Mourinho...how long will he be given?

On the day of his signing, I remember us having a discussion about Llorente and his merits and attributes. I doubt that he'd make the top 100 strikers in the world and he really isn't capable of running very fast at all. However, if you hit the ball high onto his head, in the box, he will cause absolute mayhem and score goals.

Mauricio Pochettino spent a season and a half completely misusing him, playing him as if he was Harry Kane. Only when we accepted what he could do well and what he couldn't do at all, did we start to get the benefit of him. We didn't get the best out of Janssen either. I know he became overweight and a real problem, but there was a player in there, just not one like Kane. He was great at holding the ball up and laying it off but couldn't spray passes around midfield, like Kane.

Right now, a Janssen or Llorente would be really good for Mourinho. We lack any real dominant physical presence through our spine. Yesterday, from front to back, we had Lucas/Dele or Son, Harry Winks and Alderweireld/Jan Vertonghen. Being nice, it's a bit....well, nice. We could have done with someone who's a bit of a handful and creates a bit of danger from dead balls, even if the rest of their game isn't at the absolute elite level.

 

The weird thing is, when we were a much smaller club, we had Defoe, Berbatov, Keane and Bent as a strike force. This fecking about with only one striker is just a complete nonsense. Why do it?

 

I'd agree with that. We won't get a world class/ top class striker to play back up to Kane.

I'd disagree with that, Dele has been shocking for most of this season, a good spell when Jose first came but back to being his 'brother'. His inconsistency for the last two and a half years is now becoming too much a problem. I said it a few weeks back but if we got a good enough offer, I'd happily sell now, I no longer see him as an irreplaceable member of this squad.

Son and Lucas are great wing-forwards but they're not great strikers, Son was able to fill in adequately enough for a spell last season but he massively needed Llorente to do so. Strikers considered between the 40th to probably the 100th best striker in the world would offer us more in the position that any of Son/ Lucas/ Dele in my opinion. We need someone who's trained the position for most of their career, there are certain knacks and minimalistic tendencies that separate them from a makeshift striker and it makes all the difference.

 

I've long said that Poch shouldn't have been using a target man like Janssen or Llorente as the bench option but a poacher closer in style to Defoe, because what we often needed was somebody that half second quicker to the ball than anyone else in the box

The one player that immediately comes to mind for this is Danny Ings, who if he signed for us in 2015 would have been that exact player and done a job for us - but he thought it would be nice to have a paid holiday on the Saltypool bench for a few years

 

Dele and Son have scored a goal in every third PL match they have played on average. That's despite not playing as a striker most of the time. The only player on that list who can better that is Jesus. the others are not even close.

 

Where were we in the League when they were playing for us? Apart from Berbatov, none of them are better than Dele or Son as all round players.

 

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Correct. And the overwhelming majority of those goals were scored when they were playing within a system that included a proper striker. Take that away and the goals literally dry up - we've failed to score in 3 games running for the first time in over 6 years. It is totally illogical to suggest that a player's impact in an optimum system will simply carry over when that system is compromised.

As for Dele, I can see you're a big fan but let's call a spade a spade: over the past 2 years his goals to games ratio has dropped to 1 in 5, and is on the brink of becoming 1 in 6.

 

I get why people are clambering for Troy Parrott to get some game time and into the match day squad, but he is not yet even 18 years old. Great potential he may have but he is not yet ready to be leading the line for THFC. If he was ready Mourinho would be picking him more regularly, ideally he gets a few minutes here and there to ease him in. Also, if Parrott plays and does OK, Levy will turn round to Mourinho and tell him to use Parrott instead of bringing in a desperately needed new CF.

 

Of course they are going to score fewer goals when Kane isn't playing. That's because he is being replaced in the team by an inferior player. But then also replacing Moura by someone like Llorente makes things worse not better. And the same people who are calling for Parrott to be in the team are saying that we need someone who has experience of playing the 'striker' role when Parrott clearly has hardly any experience of anything at the top level.
Dele is going through a bad patch for sure but we know what he can do and I think he will come out of it.

 

For what it's worth I'm very much not calling for Parrott to be thrown into the mixer as I think the experience could destroy his confidence. By contrast, Kane was able to flourish from such a young age because his experiences on loan had greatly built up his mental fortitude, and our expectations were so much lower 6 years ago than they are now. I fully support Maureen's decision not to play Troy, but will ask along similar lines to what DH regularly points out: he currently isn't playing for the senior team or for the U23's, nor do we seem interested in sending him out on loan. So we are currently facing a possibility that the most promising striker to come through the academy since Kane will go an entire season barely playing any actual competitive football, which is absurd.

This isn't just a matter of replacing Kane with an inferior player in Son or Lucas, it's a case of replacing Kane with an inferior player AND an inferior system. Son and Lucas in particular visibly played better last season when Llorente was on the pitch than when he wasn't. Son's performances against City in the CL and Lucas against Ajax immediately spring to mind. In fact one might argue that Poch throwing Llorente on at HT in Dam was the turning point of the game...until that point we couldn't lay a glove on them and were deservedly trailing.

You rightly speak about transfers as calculated gambles. Lots of fans bemoan the money we wasted on Janssen for example. Yet when that gamble pays off, the gains far outweigh the potential losses. Case in point: Divock Origi - a player who you would never select up front if any of Son/Lucas/Alli were available - scored just 3 CL goals last season. I'll give you a moment to recall when they were. Those three goals alone were probably worth £40-50m to Liverpool.

As for Alli, this 'bad patch' now extends all the way back to the end of 2018, save for a handful of good performances when Maureen took over. He, like many others at our club, is dining on the heights of 16/17, and should be sold if a decent offer comes in.

 

Liverpool don't really have an orthodox striker though.....when Origi plays they also play an inferior system. He was definitely in the right place a few times in the CL last season but Barcelona should never had given him the chance to win that match. If we had signed Origi he would probably been played as much as Llorente did.

 

Yeah, we were well and truly ****ed when Levy turned around and said that we should play this one youth team striker instead of Adebayor or Soldado...

 

What you say may well be true, but I really don't understand your point here. How does what you say mean that it is ok for us in 2020 to have just one out and out striker?

We were flawed back then because we were soft in the middle. Redknapp sorts that out to a degree by bringing in the likes of Palacios, Parker etc. plus some defenders. Since then pretty much all the way through to Dembele/Wanyama, we've had some kind of solidity in the middle. Now we don't have that anymore really. Plus, we don't have a strike force, we have one striker.

We have now gone backwards and we are holding the entire spine of the squad together with the gaffer tape that is Sissoko, Eriksen and Kane in the hope that we can squint and make progress and maybe nobody will notice that we are subpar as an actual eleven on the pitch.

Things is, now other bang average teams, that happen to better drilled, have noticed.

I'm not #LevyOUT but I'm most definitely #LevySORTITOUT!!!

 

Okay, I've changed my mind. We don't need a striker...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/footbal...notebook-islam-slimani-loan-monaco-leicester/

If we even think of loaning a player off Leicester, then it's time to get the torches and pitchforks out.

 

Hardly the same is it, Kane was older, been out on loan a few times and gained experience before he got his chance, unlike Parrott.

 

The thing people forget (or overlook...) about Harry Kane is that the season before his breakthrough he was seen as a flop due to his loans at Norwich and Leicester being a complete waste of time for everyone involved. Similar can be said for Ryan Mason, whose loan to Lorient was so misjudged it's genuinely worth asking if we meant to loan him to Orient but there was a typo in the text message

Loans don't automatically make players ready to step up: Steven Caulker had plenty of loans yet only managed a season in our first team before being shipped out, which is still one better than Alex Pritchard who did well on various loans and promptly sold to Norwich

More than anything else, think of all the players who were never loaned yet stepped up, with the obvious examples being Ledley King and Harry Winks

 

Kane already had close to 70 competitive games under his belt and - by his own admission in interviews later in his career - had developed a real mental resilience as a result of going out on loan - precisely because the moves often didn't work out as planned and he had fans - looking for a convenient scapegoat - on his back .

Secondly, and i pointed this out above, our general expectations under AVB and Interim were significantly lower than they are now. Back then we were happy to be treading water in the top 6. Fast forward 4 CL campaigns and a shiny new stadium later, and fans forking out for the most expensive tickets in the country rightly expect more than to be top 6 stocking fillers.

Parrot by comparison has literally zero experience, and would be walking into a dangerously toxic atmosphere with the weight of 62,000 fans on his shoulders. I fully support Maureen's position on this and have rarely disagreed with you and Brian so strongly about something. Maureen's handling of the Tanganga situation also indicates that he will call upon young players, as and when he feels they can be trusted and more importantly can cope with the pressures unique to this season's tragicomedy. Those calling for Skipp to start every game would also do well to note that Poch also apparently saw very little in him in 2 seasons to steadily increase his game time, so to beat Maureen over the head with that same stick is counter-intuitive.

Right, I've defended Maureen quite enough for one evening. I'm off to immerse my fingers in a vat of acid to atone.

 

As I said elsewhere, there's plenty of players who disprove that loans maketh man, case in point ledley King went straight into the first team and stayed there for a decade (when his knee would let him) while Harry Winks was drip-fed into the first team via sub appearances and the occasional start in low-priority fixtures, and that's the key thing about Winks' development: he was in matchday squads which made it possible to drip-feed him some minutes to acclimatise, something Parrot cannot claim because he's in the limbo between the first team and U23s that Poch was regularly criticised for but when Steptonho does the exact same thing people look for excuses not to point this out

 

I don't think that any paying spectator, outside of anyone who's spent this season living in a cave, has any significant expectations of the team at this point. We haven't won a game in 4 matches...or scored a goal in three. The only measure of success in yesterday's game, was that we managed to keep a clean sheet for the first time since god was in short trousers.

I've watched Mourinho repeatedly pick Dier, Eriksen, Rose and Aurier, despite them regularly putting in performances that deserve the expression "a complete ****ing travesty"...and occasionally, I've paid for the privilege to see it. Mourinho wouldn't pick Kevin de Bruyne or Salah when they were at Chelsea, so I'm not going with him being the arbiter of when a player deserves a shot.

Mourinho will do what's good for Mourinho - first, last and always. I wouldn't trust him to act in the best interests of anyone else, even if it coincided with his own best interests. Even his biggest fans on here suspect that he's picking certain players to make a point to Levy about the paucity of options. Let's face it, the bloke's not a Tottenham manager and will be gone soon enough. I just hope that he doesn't piss off/sell off the family silver before he goes.