NaijaSpurs
Les Ferdinand
Parker was shocking today. He gave the ball away cheaply on numerous occasions and runs with the ball even though he is a lousy dribbler
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Scott Parker
- Thread starter punk_is_back`
- Start date
punk_is_back`
Ilie Dumitrescu
He's trying to hard to do a Stevie Me impression to "Drive the team forward". GHod how I hate that term.
Rossi22
Pedro Mendes
The north London club's top-four push looked to be dwindling against Wigan, until, not for the first time, the ineffective 32-year-old's withdrawal sparked another late revival
Tottenham took a gigantic step towards Champions League qualification last Sunday, beating last year's Premier League champions, Emirates Marketing Project, courtesy of a delirious and frenzied seven minutes. A week on and they have, in typical Spurs fashion, taken two steps back again.
Despite taking an early lead against 18th-placed Wigan on Saturday afternoon, the north London club only scraped a point in yet another worryingly frequent last hurrah.
The Latics, battling against relegation, immediately cancelled out Gareth Bale's early goal before Callum McManaman rifled a shot past Hugo Lloris with the kind of venom and swerve that is usually seen from one of the Welshman's dastardly free kicks.
Upon assuming the lead, Roberto Martinez's men sat back, deeper and deeper, and invited Tottenham to break them down. They could not – nor have they been able to for much of the season. Joel Robles was a virtual spectator, not forced into action between McManaman's 49th-minute strike and Emmerson Boyce's 89th-minute own goal.
Despite controlling possession (61 per cent), Spurs, lacking in intensity, could muster only half-chances and blocked shots, while their goals were borne out of errors by Wigan, not brilliance from themselves.
At the very centre of Tottenham's problems is Scott Parker. The veteran midfielder, voted the club's Player of the Year last season, has become a laborious bubble of inactivity and indecision. When Spurs needed craft and vision to break Wigan down, he offered neither.
Of course, normally, in his role as an out-and-out defensive midfielder, Parker would not be expected to unlock the opposition defence. But, bafflingly, Andre Villas-Boas has been using the 32-year-old as a box-to-box player, inviting him to get forward while other players sit back and hold to accommodate his advances.
Such a position requires energy and athleticism, which Parker no longer possesses. Instead he ambles around the pitch, huffing and puffing after barely five minutes, with his decaying blood-and-thunder routine now more akin to a broken nail and a light shower.
The Jack-of-all-trades role requires Parker to affect the game at both ends but he has offered only passivity. He slows the game down, is incredibly reluctant to attempt penetrative passes and watching him try to manoeuvre the ball, taking touch after touch after touch, is like watching someone trying to eat rice with a single chopstick.
In attack, he has just one assist this year and no goals, while he frequently evidences his lack of predatory instinct. He conspired to miss an open goal against Basel, while against Wigan, when the ball fell perfectly into his path and with Robles stranded on the floor, he tried to take a touch when a first time shot was required.
His pass-completion rate in the final third is just 67% (for comparison, Mousa Dembele's is 86%), his accurate passes in the final third account for just 16% of his total passes, he has created a clear-cut chance only once every 1,141 minutes and boasts a staggeringly poor 11% shooting accuracy.
Defensively, he offers little protection. Spurs concede more often when he is the team (1.33 goals per game, compared to 0.96 with Dembele and 1.09 with Sandro), they keep fewer clean sheets (just one in his 16 league outings) and he is dispossessed more often than any other Tottenham midfielder (every 12 minutes).
If the stats are not evidence enough, then Spurs' constant improvement after he has been substituted should be. It took barely a minute for Villas-Boas's side to equalise against Everton after Parker had been withdrawn, all three goals against Emirates Marketing Project were scored following his substitution, while Spurs did not find an equaliser against Wigan until he had gone off.
Even in his first league start of the season, against Manchester United, it took Parker to be withdrawn for Spurs, just 10 minutes later, to score.
Yet, curiously, he is still picked. Villas-Boas learned an incredibly amount from failing at Chelsea but, perhaps, a hangover of his time in north London is an unwillingness to drop key characters in the dressing room.
Parker is a veteran, a leader, an experienced campaigner and one of the powerbrokers in the Spurs camp. Axing players of his ilk and standing is partly what lost the Portuguese his job at Stamford Bridge and there is a clear reluctance to drop a player who is underperforming. But pandering to Parker is hurting Spurs and undermining the meritocracy which Villas-Boas has sought to install at the club.
It may be ruthless to cut Parker, a bastion of valour and old school heartiness, but that is exactly what Spurs and their Portuguese boss need to be at this stage of the season.
Yet ruthless is exactly what Tottenham are not. They should have killed off Wigan as soon as they had the lead, choked them into submission as most other top sides would do - instead they switched off immediately and conceded within two minutes.
As a result, the north London side have now lost 23 points from winning positions – the second-worst record in the league behind Southampton (29). Should they miss out on the top four, the inability to hold a lead, or build on it, will be a major contributor – especially as Arsenal have dropped just four points when leading.
So Tottenham have four games to show their nasty side, to find the cold-blooded killer inside, and Villas-Boas can trigger that ruthlessness by an act of his own, by leading by example, by dropping the ponderous and passive Scott Parker.
Tottenham took a gigantic step towards Champions League qualification last Sunday, beating last year's Premier League champions, Emirates Marketing Project, courtesy of a delirious and frenzied seven minutes. A week on and they have, in typical Spurs fashion, taken two steps back again.
Despite taking an early lead against 18th-placed Wigan on Saturday afternoon, the north London club only scraped a point in yet another worryingly frequent last hurrah.
The Latics, battling against relegation, immediately cancelled out Gareth Bale's early goal before Callum McManaman rifled a shot past Hugo Lloris with the kind of venom and swerve that is usually seen from one of the Welshman's dastardly free kicks.
Upon assuming the lead, Roberto Martinez's men sat back, deeper and deeper, and invited Tottenham to break them down. They could not – nor have they been able to for much of the season. Joel Robles was a virtual spectator, not forced into action between McManaman's 49th-minute strike and Emmerson Boyce's 89th-minute own goal.
Despite controlling possession (61 per cent), Spurs, lacking in intensity, could muster only half-chances and blocked shots, while their goals were borne out of errors by Wigan, not brilliance from themselves.
At the very centre of Tottenham's problems is Scott Parker. The veteran midfielder, voted the club's Player of the Year last season, has become a laborious bubble of inactivity and indecision. When Spurs needed craft and vision to break Wigan down, he offered neither.
Of course, normally, in his role as an out-and-out defensive midfielder, Parker would not be expected to unlock the opposition defence. But, bafflingly, Andre Villas-Boas has been using the 32-year-old as a box-to-box player, inviting him to get forward while other players sit back and hold to accommodate his advances.
Such a position requires energy and athleticism, which Parker no longer possesses. Instead he ambles around the pitch, huffing and puffing after barely five minutes, with his decaying blood-and-thunder routine now more akin to a broken nail and a light shower.
The Jack-of-all-trades role requires Parker to affect the game at both ends but he has offered only passivity. He slows the game down, is incredibly reluctant to attempt penetrative passes and watching him try to manoeuvre the ball, taking touch after touch after touch, is like watching someone trying to eat rice with a single chopstick.
In attack, he has just one assist this year and no goals, while he frequently evidences his lack of predatory instinct. He conspired to miss an open goal against Basel, while against Wigan, when the ball fell perfectly into his path and with Robles stranded on the floor, he tried to take a touch when a first time shot was required.
His pass-completion rate in the final third is just 67% (for comparison, Mousa Dembele's is 86%), his accurate passes in the final third account for just 16% of his total passes, he has created a clear-cut chance only once every 1,141 minutes and boasts a staggeringly poor 11% shooting accuracy.
Defensively, he offers little protection. Spurs concede more often when he is the team (1.33 goals per game, compared to 0.96 with Dembele and 1.09 with Sandro), they keep fewer clean sheets (just one in his 16 league outings) and he is dispossessed more often than any other Tottenham midfielder (every 12 minutes).
If the stats are not evidence enough, then Spurs' constant improvement after he has been substituted should be. It took barely a minute for Villas-Boas's side to equalise against Everton after Parker had been withdrawn, all three goals against Emirates Marketing Project were scored following his substitution, while Spurs did not find an equaliser against Wigan until he had gone off.
Even in his first league start of the season, against Manchester United, it took Parker to be withdrawn for Spurs, just 10 minutes later, to score.
Yet, curiously, he is still picked. Villas-Boas learned an incredibly amount from failing at Chelsea but, perhaps, a hangover of his time in north London is an unwillingness to drop key characters in the dressing room.
Parker is a veteran, a leader, an experienced campaigner and one of the powerbrokers in the Spurs camp. Axing players of his ilk and standing is partly what lost the Portuguese his job at Stamford Bridge and there is a clear reluctance to drop a player who is underperforming. But pandering to Parker is hurting Spurs and undermining the meritocracy which Villas-Boas has sought to install at the club.
It may be ruthless to cut Parker, a bastion of valour and old school heartiness, but that is exactly what Spurs and their Portuguese boss need to be at this stage of the season.
Yet ruthless is exactly what Tottenham are not. They should have killed off Wigan as soon as they had the lead, choked them into submission as most other top sides would do - instead they switched off immediately and conceded within two minutes.
As a result, the north London side have now lost 23 points from winning positions – the second-worst record in the league behind Southampton (29). Should they miss out on the top four, the inability to hold a lead, or build on it, will be a major contributor – especially as Arsenal have dropped just four points when leading.
So Tottenham have four games to show their nasty side, to find the cold-blooded killer inside, and Villas-Boas can trigger that ruthlessness by an act of his own, by leading by example, by dropping the ponderous and passive Scott Parker.
On the contrary - Utd have recovered something like 29 points from losing positions this season - perspective
Bullet
Colin Calderwood
NAIL ON HEAD! The thing is, we shouldn't be moaning at Parker, we should be moaning at Andre Villash Boash.
I don't understand why AVB is so keen on Parker being a key ball-player. He may as well put Friedel up top to win headers. Baffling from AVB.
Lily White
Clive Wilson
Thats the thing Bullet, lots of moaning about Parker but he needs to be deployed properly to be effective. He isn't a box to box midfielder.
Kingdawson
Banned
AVB's decision to use Parker as the box to box midfielder and Dembele as the one sitting deeper is both ridiculous and very confusing. I'm pretty sure Parker would be performing far better if allowed to play his normal game.
Kingdawson
Banned
Exactly.
Modric THFC
Jimmy McCormick
AVB sees the two of them as a defensive midfield. Parkers main role in that midfield to press and win the ball back. AVB wants us to win the ball back high up the pitch so we can counter quicker. That is why Parker is so far forward trying to win the ball back high up the pitch. It a pity that he cant do anything with the thing. But that is AVB's logic here.
Parker playing more advanced started in the second half of last season, which leads me to believe it's more the players own thinking than specific instruction to do so
thejazzman
Jason Cundy
I dont think it's wise to second guess the manager's logic on things like this, as doing that is based on theory rather than evidence. But it does appear that for AVB's strategy to work you need both central midfielders to cover all aspects of the game, something that Parker. People may criticise his deployment, but would you rather he sat behind the half-way line all game, and expect Dembele to do everything? We dont play sweeping counter-attacking football anymore, so its unavoidable that he will find himself having to do things that he isnt highly skilled at; he could still be doing more than he is though. Playing a more box-to-box role doesnt explain why he takes 20 turns in his own half before passing to a poorly positioned player.
Kingdawson
Banned
I don't remember this happening.
perhaps you blocked it from your mind, was very frustrating - kinda coincided with our poor form from the end of Jan onward. very similar to how he tries to play now, was getting involved in the final 3rd a hell of a lot more than he was in the months prior - getting in the way of our build up play, slowing things down etc etc
Bullet
Colin Calderwood
Yes, just like Defoe should never go anywhere near our 18 yard box. Both should stick solely to what they are good at. Remember Defoe's pass to Suarez in our box when BAE mullered Suarez? That is the equivalent of Parker's "attacking"
Kingdawson
Banned
It can't have been anywhere near as bad as you're describing it as he won our player of the season award (and deservedly too).
THe only time i specifically remember him being our furthest forward CM last season was against Wolves away, and that was his debut (Luka was injured iirc).
Kingdawson
Banned
This season it's clear as day he's playing as the furthest forward whilst Dembele sits.
overall he had a good season, first half / 2/3's he was fantastic in the role he played protecting the back four and breaking up the oppositions play but there was a definite turning point in which he tried to do more than what was required of him and from then on his performances (and that of the team) suffered. personally i think he won the award because no one wanted to vote for want away Modric who was more fitting a winner tbf
but at his best last season he was a great player for us and even this season when Sandro got injured i wasn't so worried as i was thinking Parker would come in and play how he did in the first half of last season and fill the void rather well - hasn't turned out that way though and we have missed Sandro big time. not trying to absolve Villa Boas of any blame - he could well be telling him to play the more advanced of the two, but it's a problem which reared it's head last season, so i don't think it's entirely down to the manager
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thfcsteff
Garth Crooks
He needs to be disciplined if he is!
i see the danger of playing him as a holding midfielder. Think about it. Pirouetting back there, indecision back there, would be disasterous! It's a tough situation for AVB as I think he is one player who would not do well being dropped.