Thomas Frank - Former Head Coach

[MartyFunkhouser]

I have woken up back in February

 

[Gutter Boy]

I can appreciate why the fans would want to move on. I just want someone, anyone in the media to say ‘oh my GHod that appointment was absolutely terrible! He was so poorly suited and nearly relegated them!’ but it’s just not gonna happen. Very weird.

History will judge him as 'a Curbishley'

 

[Mr Gogolak]

History will judge him as 'a Curbishley'

A bit harsh on Curbishley.

 

[SissokoWasGood (BoL)]

100% mate, he infuriated me to the point I stepped off this board, social media and barely could watch Spurs. It was so obvious he need to be gone in November for the latest.

My biggest frustration is the painting of him as "a good coach" who just didn't fit. It was way more than that, his absolute failure to even understand the club he was managing, his failure to give the players basic passing options (triangles), his Porro spam cross directions, how he fudged up Bentancur/Palhinha as a pivot, his failure to improve any of Gray/Bergvall/Udogie/Tel. Said it elsewhere, the only fudging thing that improved in his tenure was set pieces, the thing we had another coach for.

Again, personal experience, I've interviewed people who came from good companies, good projects, passes first glance on CV. When you start to ask "what did you do", "how did you influence strategy", "what impact did you make", you realize they were a passenger, did the part they were told to, but not leaders, not top tier talent, that's how I see Frank.

And like you, I don't think people have fulled grasped what releagtion would have meant for the club's future, at best it would have set us back 5 years or more, the worst-case scenario is levels beyond

Totally agreed. It is way more than not fitting. It was just so utterly bad, and much of it came down to Frank’s decisions.

Like…it’s easy to think now the stadium is back behind the team and there’s unity and confidence again. But think back to the Fulham home game, the Palace home game, the Saudi Sportswashing Machine home game. The players were visibly scared to play football, and that translated audibly to the fans in a way I’ve never heard before. It was like the entire stadium was waiting for the next mistake, so much that they willed it into happening. The howls at each mistake. It wasn’t anger, it was like the fans were scared too.

And that wasn’t because there was transition at the executive level. That was because the new Head Coach decided to say things like ‘we will lose football matches’, to brief that only one player could play for a top team, and to play the most dreadful, risk averse football we have ever seen.

The destruction of the confidence of a European trophy winning team to the point of almost-relegation all because the Head Coach thought it best to strip the team back to mid table basics before ‘adding layers’…it’s all a stunning lack of judgement. He may be a good coach technically, but in terms of having the EQ to understand what to do with Spurs, he was abominable. I find it difficult to move on from that so long as our CEO doesn’t offer a sufficient account of why he was trusted for so long, and I’ll still find it completely odd that the media on the whole doesn’t grasp that we very nearly were relegated because of the decisions he made in coaching the team.