Having utterly failed to take advantage of a Fulham side that had to have match sharpness questions hanging over their heads, Tottenham Hotspur’s fixture this Sunday sees us travel to Bramall Lane to face a very struggling Sheffield United side.
With Chris Wilder’s side putting in phenomenal showings last season, the wheels have roundly fallen off the bus and they find themselves in bottom place in the Premier League table, with only one win from 18.
On paper, Spurs’ chances of taking all three points are aided by the fact that they will be reportedly missing seven players and although Wilder hasn’t named them, it could include Enda Stevens, Oli McBurnie, George Baldock and Jack Robinson.
As for ourselves, only Giovani Lo Celso remains out as Steven Bergwijn could come back into contention and of course, Gareth Bale now has more minutes under his belt as well.
As ever though, it comes down to us, our approach to the game and whether or not we can kill them off, or like Fulham, simply play in a manner that gives them a second wind and gets them back into the game.
It’ll take a brave fan to bet on this one as United’s one victory came in their last match, so you can somewhat see the headlines already.
Will we have a few answers or simply more questions?
Stan Rosenthal – If you take out one of the back three you force the wing backs to become full backs, there’s no free lunch. Either they sit deeper, which may mean less chance being created not more, or you go in for Leeds United style all or nothing football. In that scenario the full backs bomb forward anyway and hope we don’t get picked off on the counter. I’m also not sure what positions N’Dombele and Lo Celso are actually playing in your set up, are they both midfield players or is one of them playing as a 10 ?
PY – every team has dropped points this year. If you feel we should be top, I suspect most City/Liverpool/United/Chelsea fans would feel exactly the same, and point to the talent in their squads, and missed opportunities as well… And probably rightly so.
It’s unrealistic to expect us to be perfect, all the while expecting other teams’ shortcomings to be the norm…
BS
I’m sort of with PY here.
I just don’t think some of the other teams had the poor luck we had against N/Castle or even W/Ham.
I said at the time those two results would cost us.
Or even the Comedy of errors against Leicester
Or the ungiven foul against Liverpool
Or the world class saves made by the Palace and Fulham keepers.
I feel some of the other sides did not have our constant run of bad luck.
PY. What has made you change your tune? From always saying it’s the win that matters, not how we won. And now to not being happy at winning by more goals?
* Not to be happy at NOT winning by more goals*
HT, great question there, YES! I still say its the win that matters, I haven’t really changed my tune, because I can see even the way we are set up we can score more goals.
By us keeping on the front foot, comes the old saying best line of defense is attack, what I probably find irksome is the so definate way we sit back and defend, thus inviting the opposition on to us, esp at 1 goal up, you know yourself all it takes to get that equaliser, thus dropping points, is a fluke, a defensive error or a worldie, and we have done this 5 times, costing 10 points.
Mind I must add I don’t think my heart can take much more of this fretting/dirty pants time whilst holding on to a slim lead. COYS
I’m with you on that, PY…
Niall – believe me, I would like nothing more than for our rivals to continue to drop points, and for us to find some consistency.
But I just think that what is true for us is true for them. We’ll have spells where luck goes our way, and spells where luck goes against us – but over the course of a season, all of that tends to even itself out. And Ithink all teams face that reality.
I’m sure that Liverpool fans must be wondering what happened to them when they got beat 7-2 by Villa. They’ll classify that result as uncharacteristic.
Our 1-6 demolition of Man U had a bit of luck to it as well, if we’re honest – which is a good example of both having bit of luck on our side, and an example of how a rival could feel hard done by at the same time.
Based on what most fans expected at the beginnig of the season, we thought we’d be in the mix for top four but no more, given where City and Liverpool were, and how much Chelsea had spent on world class talent.
It seems like spending a few weeks top of the table has raised expectations, unrealistically so in my opinion. I would have gladly taken the return of a top 4 finish and a cup win before the season began, and we’re still possibly on track to meet that objective. Seeing a manager come in and win the league in his first full season is extremely rare, yet that what some are expecting, apparently.
If we could win a trophy this year, whatever that trophy is, and use that as a stepping stone to go on to bigger and better things, that would be perfectly acceptable for me.
On Tanguy and Lo Celso playing and working well in the same starting line-up? Well, of course they can. And I’d love to see it on a more regular basis. I think we’ve only seen it once before. But I can’t remember the match.
It could be in a 433 formation with Hojbjerg sitting. (Or more a 4-1-2-3?). Or 3 at the back, with 2 wingbacks, Hojbjerg, Ndombele and Lo Celso as the central 3 of a 3-5-2 formation.. Or variations thereof…
Why not Jose?
I don’t expect us to be at the top of the PL. Or to be winning it this season. Although the way it’s going so far, why not?
But it’s not in the slightest bit unrealistic to be suggesting that we could well be at the top right now, when winning just two of the 6 matches that we have drawn would indeed see us above MU on GD.
And if we consider that the last two draws for example, were against the lowly Fulham and an out of form Wolves… And that both draws came from Spurs in winning positions and with late equalisers… It was more than realistic to have expected the 3 points in both those matches…… Surely!
An English friend of mine once told me “if my aunt had testicles, she’d be my uncle” – that has always made me laugh, but it’s a word of caution about “if”.
If we hadn’t dropped the points that we did…
We can all try to rationalise that we could/should have won those games, as there were seemingly logical, valid reasons to believe so. But in football, things rarely go according to plan, in any season.
What “if” Liverpool had played this season the way the played last year (99 points over 38 games = average of 2,6 points per game)? With that average they’d currently be top of the league, 10 points clear of second.
They would have arguably been just as justified in expecting similar levels of performance before the season started, given that they had a settled squad and manager, no big departures, and world class talent in the form of Thiago Alcantara and Diego Jota coming in.
What “if” Chelsea’s stars had clicked? Given the track record of the players they bought, they would have been justified in believing those players would hit the ground running…
I could go on but you get the point.
We’ll obviously look at the situation from our point of view, but fans at every club are doing the same, also feeling hard done by, based on how the season is going for them.
Once again your response has totally missed the whole point of my post. Which is not about the Ifs and Buts, but it was an answer to you suggesting that it is an unrealistic expectation for anyone of us to be seeing Spurs at the top of the PL right now….. It really isn’t at all unrealistic.
Regardless of what happens in other games and with other teams, I am talking Spurs. And Spurs really should have beaten Fulham and Wolves for example….. Most would agree…….
I will suggest that you always underestimate Spurs and also with a lot of what ifs…….
I’ll not underestimate this team and I’ll use what ifs, if I choose ;-)… It’s all just speculation about what may or may not happen tomorrow. And there will always be frustration and regret about what could’ve or should’ve happened, but didn’t happen yesterday… It’s just normal to think this way……. Aunties with dicks is just a silly and meaningless jest when talking about Spurs giving away leads against mediocre teams at the bottom of the PL….. Liverpool or any other club has nothing to do with it…
HT – at the very least, then, I think you are drawing conclusions based on a very small sample size. Every year, teams have purple patches where games go their way and they move up the table for a short period of time. Very few are able to keep that up. That’s not underestimating a team, that just making a fairly rational observation based on decades of ebbs and flows PL football.
Even if I went along and agreed that we should have won those 2 games, what’s to say that our rivals couldn’t/wouldn’t have won what they saw as winnable games too, by the same logic? We could be 6 points better off, but had Liverpool beaten WBA, Fulham or Newcastle, gotten something from their game against Southampton (all of those results coming in the last month or so, and all very winnable games for Liverpool), they’d still be above us!
This is where we fundamentally disagree. You seem to argue that we could have won these 2 games. I am just saying that by that exact same logic, teams around us could have won theirs too… When you say “regardless of what happens in other games and with other teams” – that’s just not how a football league works, to me. But we’ll have to agree to disagree.
And even if I were top right now, there would still be a very long way between that and winning the PL. Nobody gets a trophy for being top at the end of January. I certainly wouldn’t give it more importance than it deserves, but if you want to hold your breath, be my guest…