BrainOfLevy
Michael Carrick
I’m hoping for bigger wages though, that’s it. As in, we have a bigger stadium so will have more regular, sustainable income.
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Mauricio Pochettino - Sacked
- Thread starter DubaiSpur
- Start date
I’m hoping for bigger wages though, that’s it. As in, we have a bigger stadium so will have more regular, sustainable income.
Spur of the moment
Frederic Kanoute
Ah right, well we obviously agree on that then.
BrainOfLevy
Michael Carrick
Ah right, well we obviously agree on that then.
I guess we do! I don’t see us competing with Real Madrid for signings the moment we move in, but I don’t know that we will ever get to that point until Levy sells us for oil money. But hopefully the new stadium allows us to keep our best players a while longer, and if we can still agree a 42M deal for someone like Sanchez when we’re building the stadium, hopefully we still have the transfer funds to be a destination for the best young talent once we’re in there.
Finney Is Back
Luka Modric
We spend about 55% of our turnover on wages.... If our turnover increases by £50 million then our wage bill can go up by £27.5 million.
BrainOfLevy
Michael Carrick
So another 550k per week? 100 more for Kane, 100 more for Toby, 75 more for Eriksen. Probably good increases for Dier and Dele (return to form permitting) too...
BrainOfLevy
Michael Carrick
Thought this was a real return to proper Poch football tonight. Always looking forward. Always pressing. Always running beyond. In fact it there was such an obvious improvement tonight that I think it’s planned to be this way, for us to increase the tempo when our fitness has increased to the point that it becomes or advantage, and when most players have got enough good minutes into them that their fitness endures.
I do it every year, but I look at how Liverpool under Klopp and Mourinho’s teams play in the first half of the season play and think ‘damn, maybe we just won’t match up this season’ but the last two years we have always kicked into gear and I think we will do it again. They are both managers that like to get out in front, to press an early advantage over a season. Liverpool were amazing last season, but we ended up comfortably ahead.
This season, it’s rhe half way point and we’re one point outside the top 4. After a rubbish run of form and some really annoying, key injuries. But I back us to get into a groove now. The tempo has been slower. We have been more patient in games. It’s like Poch wants us to play this relentless football when he knows the players can sustain it, when our fitness kicks in and maybe other teams begin to falter. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to win these first half of the season games, just that he probably tries to get us playing a bit more patiently and possession focussed until we release the handbrake.
Tonight was great. Burnley has some injuries but they are a super well organised team and we could have scored 6.
I do it every year, but I look at how Liverpool under Klopp and Mourinho’s teams play in the first half of the season play and think ‘damn, maybe we just won’t match up this season’ but the last two years we have always kicked into gear and I think we will do it again. They are both managers that like to get out in front, to press an early advantage over a season. Liverpool were amazing last season, but we ended up comfortably ahead.
This season, it’s rhe half way point and we’re one point outside the top 4. After a rubbish run of form and some really annoying, key injuries. But I back us to get into a groove now. The tempo has been slower. We have been more patient in games. It’s like Poch wants us to play this relentless football when he knows the players can sustain it, when our fitness kicks in and maybe other teams begin to falter. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to win these first half of the season games, just that he probably tries to get us playing a bit more patiently and possession focussed until we release the handbrake.
Tonight was great. Burnley has some injuries but they are a super well organised team and we could have scored 6.
Lemonade Money
Steffen Freund
Won away against a top 6 side in spite of starting his terrible, terrible mistake.
He's magic, you know...
He's magic, you know...
Grays_1890
Colin Calderwood
So was that performance any good for the negative posters? What excuse will they give to not give Poch credit? Burnley are not that good and the league place is not accurate for them? There is usually something to downplay his results these days.
Anyway, we played so well today at a place where plenty have struggled, bossed them and could have been 7 or 8, well chuffed.
Lovely to see Sanchez back, makes us stronger and Dier is so much more suited to the middle. Sissoko played well and nice assist so all in all a good day.
Anyway, we played so well today at a place where plenty have struggled, bossed them and could have been 7 or 8, well chuffed.
Lovely to see Sanchez back, makes us stronger and Dier is so much more suited to the middle. Sissoko played well and nice assist so all in all a good day.
Wasn't this supposedly AVB's master plan, start slowly and pick moments in matches to increase the temp significantly to blast away the opposition, downside was we never actually achieved anything and his system was great in theory but had no application in the real world.
To be fair we have generally always gone on a good run at this time of year and in many games have seemed to play within ourselves, hopefully we can use any additional fitness to our advantage over the next few weeks. If we can win the next 3 games then that will be 6 wins in 7 and positions us well for the rest of January and a very tricky February starting with UTD on 31 January.
I don’t understand, if you’re going to praise Poch when we win why can’t you give any criticism towards him when we lose? It’s not a one way street, if you think there are things he did wrong in a specific game you can call him out on it there’s nothing wrong in that....
Gazza
Nick Barmby
It's nothing to do with the "calling out" as you put it. It all has to do with the timing and the supposed tactical geniuses sitting at home thinking that they know what would happen if certain subs or formations were played.
Poch is a professional and why he is backed to the hilt by many is that the many think that he will make mistakes but trust him enough to make his choices right for the majority of the time.
Pochs choices are thoughtfully considered with his staff aiding his decisions based on research, analysis, players mental and physical well being. Not just a quick muse.
It's possible that on occasion poch and some arm chair fan has agreed with a substitution for example ... all of a sudden the arm chair fan starts believing in their own managerial ability.
This of course reflects very badly on poch, when he on several occasions didn't listen to the other end of the tv for tactical adaptations from arm chair fan.
So when we win a game apparently poch was perfect and the arm chair fan pipes up, unable to find any material. Why not talk critical tactics after a win?
Posting negative material about poch is one thing but if you are going to do it, Do it with some Grace, humility, and genuine knowledge.
Not just, poch failed. Poch is not the messiah. Poch needs to win a cup this season. Pochs starting IX was wrong. He didn't just lay in bed the morning of the game and think, I feel lucky let's give sissoko a go.
He makes mistakes sure, but who uses retrospect to hammer someone when the future was unknown.
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Grays_1890
Colin Calderwood
I get that but there are some who will try and make a situation worse by saying crap like 5-1 versus Stoke was not a positive just to make their point seem more valid.
For me its modern football and modern fans though, its become a reactive game more than people taking a step back looking at the overall picture and saying "stone me we are a decent club these days" It more about over analysis on every game on every point of the game where as in the old days you might acknowledge the other team played well etc.
Grays_1890
Colin Calderwood
This is it.
What gets me is people saying he made a mistake and if he did this things would be different like its an exact science.
Like I said on my post its modern football though, sing peoples praises one day, dig them out the next.
It’s not just knee jerk or retrospective comments, there were those saying during the game Trippier was getting torn a new one and should have done something about it. I thought he tactically setup too open from the start, and didn’t get why we constantly played out from the back when we couldn’t beat their press and he didn’t try to change these things. They were legitimate questions to ask, and all the more so because we recognise what a great job Poch has done. It doesn’t mean we think we know better than him, but I think he performed poorly that day - big deal. Doesn’t mean I think I know better or that I don’t love the guy....
Robspur12
John Lacy
Brilliant post.
BrainOfLevy
Michael Carrick
Let’s say we defend deep then and change the plan we had obviously worked on all week before the Emirates Marketing Project game. We have Winks and Dembele in midfield, neither of whom are as good as Wanyama and Dier at the ball winning side of the game, or as positionallt sound, and we weren’t able to play either Dier or a Wanyama in midfield.
We had a fair few injuries and clearly Poch reasoned that the best way to exploit the resources we did have was to get Dembele and Winks in areas higher up the pitch where they can hurt City, because their defence is the weakest part of their team. It didn’t work, but going the other way and defending deep may not have worked either. As said above, it is not an exact science and maybe we were just destined to lose that game 8 times out of 10, regardless of what strategy we used. Poch picked the one he thought was best given our resources compared to theirs. It didn’t work and I’m sure he’ll take some learnings from it in terms of what the players are capable of, but it doesn’t mean that the other strategies were obvious and would have done better or that he was ‘wrong’ to not try a particular set-up. He’s earned our trust in this regard.
BrainOfLevy
Michael Carrick
I guess with AVB, his plan was to turn it on in specific periods of games where the opposition would usually struggle and we would then increase the tempo. I think it worked pretty well in his first season although most will remember the home games as boring because there was lots of patient play, and the high tempo periods were less frequent. I guess the benefit of AVB’s approach is that if you have control, you can manage the squad’s condition in such a way that it is us (eg AVB) who decides when we attack, when we should win, when we manage the game, etc etc, and hopefully we aren’t chasing.
Poch, rather than necessarily picking spots to increase tempo in game, just picks his spot to be the second half of the season almost in totality. I think we definitely play a patient, possession based game in the first half of the season under him, where the squad’s condition is managed to peak and endure towards the business end. I think this, as much as anything else is his secret sauce and I’m not surprised it isn’t mentioned at all in his book, but I definitely notice a shift in our style of play.
We played a bunch of teams at WHL last year in the second half that would come to defend and we blew them all away. Teams like WBA, Stoke, Watford, they may not be very good but they would definitely come to defend and often will sneak a result doing just that. But we were relentless for almost 90 mins. Against Brighton, Swansea, Burnley etc this year we’ve had our moments but we’ve definitely been more patient, and yet something flipped in the Burnley game. You could see the runs the players were making (Aurier’s when he squared to Son for example) which I don’t think we would have done that much of early in the season. The pressing was relentless for 90 minutes and we beat their press with ease because our movement and tempo of passing was so high.
So it’s like Poch kicks this quick tempo style of football truly into gear once he’s got our players’ fitness into a state where they can carry it off. Like AVB, he’s managing condition and the strategy of the team derives from it, it’s just that with Poch he isn’t going to ask us to play super high tempo when we aren’t ready, or when we may do it too soon and burn ourselves out ala Liverpool under Klopp. But the result is, when we are ready, we can blow teams away and that’s what tends to happen. Every year under Poch we seem to get to the half way point and the consensus has been ‘we haven’t really hit top gear yet’ because we do play with a good tempo in sporadic games (I’m thinking this year, Everton away, West Ham away, Huddersfield away and Stoke at home) but we never do it consistently. But in the second half of the season we tend to go on runs where we are smashing teams left, right and centre week after week, and the only thing holding us back then is complacency - something Poch does allude to in his book where we lost to West Ham away last year, and he was so disappointed that he barely spoke to the players the following week.
BrainOfLevy
Michael Carrick
I would also add the difference this year is that we have sacrificed control in some of the CL games and counter-attacked so it will be interesting to see if this is built into his thinking (I assume it will be) and that we still have as good a second half or if we have a slightly less good second half of the season because we sacrificed some control and expanded extra condition through tempo in some of those bigger games in the first half. At least in those games we were sitting back and not pressing for 90 mins, so condition can still be managed somewhat there. And hopefully having a bigger squad helps in this regard - Sanchez is a massive signing given how it frees up Dier to compete with Wanyama, and Lamela coming back is also great. Liverpool have done really well with their rotation in the first half of the season so it will be interesting to see how long they sustain themselves too.