am absolutely loving what we are doing now. I love Poch, I love our squad, I love our performances. But we also need to win trophies. If in 5 years time, we still have no trophies, then, while I have enjoyed watching us play, I think it is fair t say that could be classed as a relative failure.

Also, while I actually agree with a lot of what Poch has to say in that article, some of his comments scream a bit of trying to run before you can crawl. How many clubs win their domestic league/ CL without first having even won a domestic trophy? Not saying that one leads to another but I think it is very difficult to do so, except in sensational circumstances like Leicester.
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For you - and doubtless the vast majority of fans, but not for me for the simple reason we are not competing on a level playing field.

Any Tom, dingdong or sheikh can come along and buy a trophy these days, so what? Big fudging deal.

For domestic cup ties most if not all PL clubs put out what we used to call the stiffs, so that alone dramatically devalues the status of those competitions. They have become mere consolation prizes, nothing more. Not even that if you are a Gooner.

As to the League and the CL, we all know the odds are disproportionately stacked in favour of the doped clubs, so for any of the also-rans to stand a chance they will not only need to be exceptionally good but also hugely fortunate, like Leicester freakishly were a couple of seasons back.

Given that scenario, I remain content to enjoy watching Tottenham performing as well as can be reasonably hoped for. If a trophy comes along in the meantime then fine, but I couldn't give a monkey's if it doesn't, I shall still in future years look back on this era and savour it as one of the most gloriously entertaining since I first became a fan in 1953.

As for describing any lack of a trophy during these distorted times as a failure, you might just well ask why a three-legged horse has never won the Derby?
 
Robspur12 said:
Tbh I don’t think keeping quiet is a choice. As far as I can see he is dealing with this narrative about the “lack of trophies” in the same way as other narratives that have cropped up before. Remember how he dealt with “Spurs cannot finished above Arsenal narrative?” By playing it down so much that even Wenger started to copy the same “I don’t care about Arsenal/ tottenham. ” Remember the Wembley hoodoo and how he played that down after our draw with Burnley? He is a professional who wants to take the pressure of his team and is not concerned about upsetting the sensitivities of supporters. We should trust him on this, he usually finds a way to silence these narratives.
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Nothing wrong with wanting to take the pressure off the team and i do agree with him, however as we can see outside of Spurs what he say sometimes gets misinterpreted as not taking the cups seriously and then used against us. You even see a few of our own supporters get that impression too.
 
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Robspur12 said:
It’s this, nothing else. Poch is trying to dial down the pressure on his team but I don’t think for one minute that he doesn’t care about the cups. Watch him during the cup games he paces about in the same way.
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Exactly, Anyone who saw the bench in our last FA Cup game against a league 2 team knows the idea that we aren't taking the FA Cup seriously is completely wrong.

I just wish our own fans wouldn't fall for the media narrative of the week so easily ...
 
I think, next season Poch needs to find a way to manage the squad so that we don’t have so many players needing fitness all at the same time. It’s a bit hard this year because we have so many guys coming back at once, but if we have a squad fit like this at the start of next season I hope Poch rotates well. It’s becomming a pattern with our back ups who are obviously talented not being able to perform to the level that they can.

I can see Poch likes to get a team fully fit and firing to an extreme, and it’s the thing that benefits us and allows us to overachieve. But if we go into next season with a big, fit squad, I hope we can make it work somehow. As the obvious example, Llorente suffers because Kane is so good. And I’m not saying the easy answer is to drop Kane, but there has to be a creative solution to getting Kane’s back up into form as opposed to it not mattering who it is behind him, because they all woefully underperform. And this is replicated across other positions - Wimmer suffering because of Toby and Jan for example.

It’s tough, and a delicate balancing act, because we definitely benefit from having players get up to a ferocious level of fitness and wouldn’t want to lose that, but I do wonder what the solution is.
 
BrainOfLevy said:
As the obvious example, Llorente suffers because Kane is so good. And I’m not saying the easy answer is to drop Kane, but there has to be a creative solution to getting Kane’s back up into form as opposed to it not mattering who it is behind him, because they all woefully underperform.
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We have to buy a better back-up striker. Someone who can at lest hit the target from 9-10 yards out. I know strikers need rhythm, a run of games, but Llorente has been a big disappointment.
 
Grays_1890 said:
I maintain that for what we paid from Janssen we should have give him more time
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I agree - he had least looked like he was trying and from what I recall when he came on he put himself about and got us a couple of free kicks that lead to goals and also ate up time near the end of games.
 
90291Spur said:
We have to buy a better back-up striker. Someone who can at lest hit the target from 9-10 yards out. I know strikers need rhythm, a run of games, but Llorente has been a big disappointment.
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I think we’ve tried it with a young striker who will be hungry to learn and we’ve tried it with an experienced striker who should be happy to do a job, and both have been as bad as each other and nowhere near playing to their potential. I’m not convinced we can sign a striker who is obviously objectively better to be a clear back up.
 
BrainOfLevy said:
I think we’ve tried it with a young striker who will be hungry to learn and we’ve tried it with an experienced striker who should be happy to do a job, and both have been as bad as each other and nowhere near playing to their potential. I’m not convinced we can sign a striker who is obviously objectively better to be a clear back up.
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So what is the solution other than play Son up top in the old false 9 gambit? I know Son didn't have his best game today but I think he's a better option than FernandNoGoal
 
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