85 minute matches - and we are second!

I think you're being a tad harsh on yourself as a Tottenham fan.

Of course there will always be outliers like Leicester but the overwhelming majority of trophies in the last decade have been won either by lottery winners (City, Cheatski) or clubs that benefitted from successive Champions League windfalls during the 90s (Arse, United, Liverpool), that at a time when Tottenham had fallen out of the top echelons following near bankruptcy. Even now we are still in the process of catching up.

So I would turn it round the other way, and suggest the number of times we have come close to toppling those super-rich clubs is in itself a testament to just how far we have come since the bad times.

Of course it's always disappointing that in recent years we keep coming up short. But for me, the mere fact that we get to so many finals and semi-finals means we are on the right road, and the way we are continuing to build means that sooner or later our turn must come once again.

Meantime whenever we fail at the last hurdle, I simply remind myself that, historically, we still have won way more finals (15) than we have lost (6).

 

That record was exceptional up until a few years ago then , 15-3. Seeing as we've lost the last three finals.

 

Good grief. Do you need a handkerchief?

 

Do you have sarcasm in Norway? It's all love, not hate.

 

I'm guessing there is, but let's check. @Robbo do you have sarcasm up there? If you have some send it to @LemonadeMoney who needs help deciphering my jokes.

 

Thought you were norse?

 

Only my politics.

I do plan to retire up there somewhere when the time comes (i.e. when the rest of the place becomes too hot to live in).

 

At the start of the thread it was asked whether lack of fitness was the reason.. I dont think its that because when we do concede an equaliser we all of a sudden come to life - Palace away was the perfect example of that...

In around 1979 i went to West Brom away and 2 minutes into the game a dreadful thing happened... We scored!

Even as a young, positive thinking, un-cynical 19 year old I knew that the rest of a game would be a struggle. We never really tried to play normally, it was dull to watch and we sat back trying to protect the lead.. We won 1 nil but the last 40 years have merely confirmed in my mind that we are a much better team when we are a goal down or chasing the game..

That meteorology still runs through the club and we are a long way from having a squad that may behave differently...

 

Quite simply not having steady defensive leaves us shaky.

We don’t have a commanding presence like Kane in defence, and our midfield is also not really stable. We’ve changed all personnel across the back 4 searching - all the way back to Poch - for the right players. Our midfield and back line needs stability and a couple of commanding additions.


Sitting on my porcelain throne using glory-glory.co.uk mobile app

 

That would be brave.

 

I wrote in another post that we are not exclusively bottlers, we are definitely hamstrung by our resources compared to our rivals, but we have an unfortunate habit of falling short. The most irritating thing about it is we seem to fail the test in similar ways each time. I think teams in all sports often have to go through some kind of heartbreak I.e. losing finals, finishing runners up in the league before taking the final step and winning things. Liverpool finished runners up in the league a few times in the last decade before finally winning it, they also lost the CL final a year before beating us. The Chicago Bulls lost in the playoffs with michael Jordan before winning 6 championships. It happens. But some teams learn from it and become even hungrier to win it. Not saying we don’t have the hunger but we never seem to have the fortitude to get over the line. No one grabs hold of things and arrests a decline. We just individually and collectively seem to accept it once we fall behind in a big match, the Ajax game excluded. Obviously rival fans dine out on our perceived bottling which does get exaggerated but there have been occasions where we have bottled it IMO.

 

The key in those cases though was that the team was strengthened. We built ourselves to a place where we had a very, very good team that was probably at its peak in Pochettino's third season and then made the classic mistake of failing to try to improve from a position of strength.

 

I don’t disagree that the squad needed to be strengthened, all squads do. For me ultimately it comes down to a couple of factors;

1. Did we have a squad still capable of winning trophies despite not adding to it sufficiently?

2. Did we learn from those defeats in semis and finals?

I’d say ‘Yes’ for question 1 and ‘No’ for question 2 as for me we failed to turn up on too many occasions in big games. We weren’t unlucky to lose against United or Chelsea in the FA cup semi finals. I could be a little more sympathetic had we thrown everything at those games and been a tad unlucky but the United game especially we just seemed to accept our fate once we fell behind and didn’t test De Gea at all. The games have a similar feeling to them which is, this is our level and we often lose at this stage.

 

But we also won 2 semis, one quite brilliantly when our backs were against the wall. So we won some and we lost some, but somehow you always manage to focus on the ones we lose as being the trend. The Chelsea semi, we were just beaten by a side with more player resources and who were not playing gruelling European games with a small squad. The Utd one, that was 2 evenly matched teams and it just didn’t go our way. You do have to factor in squad options whenever you look at games especially against sides where the 1st 11 is evenly matched. I am not sure what there was to learn? You will have to enlighten me as you keep making this point.

 

What I’m getting it is I don’t think our performances improved. We lost numerous big games which we didn’t deserve to win. Chelsea rested players against us in the first half and still managed to put 4 past us. Fast forward a year later and we lose at the same stage and barely put up a fight and seemed to accept defeat once United took the lead.

The Ajax semi was a brilliant comeback and I’ve said for many years we function best when people don’t expect much of us, ie reducing a deficit from the first leg against an up and coming team without our best player (Kane) for both legs and Son for the first leg. Whenever people talked us up or expected us to win a game to top, we usually crumbled. It’s like we could handle the pressure up to a certain point but when it got serious we couldn’t deal with it. That’s my view anyway feel free to disagree. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to believe we did brilliantly to get ourselves into good positions but could have done better at stages.

what’s the other semi final as you said we won two? Do you mean Sheffield United? We limped over the line against a league 1 side but a win is a win

 

If we had lost that one, like City losing the cup final to a soon to be relegated Wigan, that would have been the very definition of bottling, I.e. losing a game we were expected to win. The other games were against evenly matched sides who had more squad options than us. That’s not bottling that’s just the way it goes. You do seem to explain away the other semi final rather too conveniently as “we were under no pressure.” Actually that one showed incredible bottle to come back from 3 down to win.

 

Possible Ajax were just even bigger bottlers.

 

Well...if that's your theory...a couple of weeks and it'll have the perfect test.

 

Im not diminishing the Ajax win, I’ve just said it’s a scenario where we tend to do better in as opposed to when people talk us up and expect things from us. I think we should leave it there. You think that’s the way it goes, but I do expect one of the best teams in the country over a number of years to eventually win something after years of challenging and getting close. Not saying I expect to win everything, but eventually you have to beat a top team to win a trophy. Other teams have overcome big 6 teams in semis and finals. In a strange way, it’s why I give us a fighting chance against city, no one expects us to win. We perform better when there are lower expectations.

 

I actually do give us an outside chance in the final for that very reason.