Vital Spurs Debate Section

Match Thread – Will Spurs Give Fans Something To Ole About Or Will It Be Another Dis-United Showing

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Tottenham Hotspur fans can be forgiven for moving quickly on from the embarrassment that was the Newcastle United clash last weekend and with a point doing absolutely nothing for our hopes for a strong end to the 2020/21 Premier League campaign, many are again simply looking for a more Spurs like performance when we face Manchester United this coming Sunday.

Welcoming Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Red Devil’s to White Hart Lane, we all know this isn’t going to be an easy game at all as they will be hoping to chase local neighbours City down at the top of the table and cement their own second place finish this year. We still hanker on hopes of another Champions League adventure ourselves, but whether our ‘pragmatism’ under manager Jose Mourinho will see us get there is an entirely different story.

In terms of team news, Spurs will again be without Ben Davies and Matt Doherty, but the jury remains out on the returns of Toby Alderweireld and Serge Aurier as we see if there’s another chapter to the story of the ‘curious case of the Covid tests’.

Smoke, mirrors, behind the scenes shenanigans – we just have to hope the real Spurs show up, or this could get ugly. Or is that uglier?

Manchester United

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Draw

Lose

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  • Geofspurs says:

    6-1

  • PompeyYid says:

    Geof, morning early bird, did you get the worm lol! ok I know we are behind/ahead, jeez I have no idea.

    Thanks Danny for the latest match thread.

    MU next, no probs, backlash coming from us, so not as good a prediction as Geofs but 3-1 Spurs for me.

  • wentworth says:

    Watch out for the inevitable penalty to Man U. and their winning goal in the 98th minute.

  • TQ2Spurs says:

    I posted this on the previous thread in anticipation of this weekends game:

    Well……it’s going to be interesting to see if there is any kind of reaction from the players this weekend.

    We do have one big advantage having been knocked out of the EL, United have to travel to play their game against Granada on Thursday and we all know how these games can result in a hangover for the weekend PL games. It seems likely United will take the EL very seriously now that they have virtually no chance of winning the PL and are fairly comfortable in second place. I think we can expect them to field a strong team in the EL and rotate for the PL on Sunday with their top players only being used late on against us if needed.

    Question is…..will we be able to use the advantage from being the fresher team or will we see them again react poorly to the manager’s adverse comments and negative tactics?

  • Hot Tottingham says:

    THFC. The Good The Bad And The Ugly.

    Please just be good and win this Spurs… Pretty please… Or it could get ugly. And very, very bad…

    Up the Spurs!

    • TK says:

      Ouch! pretty please. We don’t go for “pretty” in football talk, mate. We want a beautifully played win. lol

  • Hot Tottingham says:

    If Jose was still managing United this weekend, away to Spurs, with MP still at the helm. And, with the exact same players that Ole has to choose from. He’d probably park the bus…

    Think about it!

    • BelgianSpur says:

      Ironically, when that was last the case, United were above us in the table. Probably something to be learned from that as well.

  • TQ2Spurs says:

    Thinking about it just depresses me HT! 🙁

  • PompeyYid says:

    HT, there you go, am thinking about, parking the bus, oh my head hurts, thanks a lot mate. LOL! COYS

  • Hot Tottingham says:

    Hugo
    Aurier Sanchez Dier Reguilon
    Sissoko Hojbjerg Ndombele
    Lamela Kane Son

    This is the line-up that started at OT earlier in the season. The match in which we thrashed United 6-1! And, there’s apparently a few crap defenders there as I understand it from many of our supporters..

    We won that match with 62% possession. 22 shots on goal to United’s 5. We scored 6 foals from 8 being on target. Our passing accuracy was at 90%. United’s just 83%… We dominated them!

    What’s happened Jose? Why did we get scared?

  • Niall D says:

    HT
    I’m(probably) one of those whom, you think said our defenders are crap, I don’t think they’re crap.
    I think a few things about them, almost all of them this season have made mistakes which have cost us games, a lot of these have been unforced errors.
    Some of them are low on confidence and often during the game need extra support from our midfield and even forwards, this isn’t just for corners and free kicks.
    They haven’t gelled well enough to inspire any confidence, IMO, is that their fault? Or the manager and coaches.
    I suppose I am comparing them to, Verts, Tobs, Walker, and Rose and something akin to that is what I want. Am I wrong to want something like that.
    I don’t think they are crap, but I do think that there is room for improvement in our teams defending and I do not think that some of the incumbent players can move us forward next season.

  • Geofspurs says:

    ND …. It’s hard when we compare what we have with what we used to have. I still compare every midfielder to Modric …. and then I feel depressed!

  • Hot Tottingham says:

    Hi Niall. That wasn’t meant as a criticism of anyones POV on those guys or any others. (Aurier, Dier, Sanchez specifically). And then Sissoko as well. maybe even Lamela. All players that have got a lot of stick over the years.

    I was just trying to make sense of why we started the season so well with whoever was playing. And why now we just don’t know what we will get from any of them. Even the ones we all rate.

    I will add that when MP’s Spurs were riding high. Not only were Jan and Toby regular starters. But Sanchez was too. He often had to cover for either of them when they were injured. He played quite a lot of matches.

    Aurier was looking good at the start of this season. As was Dier. What happened? Maybe they are all just knackered?! 🙂 ???

  • wentworth says:

    Eddie Howe still available. Waiting for the call from Levy. Celtic is a poison chalice.

  • Hot Tottingham says:

    I also thought that Toby was having a pretty good season. And yet I was okay with him leaving at the end of last season. Thinking he was quickly fading like Jan was…

    Now, even Toby is apparently in JM’s bad books. Why?

  • DoncasterHotspur says:

    Park the bus, park the bus Tottenham Hotspur,
    Park the bus, park the bus I say
    Park the bus, park the bus Tottenham Hotspur,
    That’s football the Mourinho Way.

    Sorry TK – not up to your standards of poetry, it’s the best I can do at the moment. I will become inspired though when Jose is gone.

    COYS

  • TK says:

    last match versus Manure we played with Hot Spurs. result was lots of possession and a magnificent 1 x 6 win.

    Since then the Miserable (not so Special) One has imposed the tactics far too ofter of playing with Cold Spurs. It’s really really hard to look good and to do anything but lose when you try to dominate a match without possession. Dominate without possession? It can make a grown man cry contemplating the thought.

    So the Mourinho attitude is that possession is bad because its most likely outcome is to lose the ball. So, to avoid losing the ball, Mourinho wants to give it to the other team from the start, to sit back and let the opponents attack with the (crazy) idea that we’ll win lots of matches making dozens of counterattacking goals.

    Wow. Sit back, give the gift of possession to the other team because otherwise we’ll eventually lose possession anyway–this is the path to mental exhaustion for our players and relatively few chances for our team to ripple the cords on the other end of the pitch. I have seen matches where this kind of attitude wins a match. Brazil won a match versus Argentina some years back doing this, but for them the tactic was such a shock that Argentina wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. But for Mourinho this is the first option about how to play, so all other teams know how to play against us when our idea is to give them the ball consistently and dare them to wear us down. The fact is that they are wearing us down when we decide that possession is a crime. You’d think the ball was like cocaine and possession gets you beaten to death by an American copper.

    Muhammed Ali rope-a-doped George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle (Kinshasa is not a jungle–check out Fifi Innocent by Luambo Franco and Simaro on youtube or some other music locator), and no one expected what Ali did and Foreman didn’t figure it out until he was sitting on his butt in utter confusion. But everyone in God’s cosmos knows what Mourinho is doing with his version of rope-a-dope, and when the world knows that we are afraid to possess the ball, we’re going to lose a lot of matches. zero points out of a possible three is not a desired result, but Mourinho the Miserable seems to thinks it is.

    Step 2: then blame the players and claim they didn’t listen to you.

    Enough to make a grown man cry.

  • DoncasterHotspur says:

    HT – TK & Wentworth – great posts from all of you towards the end of the Newcastle match thread, far more inspiring than anything we saw in the match.

  • TK says:

    Play like football is poetry. Make it flow. Make the words play in concert with one another. Don’t play like you’re afraid of the ball. Foot-ball. Play with the ball on your feet, not on their’s. when we say to dare is to do we shouldn’t be daring for them to punch us in the face. Here’s a gift from us to you–take the ball, I’m afraid of it. I dare you to beat me up. Much of the time they will do just that. Don’t dare them to do it to us. That’s getting it backwards.

  • TK says:

    Thanks for your kind words, DH.

  • TK says:

    Here’s the objective when playing a football match. Win beautifully. Win poetically. Don’t bore your supporters with the way you play. Remember that winning can be losing if you’re doing it wrong. Play like every young child watching for the first time will be dazzled and fall in love and want in their heart to come back for the rest of their life.

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