With Tottenham Hotspur getting themselves back to winning ways in the Europa League in midweek, this weekend was all about Slaven Bilic and West Bromwich Albion.
Having finally regained their place in the Premier League after a few years in the second tier, their readjustment to the top flight hasn’t been great. Seven games in, a total of three points and a minus 10 goal difference already.
Basically, given the form Harry Kane and Son Heung-Min are in, our 27-year-old England man will be confident of further chipping away at the remaining 66 goals that legend Jimmy Greaves now holds on him.
For us, three points on Sunday would be a nice boost with us sitting in fourth place ahead of Saturday’s fixtures and if we could reach 17 points, the top of the table could be interesting depending on what happens elsewhere.
As ever though, we have to focus on ourselves – we all know we are still capable of putting in a performance that makes everyone cringe and we have to ensure that doesn’t happen.
WBA...
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I have no qualms against Jose’s pragmatic style in general, and if results are anything to go by, it’s hard to be critical.
This being said, for the first time this season, I was frustrated by Jose’s game plan. I thought we needed to be a lot more positive. Eventually, Jose agreed when he brought on the 2 Brazilians, but I feel we should have gone to that game plan far earlier and/or started with a more attacking plan. We left it very late, and I feel this could have been avoided.
Against that sort of team, one holding midfielder should be enough. I would have loved to see an inverted triangle with Hojbjerg holding, and Lo Celso and Tanguy both making runs into the opposition’s box.
Again, Jose will feel vindicated because he got his result in the end, but I saw a WBA team desperately short of quality, which we could have smashed had we been more positive.
I will take the win and move on!
Agree with pretty much all of that BS…..other than the fact it isn’t the first time I’ve been frustrated by his game plan! :- )
But DH… An answer to your statement about it being hard to distinguish between Spurs and those 3 clubs is an easy one for me.
We beat them. And whilst they are lowly in the PL, having won just 1 between them… Spurs have only lost 1 in 8. Drawn 2 and won 5. That’s why we are second in the PL and they are struggling. That is why we are so obviously the better team. 🙂
All PL clubs can sometimes make it tough for all the others. But, some matches will be easier than others, win, lose or draw. We didn’t make it hard for ourselves versus the Saints and MU, did we?
And so, although it was hard again for Spurs to perform at their best yesterday, against a lowly PL club, it doesn’t follow that it will be just as tough or tougher vs Man City, next. That’s just not how it works.
I may be the odd one out here…. But I wasn’t at all troubled by our performance yesterday. I wasn’t highly entertained by it. Of course not. But, I was always confident in getting the win…
TQ, in response to your post about us not having any goal attempts for a long time yesterday… The match is played over 90 + minutes. In that time, we had 19 goal attempts. That is a lot!
It doesn’t make the match more exciting than it was but that is not a stat from a team that didn’t put in the effort to score. And, regardless of only 5 attempts apparently being on target and only scoring the 1 goal…
I’m just being selfish HT……..leaving it so late to show any real attacking threat isn’t good for my heart! 🙂
DoncasterHotspur – Not sure you are reading the premier league correctly. We have found it more difficult against weaker teams. You seem to think if can smash 6 against United we should score 12 against West Brom. But it doesn’t work like that. A team like United come to play, to try and win the game. This gives us space to attack. For many teams playing us its about not losing, a point is a good result. So they keep it tight, defend their third and try and restrict shots on target. They are focused not on their game but stopping us from playing ours. That makes it harder and it would not surprise me if at the end of the season all our best performances come against better teams.
Thinking about it TQ… Didn’t Son have a very good opportunity to score early on in the match? And from a great move (Harry to Ndombele to Son), leading to it. Son for once took too long to get his shot off. If he had been his normal lethal finishing self yesterday, and scored that early chance, the game may well have been much more open from then on… If’s and buts! 🙂
HT…..that’s probably the one off target one I was refering to in my earlier post. :- )
Great posts here to and fro-
It was a hard fought battle and TQ whilst we all have the rite to call a bad game a bad game.
You my friend are not my target audience if its good you call it m8 if its bad like ways.
My granny had an ornament which told the weather.
And when it was good a nice wee woman came out when it was bad there was this wee grumpy old man and that’s the only time you saw him when it was bad.
That’s my point.
We were OK yesterday not great but OK.
I thought it was on target. This is why I wrote that we “apparently” only had 5 on target yesterday. I’m sure we had more. The Baggies were blocking shots in front of their goal, left right and centre.
I should’ve mentioned Bale in that move that led to Son’s early chance. It was a great long ball to Harry who then played in Tanguy. Tanguy then had a great touch and pass to set up Son… Son had an off day, all round..
HT, from memory most of the shot blocking was in the last 10-15 minutes after we sent on the cavalry and upped the tempo. Agree……Sonny was a bit off it yesterday, Sissoko wasn’t great for me either, not in terms of endeavour but certainly in terms of quality.
Niall…… no worries, I know you weren’t referring to me earlier! 🙂
We have only played one team in the top 6 so far.
The top 6 keeps changing 123. 🙂
And, yesterday alone saw 4 teams top the table in just the one day. It’s tight from the middle of the table up to the top right now. And, I mean, who would have seen the two Manchester clubs where they are just now? In 10th and 14th! Oh, and the Gooners in 11th! haha!
HT and Jod – my point was that i don’t think we will keep winning if we paly like that whether it be agaianst the top clubs or not. We have got away with it in the last three games but we won’t do so if we carry on playing like that.
Jod – I am perfectly capable of reading the league table. I think we are in a false position and after the next few games we will have a better idea of where we are. You have an amazing ability to totally misread other peoples posts so that you can get your usual ignorant/know it all snide comments in. Can you please point out where I said that we should score 12 against West Brom. All I have said is that we will need to play much better after the international break if we are to maintain our position in the league.
I agree with you on Sissoko. I thought that Son, Sissoko and Doherty were not really on their game yesterday. I can forgive Matt though because of his perfectly flighted ball to Harry for the winner.
But, on the whole, the reason why I’m not so down on yesterday’s performance is because I thought that the rest of the team all played well for the most part. Dier in particular. Harry may have scored the winner but Dier alone, prevented them from many goal scoring opportunities…
And, I don’t think it was Spurs making hard work of it. I give credit to WBA for that aspect of the game…
Funnily, on MotD last night, Ian Wright said that he thought Spurs were brilliant yesterday.
I like Mr Wright but even I had to laugh at an ex-Gooner saying that about the Spurs performance. I didn’t see it as bad as many have but it certainly wasn’t “brilliant”. (Dier was!) 😉
I suppose that compared to his beloved Arsenals poor performance vs a very good Villa, Spurs did look that much better to him.
I think that was sarcasm HT, you know he would only praise us grudgingly in exceptional circumstances! 🙂
That, for me, is the problem with playing Sissoko in games where the other team parks the bus.
Sissoko is great in transition, we all know that. However, his passing isn’t exactly world class, and although he does have the ability to do it, he only rarely tries to take an opponent on 1 v. 1 and get past him.
Against the bigger teams that afford us the space, Sissoko’s game is precious for our counter-attacking. Against the smaller teams, he always disappoints, I feel.
Players like Lo Celso or even Winks tend to offer more in this sort of game. If he was a little more settled, I’d even be tempted to play Alli in a deeper role for this sort of game, like MP used to on occasion.
In terms of how to set teams up to play, I thought it was very telling (some would call it brave) for Klopp to go to essentially a 4-2-4 vs City.
That is the sort of formation you’d expect from a manager when he is playing a smaller club. Yet Klopp decided that an open game vs. City was the perfect time to use players who can pressure the opponent. He accepted that while he was probably going to lose the midfield battle, he could go direct and hurt City. In the end, he got a draw at the Etihad, which he probably would have taken before the game.
However, had De Bruyne been his usual clinical self from the spot, Liverpool probably would have lost. Fine margins.
On the other hand, Mourinho probably was worried about us being too open with an attacking game plan against WBA, and that all it would take to unsettle us was a fluke WBA goal early in the game. So he chose to keep things tight until he had no choice but to go for it. In the end, he got the result, but how many of those games have we seen end up in a draw?
Different approaches, both with merits. But in the end, whatever the game plan, there is always an element of uncertainty in any game. We can go back to the West Ham draw, but what coach is ever going to plan on conceding a fluke own goal and/or conceding a goal on a “1 in a million” strike?
That is the beauty of football. What should happen doesn’t always.
“That is the beauty of football. What should happen doesn’t always.”
One could substitute the word “life” for the word “football.” Both have a large element of the capricious.
I agree with HT, yesterdays game wasn’t a bad game, yes it was frustrating and ugly, but that is what many of the lesser sides set out to do v Spurs, as has been said a draw is minimal of their requirements, a lucky win all the better for them, so grinding out becomes our way, so move on.
As for comparing the last 3 prem games v so-called lesser sides to playing any of the so-called top 6, I have no idea where this comparison comes from, for me it is just not feasible using those comparisons because they are two completely different animals, eg…all 3 WBA, BURNLEY, BRIGHTON all set out to stop us playing, frustrate, defend in numbers, deny any room, it did not work in the end, our higher class stood out in the end, thus 3 wins for us, now take say MC they will attack, play open football, so we now will do the same, its as simple as that and probably beat them. COYS
Forgot, Son’s time taking shot was on target, for some unknown reason he took an age to shoot, 2 or 3 touches enabled one of their defenders to get back, thus blocking on target shot, frustrating yes! but it happens, we would have seen/been talking about a completely different story if he had scored that early, that’s football. COYS