After three defeats on the spin, Tottenham Hotspur got their proverbial butts back on the horse with a Harry Kane inspired victory over West Bromwich Albion in our last match and now it’s all eyes to the FA Cup once again as we face Everton in the fifth round on Wednesday evening.
It might not have been a classic performance, but we were more on the front foot again for most of the 90 minutes and we did look better for it, but given the quality of the opposition it’s unlikely to have changed any opinions about manager Jose Mourinho.
The FA Cup is the FA Cup though and with Premier League form wobbling, it undoubtedly remains one of the best chances we have for silverware in the 2020/21 campaign as even the most optimistic Spurs fan probably has to accept with a 14 point gap to top spot, we aren’t challenging for the title anymore.
With a game in hand and a point better off than we are, Everton will be a tough cookie to crack though, and we are going to need to be better than we have been in recent weeks if we want to progress. With some rotation expected, the team selection could be absolutely key to this one.
I think I’ll take up my usual position, hiding behind the settee.
i agree HT but as i said their is a time and a place, we got back to 3-3 and 4-4 and had the momentum and still lost, sometimes you have to play your cards right and not go gun ho, not say shut up shop like park the bus, but be more savvy,
Yes, I agree with you on that 123.
And maybe I wouldn’t have enjoyed it so much – a match that we lost – if we hadn’t been so boringly defensive for most of this season…
To score 4 goals away from home, and to a very good team like Everton, that have a very shrewd and savvy manager like Ancelotti is impressive. But conceding 5 goals to them, or any other team for that matter, is not…
Talking of poor decisions, the replay clearly showed that Mina caught Dele’s leg so it should never have been a yellow for diving. Just shows, when things aren’t going your way you always get the rough end of the stick.
Well done the lads and Jose for setting them up in this way.Entertaining football you wanted and entertaining football you got. With the goals scored and the other clear chances we created this is a game we should have won quite easily. We didn’t because of that Sods Law operating once again; our best defender making two uncharacteristic mistakes one resulting in an iffy penalty given against us while a less iffy penalty for us was not given, Richarlison finding his shooting boots again after a long barren period and scoring from the most acute of angles. Sometimes you must just accept that it wasn’t to be and take the positives from the game. My only worry is the damage to our morale and the possibility that Jose will revert to his defensive ways.
123
Sorry M8 can’t agree, with TK here on this one m8.
It was a good entertaining match, at least we went for it, I am actually a happy loser.
Over the last two games we’ve started to play like a Spurs team.
Yep we couldve defended better and our keeper cudda/Shudda been better.
But by fek was I entertained tonight.
I will agree with Spurfect one I think this shows just a bit of squad weakness.
What I do know is that many of us have blamed Jose’s awful, negative tactics for our recent, very poor football and mostly losing form, of late.
But many of those that have defended Jose’s overly defensive ways will now feel it’s all justified. But Jose is responsible for both our defending and our attacking play, is he not?
It’s not because we have such inferior players, or a weak-arsed squad compared to all those teams we have lost to or drawn with this season. It’s not because there is some half-arsed, Gooner inspired devil worshiping hoodoo on THFC. Or, a white witches curse. It’s not because they all inherently lack a fighting spirit or a winning mentality……. That’s just mumbo-jumbo!
But what it is, I just don’t know. But then again, I’m not payed 15 million quid a year to know, understand and sort it all out, am I?!
Just let them play football like they know how to play football and see what happens, I say……. No charge!
And, If we park the bus and lose 1-0 to Everton, whilst looking like shit. Is that any better than losing by the 1 goal to Everton 5-4, whilst looking only half-like some shit?!
Ask Jose……….. He gets paid quite well for it!
I just get paid a few pound an hour for cleaning arses and hopefully keeping folks alive and well… So really, I know nothing… LOL!
But I do know exciting football when I see it. Whatever the result or score, win lose or draw………. Cup or no cup!
Goodnight all. And Hod bless….
123 sorry again chum
Wrote this before seeing your last post to HT.
Like another poster here, thought we had a decent shout for a pen, Davies defo brought his, arm to the Ball and this stopped the flight of the ball, the distance wasn’t an issue, so fo me a pen.
But when your lucks in I suppose.
Just woke up, saw the result and read through this thread. It must have been a very good game to watch and it sounds like we can take a lot of positives from it. As some have said, I can accept losing if the effort and desire to win is showing. We can beat City!
I’m willing to admit the following: I’m so tired of the git manager we now have that (a) I’ll blame him if the weather is rotten in Timbuktu, and (b) I’ll give him no credit if Spurs beat the arse ‘n wholes 10 x 0. He cannot do anything right in my eyes. It’s too late, mates. I want to see him sent packing and will accept no other than this. He’s all wrong for N17. Send him away. Yesterday.
The single greatest disappointment in my years supporting Spurs was the day I read that DL had hired JM as manager. It was worse than the year I saw us relegated. Far worse. I’ll never accept him.
If some newspaper writer coined the name “the special one”, so be it. What kind of git gives himself a name like this? He’s worse than contemplating the offspring of Boris Johnson with a syphilitic baboon birthed in a vat of vomit.
It was nice today to see our lads playing football. It seems the first time I’ve seen a Spurs team play football as opposed to looking lost since the loss to Poo in the CL final. But I admit I’m old and the memory is weak. Perhaps there was another decent match somewhere, but my dislike of JM wouldn’t allow me to remember.
Spurs still lost so grow up
Telling someone else to grow up is a sign of immaturity, no?
Well I suppose plenty of fans on VS will be happy: we played on the front foot, we had more possession, more shots, we scored 4 goals, Dele played, the game was very entertaining for the neutral supporter…
The only problem is… we lost. We’re now out of the FA Cup, a “winnable” competition for us this season, by all standards.
We’ll all have our opinions, but no matter the performance and the entertainment factor, personally I get no joy out of losing and being knocked out of a competition.
We will all see it differently, but I look at a game like this and it only reinforces my opinions on several things:
– If you play open football, one of 2 things needs to be true (and preferably both):
1. you need to be relatively sure that despite conceding chances and goals (which is inevitable when you are open), you’re going to score more than you concede;
2. you need to have quality defenders who are going to be able to deal with 1v1’s, and win enough duels to at least keep the team in the game.
The way I see it (and to a certain extent, I am assuming that JM sees it the same way), we cannot fulfil either of those conditions consistently at the moment, so therefore, playing open football in all games is always going to be a losing strategy overall.
Whether it’s a lack of quality in our defensive unit, or an inconsistency in our forward play for anyone not named Harry Kane, the conditions just aren’t there to approach every game on the front foot. And the better the opposition, the more these issues are highlighted. That is our reality today, as I see it.
So we can either be open and entertaining, but end up losing most of the time, or more conservative and boring, and give ourselves at least a chance of getting results in most games. It’s an ugly choice to have to make, as we can all agree on. But last night as a timely reminder of that reality, for me.
– If anybody is still expecting Dele Alli to walk back in the team and be our saviour, that can only be classified as one thing now: wishful thinking.
I am not writing this to single Dele Alli out. But last night’s performance was yet another relatively invisible performance, marred by misplaced passes and wrong decisions.
As I said, I am not writing this to single him out for criticism specifically. He was no worse than others. I am, however, writing this to dispel the notion that playing Alli is somehow the solution to all of our attacking problems.
Dele Alli hasn’t been an effective player for Spurs for about 2 years now. Expecting him to magically rediscover his best form just because he is played, just isn’t going to happen.
I could go on about the many individual mistakes which led to us conceding 5 games, but none of these things are new.
It all comes back to one thing, for me. JM can change the way we play and we’ll still have problems. We could change the manager and we’d still have problems. The issues are bigger than JM, and until those issues are addressed, it’s not another manager we need, it’s a magician..
That’s not to say that the game didn’t have any merit, but I just can’t watch a game of football “as a neutral” and see the merits of it when my team is involved.
BS …. The FA Cup is only winnable if you’re still in it. it’s winnable for all teams until they lose.
We still have a useful squad of players. We can play attacking football. We can defend effectively. The problem is we lack the consistency to do both together. It’s JMs job to sort that out and it’s not going well.
Geof – a competition is also made more winnable given who’s still in it. Take our run in the League Cup: the draw has been very kind to us overall and the only “big” team we’ve had to play en route to the final is Chelsea.
Given that teams like Sheffield, Bournemouth, and one of Wolves or Southampton will all still be in the competition in the next round, that would have given us a 43% chance, at minimum, of having a very winnable draw in the next round too.
If by attacking effectively, you mean relying on Kane to have a record-setting season to carry the team, then yes we can do that – when Kane is available. We’ve seen what happens to our attacking play when he isn’t there.
If by defending effectively, you mean having to play with 7 defensive-minded players to keep a clean sheet, yes we can do that too. But at the detriment of other things.
What we lack isn’t the consistency, it’s the quality to do both things together,.
I have been extremely critical of Mourinho’s style of play recently but have to give him credit this once for the way he set the team up to play last night .
However several of the players he inherited are simply not good enough . I will not single out individual players but making possession mistakes aroung our penelty area cost us the match . Mourinho can’t be blamed for those mistakes . Even if Mourinho left any new guy would still encounter the same problems and until we get in more quality players in we will continue , unfortunately , to lose matches which we ought to have won .
Fully agree.
There are some pretty contorted posts on here. As Belgian Spur has pointed out we did exactly what many on this site wanted and we lost. So we get people trying to twist it, not very convincingly, so that somehow it wasn’t a failure. Its OK if you want a good little club that knows its place, plays pretty football but doesn’t bother the big boys or actually win anything. But if you have any real ambition you want a way of playing that delivers results and this wasn’t it.
No one is twisting anything and no one is wrong for just expressing how they felt when watching the match.
I think that we are all aware that we lost and that we are no longer in the FA Cup.
Personally, it’s very simple. I enjoyed watching Spurs play in an exciting end to end cup football match. I didn’t know that we were actual losers until the final whistle blew. Because right up to the end we looked like we could still get the equaliser and take it to penalties…
So for more than 120 minutes I had a great time last night, even though we eventually lost it. It was very thrilling but losing football. So much better than dull, but still losing football… That’s all. And we lost! We lost 5-4! Which means we can no longer win the FA cup this season. WE LOST! 5-4!
I said before the game that I wasn’t expecting any magical renaissance from Dele but was still disappointed with his contribution when he came on. There were 2 or 3 glimpses of his undoubted quality where he made telling passes to attackers but this aside he looked to be lacking in energy and gave up on chasing the ball all too readily. As someone else suggested, I wonder if he has just become disinterested or has he had his spirit broken?
Hi folks,
I completely understand where BS is coming from, and agree with much of what he said, particularly re-our squad (team) I’ve said it myself on several occasions, we have around 7 good to world class players our club, 3 good to average, the rest are just average or not good enough, it did show in the latter stages with some of the subs we brought on.
However I know there are those bemoaning the result last night, but it was good to see us play fast entertaining football, win, lose, or draw, it shows we can do it.
I think as someone else said its just about getting the balance right, and, oh yes, that wee bit of luck we didn’t get.
I think the main positive for me to take from the game was that we showed a desire and intent to win the game, even if we did lose by the odd goal to a team that has been performing well this season.