The Overlap - some interesting comments from Ange

[MartyFunkhouser]

When Frank was sacked we had a better ppg than last season so the point in bold can be spun either way, not that it matters. Last season was the worst league performance in our history, if we follow that up with something worse that doesn't change anything in the grand scheme of things. Frank was rightly sacked, as should any manager that has us in this sort of position.

Yes our problems do stretch back to the end of the Poch era - truth be told I'm not sure any of our teams since than have been any better than what we have now, take both Son & Kane out of Mourinho or Conte teams and we're likely deep in the bottom half with the players we had once we sold off the other top players from that team. A solid lesson in how not to approach transfers & squad building over an extended period.

I am a broken record with it but the squad building at our club is horrific, its been compounded with this scatter gun approach to buying youth and compounded by injuries. Was Sat having a beer Sunday with a mate and he said "there isn't one player at this club that I care about, I get excited about seeing on a Saturday or makes me think he carries an identity of the club" and I couldn't agree. There isn't one player in my mind where you look at and think "they care" unfortunately I think comes from the existing culture where the clubs not being respected by players aka there is no culture.

The club looks rotten and rudderless from top to bottom, dare I say we need another rebuild but my GHod do we now.

 

[Finney Is Back]

And yet was awfully upset on a number of occasions after PL games, despite having "nothing to play for." Here's one example from mid-March.

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Never bought it. He was re-writing history to take the bad look off the league season in a desperate attempt to save himself.

He's hardly going to say "I really don't care about the league, we're just going for the Cup" while the season is still going on is he?

 

[thfcsteff]

Said this many times. It's the quality vs quantity argument. The biggest root cause to why we find ourselves where we are.

WE SIGN WAY TOO MANY PLAYERS.

It pre-dates even Hitchen but you can definitely see patterns since 2017 of Spurs buying 5-10 players every single year. We stretch our budget thin and we try to solve for too many positions in one go. Then those players turn out to be not good enough and then we spend another cycle offloading them. It is your classic rinse, repeat model.

When this changes, my optimism will start growing again.

When you think about it, the conversations have already started about Gallagher being more of the same. Admittedly, we went for Semenyo so it's not as if we didn't try for quality. What we got though was another warm body.

In fairness we either took the Nkoudou Njie route or signed no-one. I have long gone on about the Mane and Winaldjum summer as the one which really cost us a title, but 2018 was also massive, when Poch essentially said enough of this bargain basement brick, I'd rather have no-one than that (which was the right thing to do).

 

[Mikey10]

He's hardly going to say "I really don't care about the league, we're just going for the Cup" while the season is still going on is he?

Were it true that he was only going for the cup (and it’s quite obviously b ollocks, up there with his “I was cupping my ear to hear the fans better”; he was a top-notch gaslighter tbf) then I’m sure the fans who spent their money travelling the length and breadth of the country to support the team in the PL would have been thrilled to hear he’d written off all the games in the second half of the season without letting anyone know.

Not that it’s true. Amazes me that there are folks who swallowed it - Ange’s equivalent of double secret probation.

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[Robspur12]

We kind of did. If you think we were playing the same gung-ho attacking football last season that we were the season before then we were seeing different things. As the season went on our football became less and less expansive. After the wins against Brentford and Man Utd, we were clearly prioritising the Europa and resting our better players where possible, I also think that the players that did play in the league games were playing within themselves, saving themselves for the Cup games as there was nothing to play for in the league.

I think we have to agree to disagree. What I saw were Full backs pushing forwards and in field leaving spaces behind, a high line but no VDV. There may have been slight tweaks here and there but not enough to say we played differently. And it was very different to how we played in the EL. There were lots of comments about that on here at the time.

 

[Lemonade Money]

In fairness we either took the Nkoudou Njie route or signed no-one. I have long gone on about the Mane and Winaldjum summer as the one which really cost us a title, but 2018 was also massive, when Poch essentially said enough of this bargain basement brick, I'd rather have no-one than that (which was the right thing to do).

I'd rather he'd started with youth again rather than be stubborn.