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Andre Villas-Boas - Head Coach

ArcspacE said:
Was away last week - only kept in touch with the headlines, etc.

Does anyone have a link to an AVB press-conference / interview following his appointment or has that not happened yet? Very excited about this


Apologies if that has been discussed already
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Expected to hold a press conference on Thursday with the kit launch, not confirmed though
 
thfcsteff said:
Such a shame African, we always got on so well yet something seems to have happened ever since Harry...ah well, we will find man-love again!!!! ;-) ANYWAY, to take the challenge.
*Burnley away, second leg of the semi-final, 4-4-2, failing miserably, no plan B
*Arsenal away, last season, 4-4-2, we go 2-0 up but are losing the game in midfield and it's only a matter of time before we get taken (something he admitted), no plan B (or to be accurate, no EFFECTIVE plan B)
*Chelski semi-final of the cup, 4-5-1, going OK, some terrible judgments from the ref, we are allowed to fall apart with absolutely nothing coming from the touchline
* Real Madrid away, plan A shot by zealous ref and silly Crouchy, no plan B for this scenario (remember, we did have a similar CL game in Milan, you'd have thought we'd be prepared for this sort of thing after that!)

In response to what he should've done, 4-5-1 at effeminates soon after we went 2 up (been discussed to death), certainly NOT persevere at Madrid with VdV as a lone forward, instead do a Chelski, sit, park the bus in two very organized banks of four and absolutely deny them the space to play...

You know African, I'll take scrutiny all day long. Scrutinize away. But now you answer my points. And furthermore, explain to me how he could've played the likes of Parker to a point where they will now NOT start the season because they were fudged beyond belief, and how we ended up in a situation where we had Sebasstian Bassong, a perfectly FINE CB when we made the CL, yet Harry decided to consistently play Ledders game after game even after EVERYONE saw it was not happening and the boy was badly hurt. He should've had an operation! Now he will retire. Finally, when you HAVE a whole bunch of injured defenders yet you have a whole slew of good midfielders, why could you not work on developing a 3-5-2 or 3-5-1-1 to suit the players you have? I think we know the answer.

Apologies for being part of this thread descending. I suggest we either revive and old thread or start a new one if we want to scrutinize each other beyond glibness and into details, because I'll do it all day long so delighted am I to finally see a man at our club who will prepare and at least go down fighting if, indeed, he goes down at all.
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dont remember the burnley game unfortunatley.....especially not in the semi final second leg.

the arsenal game might have been done to death, but fact of the matter is that he switched it up from 442 to a more solid formation. we just got done, it happens...that was his Plan B. it didnt work out. so as far as i can remember he actually had a plan B which had worked against arsenal in the past, yes? you say no effective plan B for that game fair enough..but it was a plan B none the less and if thats how your going to stay about peoples plan B..i expect to brick all over AVB when any of his Plan Bs go down the toilet...if he even has a plan B so to speak

i dont think we persevered at madrid with VDV, we brought on defoe at half time ? i'll got have a look, but i suspect we switched a ball retainer for one that works significantly harder from the front in a 441 formation...edit:- okay jus had a look and it WAS at half time we brought on Defoe..not sure where you got us persevering with VDV tbh. as for the two banks of four...we had modric, bale, sandro and jenas .....how on earth could we NOT have had a two banks of four with those midfielders ..all of whom are studious? (maybe bale aside). our hand were tied in that game with crouch losing his little brain cell and getting a red...and the idea you're going to use THAT game as evidence of a lack of a plan B? this cant be real

the chelsea FA cup game was a bit of a nightmare for me, i confess to not watching it in its entirety , so i'll have to take your word for it

but as far as i can tell , harry has employed a PLan b,...just that you dont like it. He did try to re adjust to a red card against madrid ...it just didnt stop the onslaught...and the chelsea game was a disaster

but in TRUE fashion of someone primarily focusing on reasons to validate their claims...you have picked a 2 games which just happen to be in Harry's worst run, one game where his man gets sent off and he cant stop the second best team IN THE WORLD from taking advantage of us and consequently because of scenarios like those OUTLIERS you deem that this man has NO plan B.

this would be valid points if he showed a consistent trend of no plan B...and yet here i sit, thinking of the many games where we have indeed come back from a deficit, where we have convincingly beaten teams, where we have taken the lead against teams and then shut up shop to claim wins..where we have done this with 10 men even .....i'm stacking them up against those that probably didnt have a desired outcome......and NOT to my surprise the better displays overshadow and engulf the poorer ones

you can focus on the poor run we had and use that as ammunition ...and fish out the bad results from the more evenly spread out good seasons all you want...i'm taking his tenure overall. and the idea that the man has no plan B isnt hanging on my wall

But now you answer my points. And furthermore, explain to me how he could've played the likes of Parker to a point where they will now NOT start the season because they were fudged beyond belief, and how we ended up in a situation where we had Sebasstian Bassong, a perfectly FINE CB when we made the CL, yet Harry decided to consistently play Ledders game after game even after EVERYONE saw it was not happening and the boy was badly hurt. He should've had an operation! Now he will retire. Finally, when you HAVE a whole bunch of injured defenders yet you have a whole slew of good midfielders, why could you not work on developing a 3-5-2 or 3-5-1-1 to suit the players you have? I think we know the answer.
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this would be when there was an overlap of sandros injuries , yes? what would you want him to do.....? play livermore and hang our hopes of 4th on those young shoulders? if parker couldnt play i think harry would have known..if parker felt he could play through the injury then that was a choice that both people came together to decide. Harry tried to play his best 11 in order to deliver the target of 4th...trust me when i say that if he hadnt have played parker and we didnt get 4th people from your corner would have found someway to use that against him.

i also particularly liked the way harry FORCED parker at Gunpoint , right up his nostril..the left one, to play for england and play his heart out during the euros even though harry gave parker the well deserved rest when sandro was fully fit. Harry was like "damn man, you still standing? go play for england, make sure you work that achilles to death so that you miss the start of the season"

Bassong wanted to leave. Are you intentionally making these things up or something? Bassong was not happy, he couldnt get into the team that was steam rolling the league..he was lilke 4th or 5th choice and he wanted to leave...and harry let him go. damn that man for being caring ..(actually in all sincerity i think harry should have kept bassong here even though he wasnt happy. sometimes you just have to sacrifice someone's happiness and parts of their career for the good of the team he signed for. he definately should have kept bassong i personally feel)

so now harry redknapp retired ledley king? its harry's fault that ledley keeps breaking down and may have to retire....i'm not going to dignify that with a response . please forgive me , but i think that is absolutely wrong and categorically incorrect. and i think its more mud slinging just to pad out your corner with stuff to validate things you say about HR. F this , every small incident with AVB i'm going to stick it up in the air and tell people to have a good long look....then when hindsight rears its ugly head i'll be like "see, this man is responsible for everything, even things out of his control ".

yes , as for the formation and tactical switch, its easy to do...Just. Like. That.

this is why when chelsea are short on defenders they play bosingwa in CB, or when man united are short on defenders SAF plays carrick in CB or when arsenal are playing on fumes they play players all out of position. But when harry has injuries and thanks to the BIG squad he himself assembled he played people only marginally out of position you take the injuries that hamper his options and you stick the knife in

At the end of all that attempted propaganda and blatant display of lynching i can tell you now that i am absolutely knackered. from day one your corner has not been able to put together anything that IMO is truly worth deeming HR less than a very good manager of men. you take things out of his control and you dump it on his door step and say "sort it out or else its your fault all that happens", you focus on the worst run of his tottenham regime and base a large hypothesis on that run, a very small sample in comparison to all the good he has done.
 
i wouldnt be as ticked off with the smearing if i felt the new guy would get the same treatment. AVB had an overall miserable time at chelsea but trust people that wanted harry gone to sweep EVERYTHING he has done under the carpet and praise him for his tactical nous (laughing my head off in silence actually at the irony of that latter comment considering his time at chelsea vs the idiot in charge of the less talented squad that guided his team to 4th)

i've officially had enough of this . its gorilla warfare for me from now on in this AVB is the greatest versus the village Quasimodo that is supposedly harry redknapp...the poor tactician with no plan B that accidentally stumbled unto 4th TWICE when he wasnt looking ..., just sly digs and finger pointing. naturally when AVB gets to 3rd or 2nd in the league i'll be kept quiet. looking forward to great games and LOOOOOAADS of wins with great tactics. Much like that lucky no mark Harry redknapp

I'm done with this thing in open debate , its literally a waste of my time
 
I think Harry did have some good ideas of how to set the team up, against Arsenal (the 2-1 in 09/10 was a much better performance than the 3-3 the next season IMO considering what we were trying to do) we played a totally different way to how we played Swansea at home the season just gone for example. Added to that, I read something a few months back (maybe a Guardian article by Jonathan Wilson?) that basically said Harry was good with instinctively knowing how a game was panning out, and could use subs to good effect to get us back in the winning position, or make subtle changes that got us there (like the 3-2 at their place). So it's just funny to see how he's painted as someone that has no plan B or wasn't capable of changing it up.

Only thing I would maybe try and level at Harry is that his use of Bale was all wrong last season. I can see what he was trying to do, but it just wasn't working really. That may have cost us points, even though ultimately he was simply unlucky in terms of being linked with the England job which inevitably leads to a slide in results. If we got us 3rd he would obviously be remembered a lot more fondly.

Anyway, sorry to contribute to the Harry stuff. AVB!!!!!!!!!
 
africanspurs said:
i wouldnt be as ticked off with the smearing if i felt the new guy would get the same treatment. AVB had an overall miserable time at chelsea but trust people that wanted harry gone to sweep EVERYTHING he has done under the carpet and praise him for his tactical nous (laughing my head off in silence actually at the irony of that latter comment considering his time at chelsea vs the idiot in charge of the less talented squad that guided his team to 4th)

i've officially had enough of this . its gorilla warfare for me from now on in this AVB is the greatest versus the village Quasimodo that is supposedly harry redknapp...the poor tactician with no plan B that accidentally stumbled unto 4th TWICE when he wasnt looking ..., just sly digs and finger pointing. naturally when AVB gets to 3rd or 2nd in the league i'll be kept quiet. looking forward to great games and LOOOOOAADS of wins with great tactics. Much like that lucky no mark Harry redknapp

I'm done with this thing in open debate , its literally a waste of my time
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This
 
I'm glad AVB is here and excited about the future, but I'm also thoroughly fudged off at the constant Redknapp bashing and snide drip-drip of derogatory and downright nasty comments and one-liners about him. Often it comes from the same people who claim he wasn't good enough for Spurs because Spurs is a club of dignity who always act on a higher ethical plane...just before they call the man who got us 4th twice a twitchy saggy-faced qunt. It's a fudging embarrassment now and people should leave it.
 
chancer said:
I'm glad AVB is here and excited about the future, but I'm also thoroughly fudged off at the constant Redknapp bashing and snide drip-drip of derogatory and downright nasty comments and one-liners about him. Often it comes from the same people who claim he wasn't good enough for Spurs because Spurs is a club of dignity who always act on a higher ethical plane...just before they call the man who got us 4th twice a twitchy saggy-faced qunt. It's a fudging embarrassment now and people should leave it.
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Amen to this!

I'm excited about AVB too, but also very happy with the work Harry did for us.
 
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chancer said:
I'm glad AVB is here and excited about the future, but I'm also thoroughly fudged off at the constant Redknapp bashing and snide drip-drip of derogatory and downright nasty comments and one-liners about him. Often it comes from the same people who claim he wasn't good enough for Spurs because Spurs is a club of dignity who always act on a higher ethical plane...just before they call the man who got us 4th twice a twitchy saggy-faced qunt. It's a fudging embarrassment now and people should leave it.
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This
 
chancer said:
I'm glad AVB is here and excited about the future, but I'm also thoroughly fudged off at the constant Redknapp bashing and snide drip-drip of derogatory and downright nasty comments and one-liners about him. Often it comes from the same people who claim he wasn't good enough for Spurs because Spurs is a club of dignity who always act on a higher ethical plane...just before they call the man who got us 4th twice a twitchy saggy-faced qunt. It's a fudging embarrassment now and people should leave it.
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=D>
 
africanspurs said:
i wouldnt be as ticked off with the smearing if i felt the new guy would get the same treatment. AVB had an overall miserable time at chelsea but trust people that wanted harry gone to sweep EVERYTHING he has done under the carpet and praise him for his tactical nous (laughing my head off in silence actually at the irony of that latter comment considering his time at chelsea vs the idiot in charge of the less talented squad that guided his team to 4th)

i've officially had enough of this . its gorilla warfare for me from now on in this AVB is the greatest versus the village Quasimodo that is supposedly harry redknapp...the poor tactician with no plan B that accidentally stumbled unto 4th TWICE when he wasnt looking ..., just sly digs and finger pointing. naturally when AVB gets to 3rd or 2nd in the league i'll be kept quiet. looking forward to great games and LOOOOOAADS of wins with great tactics. Much like that lucky no mark Harry redknapp

I'm done with this thing in open debate , its literally a waste of my time
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I don't get either side of this debate. I don't get the Harry bashers who hated him beyond belief and I don't get the Harry supporters who are going to put ridiculous pressure on what AVB is supposed to achieve in his first season based on "anything that isn't an improvement on 4th is failure as we should have kept Harry".

The fact is Redknapp brought about the best/proudest period of watching Spurs in my lifetime as a Spurs fan. There's no taking that away from him. However, he clearly had flaws, like any manager. He seemed to dither in making decisions in the transfer market and i don't think its any surprise that before Redknapp arrived we did business early for younger players (Carrick, Postiga, Berbatov, Modric, Kaboul, Boateng, Bent etc), some of which worked out, some of which didn't, but we did business early and decisively compared to the Harry era where we seemed to leave everything last minute, then cmopared to the immediate aftermath where things seem to be moving so quickly in terms of targets.

I also think Redknapp didn't utilise the squad as well as he could have and did seem to dither making tactical decisions in games we were struggling in. I'm sure AVB will make mistakes too as do all managers, so i'm not really holding this against Redknapp.

Overall I think Levy just wanted to go in a new direction, i think under Redknapp our average age and wage bill was creeping upwards and it did seem hard to pinpoint a coherent transfer strategy for the club going forward with him at the helm. I also think the 2nd half of the season collapses last season and season before were alarming and I think ultimately given the position we got ourselves into in terms of being 10 points clear in 3rd, we have to regard this season as a failure to at least a certain extent. Yes, Harry got us there, but he has to take the blame as well as the credit where its due.

However, overall, Redknapp is the best Spurs manager I have ever known.

What I don't like however, is that some hold AVB to task and say he must improve on REdknapp's league finishes.

This is going to be really hard to do. Basically what people have to understand is regardless of what Redknapp did, it wasn't AVB's decision or fault that he was sacked.

Its a new era now and AVB will be tasked with keeping Spurs competitive whilst lowering the average age of the squad, making more use of the academy and reducing the wage bill in preparation for building a new stadium - so essentially I was a big fan of the Harry era, but I don't think its an either/or issue. I loved the team Harry built, but I am fully behind AVB and his future plans.
 
chancer said:
I'm glad AVB is here and excited about the future, but I'm also thoroughly fudged off at the constant Redknapp bashing and snide drip-drip of derogatory and downright nasty comments and one-liners about him. Often it comes from the same people who claim he wasn't good enough for Spurs because Spurs is a club of dignity who always act on a higher ethical plane...just before they call the man who got us 4th twice a twitchy saggy-faced qunt. It's a fudging embarrassment now and people should leave it.
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But it's only the die-hard Arry disciples who are still sour their main man was told to fudge off that notice this - no one else seems to give a brick or better yet - notice any of it or feel upset about

Same goes for Ramos, Jol, etc. - all our past managers are referred to within different conversations and context of discussion
 
I think it was simply that Harry's preference as a manager was to sign proven players. Nothing wrong with that, he got us results using that philosophy, but it costs money. We could spend a bit/attract players better than 14 other clubs, but when it comes to trying to break the top 3, a philosophy that requires spending money on proven talent isn't going to work. We will always fall just short.

So we need someone who is going to take slightly more risks. Someone who will identify young players and hopefully see them perform. This is what Levy wants and this is what AVB will hopefully be good at. Harry made mistakes, AVB will make mistakes. We all make mistakes because we all human and no-one will get everything right 100% of the time.
 
I wonder if the appointment of that Martins guy is down to Moutinho.

We have a better chance of landing Joao with him.
 
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