He actually looks dot me as though he knew that this was coming - a game where we wouldn't turn up and he had no control over it
He also looked tinkleed off an frustrated
To be honest I'm not sure that many teams would've coped with West Ham in the first half yesterday. They came out like men possessed. That was the most energy and physicality that I have seen from an opponent for a long while. To come away with something yesterday it was important that we didn't give them anything easy/silly early on so that we could make our superior skill count later in the game as their energy levels dropped off (as it would be impossible to maintain the physicality they showed in the first half for an entire game).
Conceding from a corner was criminal. Chadli was incredibly poor in losing his man and Lloris didn't cover himself in glory at the near post either.
Also towards the end of the game when West Ham tired and we had more time on the ball, we didn't have the guile to unlock their defence. I thought Pochettino got it a little wrong here with his starting team and his subs.... I would've preferred to see Chadli coming on from the bench in the last 30 minutes or so, as he has that knack of getting a goal against tiring legs as there is more space to exploit. I also thought that Lamela was growing into the game in the second half and taking him off was the wrong decision, Son came on and was pretty much anonymous. In the last 30 minutes of that game I would've liked to have seen Chadli, Lamela and Alli all high up the pitch trying to make something happen (and two of these having fresh legs). Eriksen could've dropped back into Mason's position to dictate play with more time on the ball due to West Ham dropping off.
If we needed to drop Dier back into defence because we were concerned about Wimmer being sent off (or perhaps concerned about Carroll's physical presence?) then Bentaleb could've come on at the base of the midfield to give a platform allowing the others to attack.
Anyway - this and Chelsea were our two remaining games that I was most worried about. West Ham are a good, physical, powerful team and with the dual motivation of this being their final game against us before moving to the Athletics stadium and their usual "Spurs is our Cup final" mentality I didn't fancy us to take 3 points from this game, especially with them having had an extra day to recover since their last fixture. I thought we would do well to come away with a point, if we had defended the set piece properly then I think we would've done so.
On Sunday we need to come out against Arsenal in exactly the same way as West Ham came out against us last night. I hope that Pochettino uses last night's game as a lesson to our players. Somebody else wrote that this was more a 'smack in the face' than 'a black eye' and I agree. Let's hope we use the motivation of that smack in the face to inflict a black eye on Arsenal this weekend.
