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***Tottenham Hotspur v Fulham OMT***

On my way back.
Just a terrible day at the office. Bales first bad game in a very long time. Ade at least appeared to be trying and dererves credit for that. I'm trying to forget all the other performances.

As for the crowd - the second half was probably the flattest and quietest I have ever witnessed at the Lane. Dreadful.
 
thfcsteff said:
But he DID rotate.


<<THE GUARDIAN - Villas-Boas had started with five of the players who had played the 120 minutes at San Siro and four who had not featured>>

I would personally NOT have played Verts today as he has looked VERY tired, but he cannot rest everyone, thus Walker got the rest today (doubtless because there's international duty ahead)...again, personally, I would not have played Parker today either. So call it a mistake or a choice, your decision.

What would YOUR side have been today?
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He has rotated, but not our central midfielders.

5th game in 14 days today, slightly busier than a World Cup schedule I think. Parker has played every minute of that, including the 120 minutes on Thursday. Dembele got 25-30 minutes off at home to Inter, otherwise he's played everything, again including the 120 minutes against Inter.

Unsurprisingly our biggest problem today was our central midfield. Parker was quite simply not good enough. Dembele taken off after about an hour, I saw a stat at half time, he had 8 or 9 completed passes in the first half. Probably about a third of what we should be able to expect in a game like this at home to a defensive Fulham side. He quite simply didn't get involved offensively and was taken off because he was exhausted I'm guessing.

That's on AVB. Not a big fan of cliches, but central midfield is the engine room of the team and today our engine was some old rusty thing out of a Skoda from the eighties...

That's on AVB! What should he have done? Well, not start the same two central midfielders for 5 straight games in 14 days (yes I know Dembele started wide right for two of those games, but it doesn't change anything).

There were options available to AVB. He could have started Carroll or Livermore today and brought Dembele on for half an hour at the end with some energy to actually spend rather than just let him run himself out of energy by defending in the first half. Or, if not starting Dembele today just wasn't an option, he could have started Holtby on Thursday. He was starting Livermore and Parker in the centre anyway. Then he could have started Livermore and Dembele today. Just as an example that is. Hudd was on the bench on Thursday, he could have started perhaps? Like I said, there were options other than starting the same two central midfielders for all 5 games in this two week period.
 
thfcsteff said:
Agreed, but to be fair, it looked like he was clearly a 60% in the second-half, and frankly, I could say that THIS was a mistake from AVB to even leave him on!!!!
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Dont want to be too harsh on Bale but alot of the grabbing his ankle came after a poor cross/pass.
 
diego_maradona said:
Again I just had a feel that without Lennon whatever we chose might have given the same type of performance. Unfortunately Gareth wasn't really on it today. And sadly we looked completely limp as a result.
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I agree with that but you have to wonder whats plan b. Verts and BAE were putting decent crosses in the box and nobody was there to attack them. So it wasnt a complete lack of width, Ade spent too much time outside the box and Dembele and Parker arent the kind to attack these.
We need another proper option on the wing so that we could have taken Bale off today but facts are we had none and we had none for Lennon aswell.
 
Joesh said:
I agree with that but you have to wonder whats plan b. Verts and BAE were putting decent crosses in the box and nobody was there to attack them. So it wasnt a complete lack of width, Ade spent too much time outside the box and Dembele and Parker arent the kind to attack these.
We need another proper option on the wing so that we could have taken Bale off today but facts are we had none and we had none for Lennon aswell.
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Half of the reason Ade never got in the box is because of the truly indisciplined and selfish performances of Bale, Sigurdsson and Dempsey. The second half saw these three behind Adebayor, yet they all wanted to play in the centre. This problem was only made worse when Defoe came on for Sig. Bale and Dempsey were wholly ineffective and by hovering around in the centre constantly, only congested the middle and helped break down our own attacks. We needed at least 1 player out wide (in an advanced position, not simply from fullback), to stretch the opposition.

The commonsensical thing to do would have been to instruct Bale to stick to the left and Dempsey to play behind Ade with Sig on the right. After Sig went off Bale should have definitely moved out to the left because we became even more narrow, as although Sigurdsson clearly did not want to play on the right wing, he at least occasionally stayed out there.
 
Absolutely bewildering decision to put Benny at LM as well... he was totally and utterly clueless. Can't see why he was picked there - Riether really isn't so dangerous that we should compromise our entire team just to combat him.
 
diego_maradona said:
Agree. I think we could have had Falcao and struggled.
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From back to front, it was a horrible complacency, tiredness and unimaginative attitude that doomed us.

Made worse when you consider that the players knew they had to win today, knew they had a week off after this, knew that if they won they would have finished the week in third and provided a positive flourish to carry the whole club through the week to the next game.

And we get that beautiful performance. Utterly fudging enraging.

Now, the club will be the subject of endess media jibes about 'wobbles' and 'collapses', as John Dykes has already proven by getting an early one in during the post-match analysis on ESPN. The fans are disgruntled, the manager's disappointed and all the positivity of the last few fudging months will have competely evaporated by the time we play Swansea.

Sigh. Trying to calm down, not fudging working.
 
Rossi22 said:
Didn't Defoe miss a sitter at the end?
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So if he had scored that we wouldn't have gotten one point and everyone would have been happy?

The performance still would have been far from good enough and it would have been 2 points lost instead of 3.

Pandy said:
The strikers were not the problem today at all.
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Agreed. Quite clearly the midfield was the problem. Our reliance on Dembele is scary as fudge.

I thought Ade had a pretty good game, essentially no service though. Defoe's miss was disappointing, but we created far from enough and that wasn't down to the strikers not being good enough.
 
Nutter-Naylor said:
On my way back.
Just a terrible day at the office. Bales first bad game in a very long time. Ade at least appeared to be trying and dererves credit for that. I'm trying to forget all the other performances.

As for the crowd - the second half was probably the flattest and quietest I have ever witnessed at the Lane. Dreadful.
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This - the only positive I can take from the game is Tom Carroll's performance.
 
Rossi22 said:
Didn't Defoe miss a sitter at the end?
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Well, he does generally need about 8 head-down blasts at the middle of the goal before he'll put one past even the most static of keepers. Looked like a bit of a melée from the other end of the ground; I couldn't really see why it didn't go in.
 
djp82 said:
I know it's been done to death that argument but its valid
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I totally agree mate, Levy's penny pinching could fudge us over for the 2nd season in a row, I thought these switched on shrewd businessmen learnt from prior mistakes, hmmmmmmmmmmmm
 
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