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Mauricio Pochettino - Sacked

Millsy_Yiddo said:
So it's not just about what change is made, but also about how the player performs. Poch is being hammered for the Lamela sub. But the reason he is being hammered is because of how badly Lamela performed. As I said earlier, if you look at the options he had on the bench, Lamela was the only sensible option.
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I don't know about others, but that's not the primary reason I'm criticising Pochettino's decisions against Stoke (and remember - I think it was an uncharacteristic mistake from a generally good manager; I'm not slating the guy as a disaster or anything).

I accept that Kane probably had to come off. He's too valuable to us (especially until we get in back-up / competition) to risk - if he felt a slight strain at 65 minutes when we are 2-0 up, then I also would have taken him off and put an ice-pack on the leg. That's fair enough. But our midfield was already coming under serious pressure at that point - Ireland had been on the pitch for a few minutes and - if you remember - he made an instant impact. We were starting to go onto the back foot.

In my view we needed to shore up the midfield at that point. The match was screaming for it. Watching the momentum shift, I was almost screaming for it. It was one of those occasions (I felt) where the correct tactical decision was obvious.

Instead, over the course of 4 minutes, he made a like-for-like switch up top (and in doing so, was replacing our best player with someone who - charitably - is not on form) and took off our stand-out most solid midfielder (and I'm not Mason's biggest fan on the board - but he was having a great game on Saturday; gave me hope for the lad) and replaced him with someone who didn't have the best of games last week.

What he should have done was replace Kane with Bentaleb; put Chadli up top, Eriksen out left and use Bentaleb, Mason and Dier to pack the midfield. We were already 2-0 by that point. The substitutions he made were ineffective; but it's not (just) a case of bad performances from the players... even if Lamela and Bentaleb had played fairly well, I'm not sure how those changes were ever likely to address the Stoke threat in midfield.

Again; I'm a big Pochettino fan. But I'm not going to pretend the guy walks on water and never makes a mistake. Bringing off Mason was a mistake. Failing to address the new Stoke threat in midfield was a mistake.
 
Bedfordspurs said:
the key was the change in who they replaced and for once it wasn't a like for like and cost us dearly
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I think Bentaleb for Mason is reasonably like for like. We did not have a like for like option for Kane and this along with gifting an unnecessary penalty, is where I think the game was lost.
 
Why hasn't he played what was our best midfield partnership last year? Very strange, he continues to baffle me with some of his team selections.
 
No what I mean is, why has it become Mason or Bentalab? Bentalab had one bad game, hardly reason to ditch given the amount of bad games that some of our players have had! Dier is a stop gap in that position and if he is more than that then we have major worries!
 
Spurmac1974 said:
No what I mean is, why has it become Mason or Bentalab? Bentalab had one bad game, hardly reason to ditch given the amount of bad games that some of our players have had! Dier is a stop gap in that position and if he is more than that then we have major worries!
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Dier has played quite well, so why would you drop him for an off form player or one coming back from injury?
 
milo said:
Dier has played quite well, so why would you drop him for an off form player or one coming back from injury?
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Is one bad ganme off form now? So why hasnt Chadli been binned or Eriksen for that matter, both poor in the first two games.
 
No they weren't. Last season we were atrocious in defence and created nothing in attack, relying on eriksen and kane to score worlds and win games when we didn't deserve it.

Both of these things I blame "our best pairing", they don't protect our defence enough, and they don't link to the attacking 4 enough. Because they're similar, because they're not quite good (mason) or consistent (Bentaleb) enough.

With a much better central midfield our defence would be stronger, and hopefully we'd create more.

Not playing Bentaleb and mason together makes the most sense to me out of all of Poch's awful decisions. Just a shame we're playing a 20 year old centre back in midfield. Not ideal.
 
GrimsbyYid said:
No they weren't. Last season we were atrocious in defence and created nothing in attack, relying on eriksen and kane to score worlds and win games when we didn't deserve it.

Both of these things I blame "our best pairing", they don't protect our defence enough, and they don't link to the attacking 4 enough. Because they're similar, because they're not quite good (mason) or consistent (Bentaleb) enough.

With a much better central midfield our defence would be stronger, and hopefully we'd create more.

Not playing Bentaleb and mason together makes the most sense to me out of all of Poch's awful decisions. Just a shame we're playing a 20 year old centre back in midfield. Not ideal.
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Agree with all of that but differ on the Dier situation. having been at both the games so far I would say Dier has been good in both games and could become the missing link we are looking for.
 
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