I think probably the less said about Tottenham Hotspur’s trip to the Library to face Arsenal in the North London Derby at the weekend is probably for the better, so let’s quickly turn our attentions towards NS Mura in Thursday’s Group G Europa Conference League clash.
We will undoubtedly see plenty of rotation again under head coach Nuno Espirito Santo, as despite growing calls for a change, I don’t see the club pulling the rug just yet, but pressure is undoubtedly growing and of more concern than the results of late, the performances are chalk and cheese to what we know this squad is capable of…even if we all accept we need significant improvement.
I know absolutely nothing about our next opponents other than what I’ve read on Wikipedia but with no disrespect meant, a Slovenian side with a Stadium capacity of circa 5500 leaves me thinking of a backwater club that will be physical and competitively ugly. Everything says it should be an easy victory but these are exactly the kind of European games that catch sides out and leave players not enjoying the trip.
This is another behind the settee game in my book, but we surely can’t lose again…can we?
I’ll have some of what you’re on Arky. lol
We need to see a reaction tonight and on Sunday.
Apparently, Pinky and Perky are having too much influence on team selection and coaching during matches. Players and coach are getting a bit hacked off with it.
OMG we have sideways , backwards Winks, the painful Doherty and the dreadful , one legged Lo Celso starting. Let’s hope Scarlett can score a few goals and give us hope for the future.
WW….I’ve said before Paratici and Hitchen shouldn’t be allowed to sit on the bench, if nothing else it doesn’t look good and is bound to give the impression that the manager is being undermined.
For the record, the reason they sit on the bench is because of Covid rules. The team are considered a bubble and nobody can enter/exit that bubble. It was explained a few weeks ago.
Hitchen and Paratici either have to remain in the bubble and they can’t then be allowed to sit close to fans, at the risk of having to leave the bubble. If they left the bubble, it would hurt their ability to do their day to day jobs around players.
Blame Covid for that one.
BS….sitting on the bench is fine but they shouldn’t be standing up and shouting at the players which I have seen them do. In my opinion this is undermining the manager and shouldn’t happen.
Could be we’ve all been reading the situation wrong and it’s the wider group dynamic that is the problem with it being a case of too many cooks.
Harry save some for Sunday
Well played Harry!
That’s what I’ve been missing!
Thanks goodness for the big guns. We were pretty dismal before they came on. Should not have been necessary.
We need to feed the harryicane
That’s what we’ve all been missing……someone who creates, he might fall over a bit but Lo Celso showed what he does when he has players making runs that he can play balls to, just as he does with Argentina.
Kane can be our fox in the box,
Well it was a win. The ‘fringe’ players didn’t to their job very well at all. Kane came on (I have no idea why) and showed little interest in being there, another poor substitution from the manager who is clueless. Because Harry is the first player ever to score a hat-trick in all three European competitions I suppose many will see that as a comeback (from wherever it was that he went). I’m afraid it really wasn’t a comeback and he is still in the same place, mores the pity. It was just one game so I wouldn’t get too excited, and it was against mediocre opponents. Let’s hope Nuno leaves him on the bench at the weekend so that we can find someone who will consistently score goals for us.
Good result
Lowly opposition, however you can only beat what’s in front of you, their goal let’s face it a worldie,
But good to see HK back on the score sheet, let’s hope he can do this at the weekend.
I do feel a bit sorry for Scarlett, Dele, and Gil who were OK first half, and may have been able to bring the result home.
But the big guns certainly hammered the result home.
Let’s hope its a springboard.
HT – just to comment on all of the so-called pundits who agree/agreed on Kane (I wonder what they’ll say after last night and how quick some of them will turn their coats, but that’s another story…).
Yes, they are all football men and know more about top end football than me – I’ll be the first to say that. But that still doesn’t mean they’re right all the time, that’s the point.
To prove that point, I’ll take an example out of my work. I work for an IT company and recruitment is tough right now. There’s a scarcity of available IT talent and lots of competition for it. We’ve gone to great lengths to try to improve our recruitment, and to try to get our recruitment decisions right, given how hard it is to recruit.
Recruitment remains an inexact science (as we all know as football fans) but there are ways to make it better/more accurate (multiple rounds of interviews, assessments, personality tests, tools etc).
A university in the US did a study to try and evaluate how accurate you could make a recruitment process by adding all of those things to your process.
Long story short: if you just do a single interview, their findings showed that there was about a 30% chance you were making a good decision. If you added every tool and technique on earth to your recruitment process (making it long and really inconvenient for prospective candidates), you could perhaps increase that percentage to somewhere between 60 and 65%. In other words, using all of the human knowledge we have at our disposal, there was still about a 35 to 40% chance we were going to be wrong.
Back to the pundits you were listing. Even if we all agree that they know as much about football as anyone on earth (debatable when it comes to some of the names you listed, but that’s another discussion), there is still a failrly significant chance they might still be wrong in the end.
That’s when critical thinking comes into play.
It was just a joke I made, BS. And those pundits I mentioned were just off the top of my head…
But it’s very arrogant of you to just dismiss them like that, as though they are all idiots who know nothing of the game. And nothing of how a player might be behaving in a game, etc.
I am just giving opinions based on straightforward observations, as were the various pundits. Surely it doesn’t really need or warrant such scientific analyses mate… Interesting, though it is.
Harry got on the end of stuff, with perfectly timed runs into the box last night. And he scored a very tasty hat-trick. It’s what I have not been seeing in the PL this season. Those runs! It’s what he does best. Simple as that.
Hopefully he can continue in this way, at the weekend.
If that came off as arrogant, it wasn’t the intention. I am not dismissing or questioing their knowledge. I am simply saying that despite all of this knowledge, they might still be wrong, as nobody gets it right 100% of the time.
Let’s be honest, I’m sure a quick Google search could help me find utterly ridiculous quotes from all of those pundits, where they have been badly wrong. That was the point I was making. And that we should all be wary of quoting those pundits.
As far as the game is concerned, it’s always better to win than lose, but how much can be read from beating Slovenian farmers?
I suppose we have confirmation that Kane still knows where the goal is, for whoever doubted it.
Funnily, the people who are likely to question Kane, and whether those goals really mean something given how poor the opposition was, are likely the same people who talked Dele Alli up last year after he scored that penalty against Marine.
I talked Dele up at that time because he played a good game. Players can play well or bad against any kind of opposition.
Am I now supposed to continue to talk Harry down because of the poor opposition last night?
He went on as a sub and quite possibly saved some Spurs embarrassment last night. It’s also possible that we would have still beaten them anyway. But if a player plays well, he plays well. No matter the opposition.
Well, I like to think that Harry remains the same player/person regardless of the game/opposition. The same talent, the same ability. The motivation may slightly vary but he is the consummate professional.
From that point of view, I struggle with the notion that an opinion on an player could vary greatly from one game to the next. It’s a far too small sample size to be representative.
I think Harry’s body of work in a Spurs shirt speaks for itself. I think Dele’s performances in the last 3 years speak for themselves as well. Regardless of what happens in a single game.
And…
Personally, I like to give the opposition some respect. They were not “farmers”. They are professional footballers.
Define professional. I was getting paid in the 5th tier of Belgian football, making me a “professional” by definition . that still doesn’t mean I was ever that good, or capable of giving a Spurs player much trouble.
If the definition of a “professional” is merely that he’s getting paid some money to play, the threshold is quite low.
I’ll wade in here on the ‘pundit’ discussion.
I’ve been watching football at the highest level (thanks to Spurs) for decades. During that time I’ve come to understand the game. Just like most of you on VS. Now, I believe my opinion on Spurs is just as ‘good’ as any pundit or anyone on VS. I hope you all believe the same about yourselves. The only advantage a pundit would have over us is if they are privvy to some form of ‘accurate’ (note the operative word) inside knowledge …. like Hoddle ‘may’ have regarding Spurs. If they do not have that knowledge then their opinion is no better than ours.
As far as opinions on Spurs go I place more credibility in comments by TQ, HT, BS, PY, and too many others to mention on VS because I understand where they are coming from (whether I agree with them or not) and they are not trying to to promote a career by being deliberately provocative.
For these reasons I stopped paying attention to what pundits think a long time ago and rarely give them any of my time. VS has a room full of experts on THFC and their opinions are as good as anyone’s. Never doubt that!
All those pundits I named were mentioned simply because I noticed that they were all in agreement with each other, on Harry K. This was my point. The fact that so many were of the same opinion. And I could only think of Murphy that wasn’t.
I didn’t name them because I thought they were all football geniuses with superior knowledge to us mere mortals.. Just that they were all ex-pros. Very experienced ex-pros that do know what it’s like to play with other ex-pros at the top level of the game…
Personally, I haven’t played at that level… So I will give them some credit at least. Regardless of when I sometimes disagree with any of them…