Match Day Thread Tottenham Hotspur v Wolverhampton Wanderers

Dele slowly rediscovering his form, he had another good game today and worked hard, it is amazing what being shown some faith by the manager and a run in the team can do. Good players do not lose their ability, they just need a manager who knows how to get the best out of them.

 

It also helps that he's well rested and has good reason to play with a lot of "**** you" in his stride

 

I think this applies to Lo Celso and Ndombele too. If Pep Guardiola was our manager I could see him playing all three of them behind Kane and Son with Skipp in the Fernandinho role.

 

Ndombele I think will be moved on in the summer. Hopefully get a decent amount for him and use that to get a central midfielder who can play regularly and doesn’t look lazy or overweight.

I’m not the biggest fan of Lo Celso and in an ideal world i’d get rid of the pair of them but right now if I had to keep one then I’d choose GLC over Ndombele.

 

Ndombele is a luxury player who is inconsistent and we can't afford him.

 

If Pep was our manager he’d likely sell all three.

 

Mason unimpressed with the MOTM choice.
Apparently Gary Neville said that he couldn't be bothered, so he just picked Coady. WTF is that? If you can't be bothered, then quit. Twat.

 

Pass map time

please log in to view this image

What stands out here is that, if you compare it to the Sheffield United passmap where there was a lot of interplay between Aurier and Lo Celso before Lo Celso moved it on, here the transition from the back is through the centre with the thick lines between Dier, Hojbjerg, Lo Celso and I think Dele (it's hard to make out due to that part of the pitch being obliterated with thick slugs in such a small space) while Tanganga is moving the ball into Bale to take it forward where he's bringing in Kane, Dele and Lo Celso higher up the pitch

Or, to put it another way, we're not dogmatically sticking to a tactical plan regardless of who is or isn't in the starting lineup, which is nice...

 

Am I misunderstanding what centrality means? Not sure how it can be Hojbjerg, regardless of how it's interpreted.

 

please log in to view this image

Spurs v Wolves 17th May 1972.

 

IIRC, centrality is less about positioning and more about which player connected the most passes from one player to another

In this case it's pretty easy to understand given the amount of traffic you can say going to and from Hojbjerg, however other times it makes less sense for example against both Leeds and Sheff Utd the player who had the most centrality was...Eric Dier???

 

Well done Mason for challenging the pundit view.

 

Graph theory.

In this case, the node whose in/out edge "weights" sum up to the
largest value (X ---> Y means edge from X to Y, X -- w --> Y means
the edge from X to Y has a "weight" of w) .

The players are the graph nodes / X passes to Y is an edge / the
number of times X passes to Y is the edge weight.

 

What's Y in this case, though? The middle of the pitch? The centre of the pitch from left to right only?

 

Y is another player.

The use of the word "centrality" is confusing.
In graph theory, the term is graph connectivity analysis.
On the graph shown, Hojbjerg is the "most connected" node.

Connectivity analysis is topology (the structure of the graph is all
that matters, not how/where the nodes may be in the physical world) .

 

4 days before I was born...!

 

If he was our manager our wage bill would become unsustainable within a month

 

I was 15, bunked off school to get to the ground early , got detention for the next 7 school days , well worth it

 

Coady saved them from a hammering.
Whilst it’s obviously not PC to award it to a player from the losing team, it was probably the right choice.
Mason has got Spurs playing to your strengths a lot more than the “Special” One and results have generally been better.

Which is why Coady played a blinder.