Match Day Thread Tottenham Hotspur v Stoke City

Simple question: Which player are opponents targeting knowing they're a weakness in our team, Dele or Aurier?

So why the hell is Dele the topic of the argument?

 

That is a depressing list...and I've checked it twice.

 

The answer is to coach the good players to play better, not spending another 300m getting more of the same....

 

Who said anything about spending £300m? A few more Hojbjerg value signings and we’d be laughing. Most of our best players in recent years cost us less than £20m each. Utilise the scouts and follow that module to find more good buys whilst binning those who don’t offer enough.

 

We've signed nine players under Mourinho. I don't think any are obvious improvements on what we had. The truth is there are 25 world class players in the world and the next 300 are pretty similar. There are 20 clubs like us trying to unearth talent....there is no way of getting an edge.

 

There is a way and that is buy players that enhance the team even if on paper they are not that good .All that matters is the total of the team not the individual parts .

 

Hojbjerg and Reguilon are certainly improvements. Vinicius when given the chance has also impressed as a good stand-in for Kane and so he’s essentially an improvement on no one which is what we had last season. Gedson has certainly been a disaster and Bergwijn has fallen off a cliff after bursting onto the scene. Doherty and Bale haven’t had the desired impact (yet) whilst Hart surprised many usurping Gazzaniga as second choice. We can’t judge Rodon yet as he’s played just one full game.

I’m not sure I’d agree that after the world’s best the next 300 are similar. I think there’s somewhat of a tier system in football (Messi/ Ronaldo God tier, world class, great, very good, good, average, poor etc). At Spurs right now we’ve got too many who are probably between good and average when we need to be aiming for very good/ great or youngsters who are potentially good/ great if we want to push on. A number of players have been here for many years and they’ve either seen their best years or never kicked on as desired, realistically we can’t coach those types to be better any more therefore we need to utilise the scouting team to find us upgrades.

 

Got a feeling they were all naughty and not nice.

 

The answer is to fix what doesn't work

What doesn't work if the triangle at the RB spot, as opponents are targeting Aurier knowing that
a.) Aurier has a mistake in him
b.) Toby is half a yard too slow to cover Aurier
c.) Sissoko lacks the defensive nous to protect him

And that's the issue, as opponents know it's a matter of time before two of those line up and they're going to create a chance at best, win a set piece at worst - and since the latter is arguably worse than the former, this is why zeroing in on Dele would only make sense if he's expected to bring in the transfer funds to fix this

There's a problem with that, however: the solution would need to be HG, what with our Non-HG quota still being an issue, so it would have made more sense to keep singling out Sanchez to get him out the door so that we free up a Non-HG spot so can sign anyone we want, not anyone who fits into a narrow band of what can do a job

 

It's the way any distribution works. By definition the 21st best player in the world is better than the 320th best but it's quite hard to tell which is which, especially which young player is going to be better than another in the future. Look at something simple like athletics.....the difference in times over the top 20 is clear, but after that they are much closer so that the difference between the 200th and 300th is barely discernible. And this is a single easily measurable skill. In football the players are multi-skilled and that makes it even more difficult to do relative measurements. Successful teams don't have to have the best players. They need to be coached to work together. Sometimes as @Solid_Air 2 suggests adding a particular player into a mix makes a huge difference.

 

I said this (Kane and Son are good the rest are just meh) at the beginning of the season when I was quite pessimistic about Spurs’s chance of a good season.

I think this current squad can definitely win a cup but the league campaign won’t be any better than top 6. This is why I don’t expect too much from them in some games and tbh I’ve found myself less annoyed because of my reduced standards

 

Only Liverpool are in a better situation than us squad wise. But it will be a close race all round especially if Liverpool have more injuries.

 

Chelsea and City have better overall squads. Liverpool have already had injuries and still top of the league.

Spurs can finish 6th again and do well (hopefully win) a cup but I think the defensive issues will cost Spurs top 4 as January is such a hard time to get who you need unless you’re willing to overspend massively

 

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